Jon Watts

As a kid growing up in holiness-influenced Indiana Quakerism, Max Carter was taught to avoid a long list of sins, including soft drinks—“which led to hard drinks!“—and dancing—“a vertical expression of a horizontal desire!”

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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.

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Being a Quaker isn’t just about sitting in silence for an hour on Sunday morning. Fritz Weiss shares some of the ways he carries his Quakerism throughout the week.

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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.

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Planning to attend a Quaker wedding? Here’s what you can expect.

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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.

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What does Quaker prayer look like? Australian Friend David Johnson says it’s something every human being does naturally, and it leads to inordinate spiritual refreshment.

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Quaker prayer is a matter of letting go of outward words, and of our thoughts and imaginations, and of centering down into a place of silence where we can wait and notice the movements of God within us.

A Quaker Prayer Life

I’m David Johnson. I live in far North Queensland, Australia. I’m part of a small worshipping group; my monthly meeting is Queensland Regional Meeting.

I’ve written many small pieces in Australia, but the two main things I’ve done recently are to collate–with some of my own comments–many quotes on Quaker prayer from the first- and second-generation Quakers.

A Heart Prepared By God

There’s a difference here between an outward prayer of a known prayer or a liturgy, which for some people–and I’ve used it myself–is a very helpful anchor. When I first kneel by a bed or when I first sit down to say a prayer, it’s a very helpful anchor and an introduction. But that is different to the prayer which emanates from the heart, and the early Quaker William Penn identified his experience when he said that “true prayer can only come from a heart prepared by God.”

A Natural Contemplative Practice

Our Quaker prayer life is one of the inheritors of this very ancient, very natural contemplative practice. This is very natural for the human being. We can see this practice coming down in many strands. We can see it in the mindful breathing in the Buddhist faith. We can see it in the constant invoking of the name of God in the Orthodox Christian faith. We can see it in a similar way in the Sufi faith.

The Quaker prayer life, for me, is a way of going inward, using normally one of these practices as an entry point: using deep breathing, using the same repetitive saying of a sacred word, so that my attentiveness moves from up in here, gradually and sinks down into here where I’m enabled, I don’t actually do it, I’m actually enabled to give up my own willing, give up my own running of my own mind, sinking down, breathing down, centering down into where the spirit of God is present in the heart, and where the presence of God can actually minister to me, convey things to me that I then have a choice about.

The Steps of Quaker Prayer

So the first step as we go inward, which is identified in the Quaker prayer life, is actually being very attentive inwardly in the heart to the Light and the movements there, what the early Quakers called “mind the light,” be attentive to it.

The second step, when the light shows us something, is actually to welcome it. What George Fox, the early Quaker called, “love the Light” no matter what it shows you. Because the Light is showing parts of you that may be in error (what others call sin) so that it might be remedied and you might become purer of the heart.

And that’s my experience, that when I welcome those signs–and they come quite often– that I was out of line spiritually, when I welcome those and sit with them, the light shows me some reparation or there is some healing. There is some reconciling going on towards peace within me.

Experiencing Inward Refreshment

The Quaker experience is that as we continue that letting-go of outward forms and just sinking inward, we find we’re being helped. Something is actually working with us. We can call that the grace, we can call that the presence of the Light, or of Christ, or another word for it, is the anointing within us–it comes to help us in this path. And as we do this, we find that it gradually goes deeper and starts to take hold of us. We begin to let go of those expectations. We begin to find, eventually, for small times at first and then for longer ones–that that deep silence is actually accessible to every one of us, and that it is actually–even though we don’t hear anything–we begin to realize that the first language of God is actually silence.

And when we’re sitting there, we come out of that space with a feeling of inordinate refreshment inwardly, and the normal and natural response within that is a breathing from the heart of gratitude and joy.

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Sitting in silence with a group of people every week can be an intimate experience. How do Quaker worship spaces encourage that?

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I don’t pretend to be a great artist in any sense of the word. I’m just an amateur in some ways, but when I go to a museum and look at a famous painting and it makes me feel a certain way, I think that’s not that different from creating a building that when people walk into it, makes them feel a certain way.

The Intimacy of Quaker Worship Spaces

My name is Paul Motz-Storey. I live in the Denver area, and my Quaker meeting is Mountain View Friends Meeting. I’m a real estate agent, I also manage property and I’m also a general contractor, so I’m a little bit of 3 or 4 different things that I do for my day job.

Construction was something I grew up with. My father had a construction company when I was a kid, so my earliest memories were of being around construction sites and I loved it, and I still love it. I love that notion that you can create a space in which people work and live that makes them feel a certain way.

Practicing Being Still

Well my mother would probably (and probably still does) laugh that I gravitated towards Quakers because as a child I couldn’t sit still. My barber hated me. And to this day, I have a problem with that, I can’t easily sit still for long periods of time. So I see it as a discipline that I have to practice, probably more so than other people, but that in the process of doing it I find great value because I do feel that God is that still, small voice. It’s not yelling at me, it isn’t going to come in over the top of my busy mind. It’s only going to happen if I can be quiet and quiet that noise and listen.

The Aesthetic of Quaker Spaces

So Notre Dame is much in the news, and I remember visiting Notre Dame as a child. I remember the guide that took us around the building said, “You are meant to feel small. That’s the point of this.” You walk in and this soaring ceiling and the light and the scale is intentional. You are meant to feel small. God is big and you are small. The church is big and you are small.
Quaker meetings I think offer a completely different aesthetic. They don’t always particularly look like a church of any type. The scale is small, but it doesn’t mean that God isn’t big. It’s just a different feeling that you as the individual have in that meeting space.

Speaking from the Heart

I think the scale being small is important because it gives you the opportunity, encourages you to speak. Because how intimidating is it (especially for an introvert like me) to speak in meeting anyway, but to speak in a huge cathedral? I’m not going to stand up and talk in that setting. What do I have to say that’s of any important?

So yeah, I think the building matters, and a certain feeling that we are gathered here in a space and in a size and in a format that’s conducive to somebody being able to stand up and speak without a microphone from their heart, from what they feel moved to say without it feeling like somehow it’s a performance, because it’s not meant to be a performance.

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What is God? We asked 20 Quakers, here’s what they said.

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Paula Palmer: I do have a sense that all living things are in some mysterious way connected; that life itself is such a miracle. I want to feel that connection, acknowledge that connection, be conscious of it, be appreciative of it, cherish it, share it, and not define it.

What Do Quakers Believe About God?

Patricia McBee: I have a lifelong experience of hearing something speak to me and guide me. I can’t reconcile my belief in an abstract sense of God and this sense of guidance, so I have this big, rich, dizzyingly awe-inspiring abstract God and this very close presence that I can turn to and will speak to me.

A God That Transcends Understanding

Kenyatta James: My concept of God is everything that we can know but not understand. That there’s a lot in this world that we might be able to know but we don’t really understand or that we can’t replicate . For me, that energy, that power is what God is.

Jim Rose: Christ, Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is within you.” That is what Quakers are convinced of and I’m convinced of, is that our journey is a journey inward. Whether you call it God, the divine, the light, there is something to be found there and it’s something that is–I don’t want to call it irrational, but the rational mind cannot cope with these things that are inexpressable, ineffable. The definition of God is not something that the rational mind can grasp. What can grasp that is only the heart.

God As an Experience

Laura Boles: God is an experience to me, it is not a belief or a concept and so I am looking to experience God in my daily life and allow myself to be a vessel for others to experience God through me. And you know when you feel it. You know when you feel it. You know when your greatest gifts as a person, as an individual are shining to their highest capacity.

Kevin-Douglass Olive: As someone once told me if I can understand God, if I can conceptualize God in God’s fullest, then that is not a God that can transform my life and bring me out of any dark night, of any hurt, habit, or hang-up.

John Moorman: The almighty being, whether it’s he or she or what that was there at creation, was there before creation. I don’t pretend to understand it but it is there. I will be seeking it until the day I die. I won’t know the answer, but I know the presence is there.

Ruth Montague: I think life is very whimsical. I think my brain isn’t really wired to really understand everything that might be or is going on and I’m okay with that. It sounds funny, but I love the word “whimsy” I think it describes… I mean, isn’t it crazy that we get to have this experience? I mean, wow. Here we are. Hm.

The Limitations of Language

Amy Kietzman: I use the word, “God” because it’s the currency, because it’s the word we use in our culture. But for many years when I write the word “God,” I write G-!-D because first of all, “God” is not God’s name. We pretend that that is the name of something, but it really… we don’t know what it is. And it’s important not to know, or not to try to know too much because it’s more about that we’re experiencing something and we have to communicate about it, so we have to have words.

Elaine Emily: I think by definition if I could define God then it wouldn’t be God because it is so much beyond whatever concept we have, but it’s a language. It’s a way to talk about these deep, important pieces of our lives. We have to start somewhere, it’s all metaphor. There’s not words for what we really know and want to communicate.

Mark Wutka: If what I think is “of God” in my heart, if someone else feels that same thing and obeys that same thing but calls it something different, maybe even calls it the subconscious, that’s not really for me to judge.

God As Love

Laura Kinnel: When I use the word God I think the closest thing I mean to what people who don’t use the word God might often understand is “love.” I think of love as something that we all know exists. Everybody believes that love exists. We’ve seen love in action. We’ve felt what it feels like to love and be loved. We’ve seen what acting in accordance with what we think love requires of us looks like.

Carter Nash: So I think of “that of God in everyone” as that of love in everyone, and so I try to relate to everyone with love. Amongst Friends, amongst Quakers, I have found that is what they do with me. They relate to me with love.

That of God in Everyone

A.J. Mendoza: There is that of God in every person. There is a fundamental equality to our faith and practice that informs everything. It informs our peace testimony. It informs how we talk to each other, as not using honorific terms, that we’re talking to each other on an equal level.

Jane Fernandes: I believe that Quakers see that of God in every person. I think that’s fundamental, and when you see that of God in everyone–that’s every one–that changes everything.

Equal Access to God

Ingrid Lakey: As a Quaker I believe that we all have access to the divine, that spirit is available to us, there is God in everyone including me, and that we don’t need an intermediary to be in contact with the divine, the divine is always with us.

Valerie Brown: God is available. When I say “God” I mean the energy of love and compassion, the absolute acceptance of all people, not a father-figure sitting on a white cloud with a long beard. That may be some people’s idea of God and that’s ok, that’s not mine.

A.J. Mendoza: That informs that there’s an equality in the meetings. God could speak through the person who has been in Meeting since they were born and is now 85, the person who just happened to walk into the meeting, didn’t really know what they were doing that Sunday morning has equal access.

Laura Goren: That it is not only men or not only people with certain educations or certain positions that can access truth, but that everyone can do that provided we try.

Listening to God

Carter Nash: When we’re gathered in silence, we are opening ourselves–we do what we call “centering down” and that is opening ourselves up to allow the spirit of God to fully take over us and if that spirit leads us to speak, then we will deliver a message.

Kri Burkander: My Mom used to sing this song about –it’s some country song I guess–about “turn the radio on, turn the dial, get right with God.” And I’m totally paraphrasing, and I should actually get the name of the song because I don’t know what the song is, but it was this idea that God’s always on the radio, you just have to tune to the right station. I really value the time in worship to turn my radio station to God. This is the time I’ve carved out of my week to sit down and just hang out with God.

Kevin-Douglas Olive: And so whether it’s the early Quakers or Evangelical Quakers or Liberal Quakers, we have a sense of a power greater than ourselves that restores us, that guides us, that brings us together, and when we come together in that reality and we seek to be humble in that reality, we find ourselves connected in an intimate way.

Eric Baker: What is that thing that challenges us to see the value in everyone else, to be people of peace in really challenging times, to be people of integrity when there are so many other voices saying, “no, you don’t have to do that.” That thing that’s moving us in that direction towards peace, towards integrity, toward real community, toward treating people with equal standards, that everyone has the light of God in them, that’s the spirit of God moving us in that direction.

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Most Quakers agree there is an Inner Light in every person. But is the Light Christian or is it universal?

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The central paradox of Quakerism is the belief in a Light that’s in each person’s conscience. Early and traditional Friends understood that Light to be the presence of Christ. But they, from the very beginning, also believed that that Light was in everyone’s conscience beyond the realm of Christendom.

The Paradox of Quaker Belief

I’m Doug Gwyn. My work is being a Friends minister. That has taken me into pastoral work among Friends as well as traveling ministry and writing among Friends.

What Do Quakers Believe?

“What do Quakers believe?” is a big question for a group that has no creed. For me, I see it all going back to the central paradox of Quaker spiritual formation. Historically, we have tended to believe that the Light is Christ’s presence within each person, able to enlighten and teach each person, lead a person into a better life.

On the other hand, we believe that this same Light is present universally in all peoples’ consciences, and does not depend on them having ever heard of Jesus, or ever having read the Bible, or even if they have they don’t necessarily need to believe it. They may have other ways of understanding what the Light is. As long as you’re centering your consciousness in the Light and trying to follow it, good things will happen.

Diverging Theologies

So those two things are hard to hold together. Friends have tended to favor one side of the paradox or the other: the Christian sense of the Light, or the universal sense of the Light. Out of which way you lean, many different realms of belief can generate, from very Christocentric and even very Evangelical even Fundamentalist forms of Quakerism generate from the Christian side, as well as—on the other side—very Universalist views that connect with other world religions and aren’t necessarily even theistic in orientation.
A Dynamic Tension

I think Quakerism works best when we’re trying to come closer to the center of the paradox, listening to people on the other side of the paradox, learning from them, not being threatened or discounting them.

A paradox is not something you ever live perfectly in the center of all the time, but the conversation across the paradox can be very fruitful and I know that as a Christ-centered Friend from the Evangelical stream of Friends I continue to learn from Friends across the spectrum and it keeps me honest.

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Norval Reece was giving a tour of his Quaker meetinghouse when someone asked, “What is this space used for now?” That’s when he realized we’ve got to do a better job of telling our story.

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People have asked me why I became a public Quaker instead of a private Quaker, which I’ve tried to describe as going from being happy to keep my Quakerism boxed into a little compartment I open up on Sunday morning and put back, into being a more open Quaker throughout the week. To me it has to do with stewardship. We talk a lot about stewardship as Quakers: stewardship of money, stewardship of the planet and so on, but what about stewardship of the Religious Society of Friends? We are the inheritors of a tremendous history of people who have changed the world.

Leaving Quakerism Better Than We Found It

My name is Norval Reece and I live in Newtown, Pennsylvania. I’m a member of Newtown Quaker Meeting, Newtown Friends Meeting.

Newtown Meeting when I joined it really wasn’t doing much outreach, and I became clerk of the meeting, and one time a chap called up—this was about 25 years ago—and wanted to come over and film the graveyard. I said, “sure,” so he came over to Newtown and we spent about half an hour around the graveyard and I showed him various graves and Edward Hicks and so on and so forth. I said, “Would you like to see inside the meetinghouse?” He said, “Oh sure, that’d be great!” And so he walked into the meetinghouse and he said, “This is beautiful! What’s it used for now?”

I said, “Well actually, Quakers meet here. There are 250 of us or so.” That was part of it. People just don’t know that we’re around.

Applying Our Skills

Somebody once said, “Norval, you’ve been in marketing in business and you’ve had a certain amount of success, but if you share your skills in that area in your business, why don’t you share them in your Quaker meeting?” It had never occurred to me to share them with my Quaker meeting because I segregated my business from my religious life. Some good Quakers said we shouldn’t do that. We should have a seamless life. Our lives should be patterns, examples to all people in all countries all the time. So that gave me a lot of things to think about, and I thought, well, yes, we should open our doors and be willing to let people know who we are and that we still exist.

Describing The Quaker Faith

When people ask me who Quakers are, it’s an elevator speech that doesn’t fit too nicely into an elevator time period. Because I have a theological background, I like to say that there are 3 radical theological concepts that Quakers are based on, and they’re really radical. One is that there’s that of God in every person. Every single person has that spark of the divine in them, whoever they are, wherever they are. The second point is that of continuing revelation. People can learn more about God, have more revealed to them than they currently know today. And point 3 is the perfectibility of man, which is also radical. That man, women, people… they can improve. They can become more perfect as it were, more like Jesus, more like the divine.

Owning Our Accomplishments

So one piece of this “private Quaker, public Quaker” is to, as a Quaker… yes, it’s ok to acknowledge that Quakers have done wonderful things. You don’t have to push them under the carpet or hide them behind the door. The Nobel Peace Prize is a good example. I had never seen it. I finally talked the American Friends Service Committee into bringing it out to Newtown Meeting so that we could see it, even though they had a policy not to take it out of the lockbox. Well it belongs to all Quakers, why not show it to people? It’s ok. You don’t have to be embarrassed about having won it, a lot of people gave a good portion of their lives in refugee work in Europe when that was awarded, so that’s the kind of thing.

Stewarding Our Tradition

I like to tell the story of Dr. Rogers’ boathouse on Cape Cod. Dr. Rogers was a wonderful kind of gruff old guy and he had a wonderful, mysterious boathouse that had all the tools you would ever need to fix a toy, fix a boat, to fix anything… but he had rules. 1. You had to be invited to get in. 2. You could borrow a tool (if he liked you) and you promised to bring it back, and 3. You had to bring it back in better shape than when you took it. So to me, all Quakers, we have inherited the Doctor’s boathouse. It’s a wonderful place, a serious place with everything we need, and we have borrowed it in our own lives. We’ve benefited from it tremendously. So I think we have an obligation to leave it in better condition than when we found it, and that means in every possible way: in terms of values, in terms of practice, financially, in terms of membership: do everything we can to make sure this wonderful institution we call Quakers or the Religious Society of Friends remains and prospers after we’re gone.

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San Francisco Quaker Meeting is located at the border of one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and one of its richest. Member David Breitzmann discusses the meeting’s attempts to meet the needs presented by its location, and how it has grown and deepened in the process.

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To me, the inner prompting of what would lead us to treat someone the way that we would want to be treated is anchored in the word mercy, I would say. When we are at our worst, we would ask that someone else would be merciful to us.

We sometimes construct these artificial categories of who is the poorest or the least among us or those sort of things, but really George Fox was quite prescient, I think, when he noted in that famous quote about the ocean of darkness and the ocean of light (great metaphors!), that you don’t get to that point until you recognize that all the propensities that you would point out in someone else—Pharaoh, a Cain, someone else that’s an arch-villain or is self-destructive—exist in you, primarily, first of all.

And when you come to that understanding, you’re not ministering to someone who is categorically different than you. You are caring for yourself in a way that you either have been or at some point in time will be, because those same propensities are in you.

Ministering to the Poor

My name is David Brietzmann. I live in San Francisco and I’m a member of the San Francisco Monthly Meeting.

I was reading early this morning the quote in Isaiah in which, of course, Christ reiterates that there is a message of good news which exists for the poor: a proclamation of good news to the poor. Insofar as in other ways we respond to the needs of people when they present themselves in any condition that is “in need,” we are responding to that of Christ in them, whether it’s in material poverty, or poverty of understanding, or poverty of self-care. To some degree, we are all poor in that way, because we are finite creatures.

San Francisco Meeting

The San Francisco Monthly Meetinghouse, of which I am a member, is located in an environment that is right at the precipice of where two very distinct socioeconomic populations meet. One of which is known as “The Tenderloin,” is one of the poorest in the city, and if you look at crime indices or other indices that are reported by the police, that is a hot red bed of activity and the rest of the city is a lush eco-green.

Here, right across Market Street on 9th, we encounter what is the spillover from that otherwise very tightly clustered hotbed of activity, and that can take many forms whether it’s people that are sleeping outside of the meetinghouse, whether it’s the young homies that are outside engaged in colorful transactions because as undocumented persons there’s no other way to earn an income, or it can take the shape of people who are mumbling to themselves, clearly mentally distressed and in need of care but the city of San Francisco has to some degree eliminated all of the places that would care for them, so they’re just left to their own devices and wander out in public.

Practicing Hospitality

That can be difficult particularly on first days because the meeting house, as it should be, is open and so there’s some challenges with what you do depending on who presents itself. But I have found that even what seems to be the greatest calamity in our city affords Friends the opportunity to be obedient to how they are called to respond to the personal needs in persons, whether that means just letting someone sleep in the lobby during worship. As inconspicuous as that might seem, it can sometimes be the greatest form of hospitality that we can give.

So in that way, I think that we’re both challenged in this particular area in San Francisco and we can show up to our neighbors and learn something from them in the best of all cases.

Seeing Christ in Others

Christ approaches us in the face of other people, I believe that quite strongly. Sometimes the needs are slightly more, but humans are always bickering and fighting and catty and self-willed and self-interested. That’s always true. So what I prefer, interestingly enough, and what I have found in the blessing of working with people who are more visibly distressed (I would put it that way) is that there’s a greater sense of honesty. They don’t lie. They’re not trying to deceive you. They’re not trying to put on airs and make you believe something about them that isn’t true.

They will tell you, “I just used. I’ve had a horrible night. I didn’t sleep. I just had intimate relations with someone I don’t know. I’m self-destructive. I’m hurting myself.” Who is going to tell you that in a board meeting? Nobody, that’s who.
So I think there’s a certain level of honesty that is the light and the fire in people that you get from people who are not trying to evade and put on a show and be performative about interactions. It’s not so much that there’s a blessing, let’s say, from that interaction alone, but if you internalize that and use that as “we’re trying to be publishers of truth,” that fire can be quite useful and necessary on some level for a monthly meeting to stay vital.

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When Ayesha Imani found Quakers, she knew this was where she belonged. But she also felt limited by the culture she perceived in Quaker meeting—that is until she tried worshiping with other Quakers of African descent.

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The first time I came to a Meeting for Worship, I thought I had wandered into a group of people who actually believed that God was able to speak directly to them. I remember saying, “Oh my God, this is Pentecost!” I couldn’t believe that these people think God is actually going to speak to them! I’m down for this. This is where I belong.

How Does Culture Influence Quaker Worship?

I’m Ayesha Imani. I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I’m a member of Germantown Monthly Meeting and The Fellowship of Friends of African Descent, and I worship at Ujima Friends Peace Center in North Philadelphia.

How Culture Can Influence Unprogrammed Worship

In an unprogrammed meeting you come together expecting the Spirit to show up, hopefully, not knowing exactly what form that will take. However, we tend to be culture-bound people too, and after hanging out with Quakers for a while and being one of only a few people of African descent, it became clear that there’s the waiting on the Spirit, but also there’s the requirement to the Spirit, that, “You can speak to me but only in certain ways. Please do it in complete sentences. Please use standard English.” And then when I rise and I share, I’m going to share in the way that I’ve been taught to communicate.

Being Free in the Spirit

You may find yourself having difficulty really being free in the Spirit. And it seemed to me that there was this liberty of the Spirit that really was at the root of Quakerism, but as Quakerism developed and developed among a particular race and a particular class over time—different from the class that it started with—then Quaker meeting began to kind of perform itself in a way that was very cerebral and reflected the cultural orientation of the white, middle class folk who had gathered.

And though I found that to be a rich experience, I also believed that I wasn’t operating in the liberty that the Spirit had set me free in. Not that the people there were doing something that they were supposed to do differently, but that I was not following the Spirit in the ways that I was always led to, because I was afraid of not being accepted.

Gathering With Friends of African Descent

And therefore, saying let’s put a call out to Friends of African descent or people who might come into community with one another and have different expectations of how the Spirit expresses herself.

The Fellowship of Friends of African Descent is a community of Quakers of African descent who came together in about 1990, and I think we came together just to see whether there were more people who looked like each of us individually, because there are so many Friends of African Descent who are in meetings where there’s just one of them. But we believed that just our coming together would be something that a) would be historic, and b) we believed it would be powerful. And it was.

We met at Pendle Hill, and our first worship was 3 hours. And I don’t think we wanted to stop then! It was like really and truly coming home. Coming home in terms of finding this space in the Spirit where we really felt that we could be who we were, and that we could just open the ancestral floodgates and allow our experience as a people to enter into this worship space.

Experimenting with Freedom

When we began to come together, we began to experiment with freedom—that it was ok to laugh when someone was funny, that it was ok to say “amen” or “ashe,” that it was ok to clap your hands or click your fingers. That it was ok, if someone started a song, for you to jump in with some harmony on that. That it was ok to stand up or to sit. That it was ok to fall down on your knees and raise your hands like in praise. It was all ok.

So we’re still on that journey of saying, “There’s a liberty of the Spirit that we’ve been given, and we also want to give that liberty back to God.” And as God has made us free to say, “God, you can cut up a little in this space! You can be free in this space. You don’t have to be limited by these particular cultural expectations.”

Because I do believe that it wasn’t over with the Book of Revelation. It’s not a Genesis-to-Revelation kind of thing. The Spirit is real and the Spirit still wants to engage us and if we are just open, amazing things can happen.

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During a lunch counter protest in 1960, a white supremacist threatened to stab David Hartsough with a knife. What David said to his would-be attacker was the last thing the man was expecting, and it transformed the situation.

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At Howard University in the Spring of 1960, lunch counters throughout the south of this country were segregated. And so we went to what was called �People�s Drugstore� (but segregated!). They were only going to serve white people, and I was with my black friends. So they closed the lunch counter and gave us nothing to eat. So we sat there for two days. It was the most challenging two days of my life. People would spit at us in the face. People would put lit cigarettes down our backs. People would punch us in the stomach so hard we would fall on the floor and then they would kick us. And each time�we�d gone through nonviolence training�we would try to respond in a loving, nonviolent, caring way.

The Power of Loving Your Enemy

My name�s David Hartsough. I�m from San Francisco, California. I�m a member of San Francisco Friends Meeting and I would say my passion and most of my life�since meeting Martin Luther King when I was 15 years old�has been peace and justice and promoting helping people deepen their commitment and understanding of nonviolence, and how we can transform this world from greed and violence and militarism and racism, environmental destruction into a life that I think God would like us to live, which is just and peaceful and care for all of creation.

Why Nonviolent Action?

I�ve chosen nonviolence and nonviolent action as a means of social change partly because I believe that we�re all God�s children. We�re all brothers and sisters, and an injury to any person is an injury to me. We�re all related. So it�s morally right and it�s trying to walk our talk that love is not just something to talk about with your little family�the world is our family.

Putting Quakerism into Practice

I think the essence of Jesus� message is to love another, and even love our enemy. So we really need to put that into practice in our own lives and our work. It�s not something we do one hour a week at the meetinghouse on Sunday, it�s really how we relate to one another and our families and our communities and our nation and the world.

Seeking That of God in Our Enemies

I think a challenge for me and all of us as Friends is to seek out that of God in one another with our friends and neighbors and with the �enemy.� I don�t think there�s some people that have that of God in them and there�s some people that are totally evil. That�s what our government and many governments teach the people, is �we�re the good guys and they�re the bad guys.�

I think Martin Luther King called it the Beloved Community, and when we talk about the kingdom of God, what are our challenges to help build that kingdom, that brotherhood here on Earth? That�s a very important part of what being a Quaker means.

The Lunch Counter Protest (Spring, 1960)

Toward the end of the second day I heard a guy come up from behind me saying, �If you don�t get out of the store in two seconds, I�m going to stab this through your heart.� In his hand was a switchblade. I had two seconds to decide, well, do I really believe in nonviolence and the power of love? Or is there some other way I should be dealing with this guy?

But I only had two seconds to think about it, and we�d had a lot of practice, so I just looked him in the eye and said, �Well, Friend, do what you believe is right but I�ll still try to love you.� And it was quite amazing�I was just 21 years old at the time�his jaw began to drop, and his hand was shaking with the knife, which began to fall, and he turned around and left the store.

He was ready for any kind of violence on my part, but he was not ready for someone saying, �I�ll still try to love you.�

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On the surface, it can seem like Quaker worship is just sitting in silence. But as Lloyd Lee Wilson explains, something much more profound is happening.

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God is always talking to us. God is always reaching out to us. Every time I stop to listen, I hear that God has already started. It’s not a case of getting God’s attention, but it’s a case of getting my attention.

Why Do Quakers Worship in Silence?

I’m Lloyd Lee Wilson. I’m a member of Friendship Friends Meeting in Greensboro North Carolina which is part of North Carolina Yearly Meeting Conservative.

For many folks coming into a Quaker meeting for worship who aren’t already familiar with it, there aren’t many cues to indicate what’s going on and it sometimes seems like we’re having worship based on silence or something like that, but in fact something very different is going on.

Passing Through the Stillness

From the exterior, there may not appear to be very much different between a group of individuals doing individual meditation or individual contemplation in the same room and a group of Quaker worshiping together. But there are a number of things that are, as we experience them, different. One is that these practices that have as their goal achieving stillness of mind or perfect quiet or single-pointed awareness, as a goal, are actually quite different from what we are attempting and achieving in meeting for worship. For Friends, this point of stillness is only a way station, and we pass though that. It is not our goal, but it is how we get to a point of encounter with God.

Waiting Worship

Sometimes this is called “expectant waiting.” In my yearly meeting, it’s more often called “waiting worship.” So when I sit down and worship, yes, the beginning looks a lot like stilling the mind and coming to a place of silence—and it is a place of silence of body, silence of mind, silence of emotion, a stillness—but we do that in order to pass beyond that into an encounter with the Divine. That’s what we’re waiting for.

So we’re in waiting worship because we’re gathering to prepare ourselves and wait for the presence and guidance of the Divine to be made manifest among us.

A Group Experience

As we gather together, that presence is not just my experience, but in a way, again, that’s beyond words, one knows that it’s our experience. We are as a group having a particular kind of encounter. At its best, it becomes what we call a “gathered meeting.” No words may be said; outwardly it may still look like silence. But afterwards, one may find that everybody else that was in that meeting was thinking about the same thing and feeling the same emotions and experiencing that divine presence in a very similar way. Francis Howgill calls it “the Spirit gathered us in a net and hauled us to shore.”

A Life-Changing Relationship

So that’s what we’re getting at, that idea of a gathered meeting. We’re all human, we don’t all get to a gathered meeting every first day or even every month, but we are gathering and preparing ourselves and waiting for that encounter to happen, and we find that whether it is my individual encounter in individual worship, or this corporate worship, that it is a life-changing relationship.
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Many seekers have discovered Quakers through online quizzes like Beliefnet, but what do they mean by “Liberal” and “Orthodox” Quakers?

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One of my favorite experiences when I was teaching at Guilford College and working in campus ministry was an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi from Israel came to speak to our Jewish students and came into the campus ministry center and said, “Does Guilford have a religious affiliation?” And I said, “Yeah, we’re Quaker.” and he said, “Quaker! Do you know, I took a Beliefnet quiz and I came out Quaker!”

Are You a Liberal or Orthodox Quaker?

There are a number of online quizzes that people can take these days that can determine everything from “Were you born in the 1950’s/60’s”, “What music do you remember” to “What’s your religion?” Many people have taken these quizzes and have learned that they are Quaker. But there are two kinds of Quaker that are offered by some of these quizzes—which displays whoever has written these quizzes doesn’t really know their Quaker history.

The Great Quaker Separation of 1820

It’s important for a person who is exploring Quakerism to understand that there are a variety of Quakerisms, and they go back to social and theological historical movements in the late 1700s and early 1800s, especially here in the United States. There was a huge separation of the Quaker body in the 1820s into Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers. I won’t go into the sordid history of this, but Orthodox Quakers essentially represented an Evangelical Christian faith. They believed that Quakers ought to embrace the wider Christian world—especially the Evangelical Christian world—be engaged in missions, be engaged in social movements, reforming society in cooperation with other evangelical Christian groups.

Hicksite Quakers tended to take a more conservative (small “c”) approach to “we’re a remnant people. We need to protect our social boundaries as a distinctive, peculiar people and keep the world at arm’s length.”

The Branches of Modern Quakerism

In the oddity of how Quakerism has evolved, Orthodox Friends—who were the liberals of their time—became conservative (small “c”) Christians: theologically evangelical; socially and politically more conservative; adopted standard Protestant practices of settled, pastoral ministry, programmed worship, hymns, choirs, sermons; and look fairly Protestant by the end of the 20th century.

Hicksite Friends became liberal from their conservative beginnings, because they maintained unprogrammed worship, emphasis on the inward light, so they became more universalist, more politically progressive, socially progressive, more liberal.

What Do Online Quizzes Mean By “Liberal” and “Orthodox” Quaker?

So if you come out “liberal” Quaker, which is one of the options on these quizzes, you have probably said that you’re open to other denominations, other religious expressions, you’re ok with Muslims and Buddhists and Jews, you’re fairly politically active, you’re probably liberal in your political leanings, and that will—whatever the algorithms are for these things—identify you as a liberal Quaker.

Another option is “orthodox” Quaker and that would indicate that you’ve answered questions like you read the Bible regularly, you believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, you are conservative socially, perhaps even politically, you ascribe to the standard orthodoxies of mainstream Christianity.

Those are the only two options they give you, essentially, on those quizzes, but there are many other variations of Friends.

Finding the Right Quaker Meeting for You

So if you moved to Greensboro after taking the beliefnet.com quiz, knowing that it’s “the center of Quakerism in America… I’m going to be in the Valhalla of Quakerism” and you had come out liberal Quaker and went to the Evangelical Friends Church—steeples, stained glass windows, backlit cross, organ, piano, drum set, electric keyboards and guitars, revivals, holy hands—you would have fled in terror halfway through the worship!

If you had taken that quiz and come out orthodox Quaker and went to another one of the meetings where someone rose out of the silence and said, “As I heard on NPR this week…” Buddhist expressions, Zen expressions, Jewish, Hindu expressions of faith—they would have fled in terror.
So it’s important that you take care of doing your research, look at the websites, see how they express their Quakerism, and match it with your own beliefs.

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As a lifelong Quaker, Arthur Larrabee was frustrated that he couldn’t answer the question, “What do Quakers believe?”� So he set out to do just that.

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About 9 years ago I began to give voice to a lifelong frustration of mine. The frustration was that I cannot answer the question “What do Quakers believe?”� I would always answer the questions somewhat defensively. I would say, “it�™s kind of hard to know what Quakers believe, but let me tell you what I believe.” Or I would say, “well, it’s hard to know what Quakers believe today but let me tell you what Quakers believed at the beginning.”� Or I would say what I thought Quakers believed and I would hope that no one else was listening because I did not want to be overcalled.

And so I had all of those experiences as a lifelong Quaker and I said, “this is for the birds!” We can do better than this.

9 Core Quaker Beliefs

My name is Arthur Larrabee. I�™m a member of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting. I live near West Chester, Pennsylvania, very close to Westtown School. My work in the world is the work of teaching and consulting about Quaker decision making.

In attempting to name what I believe are core principles, or core beliefs of the Religious Society of Friends as understood by unprogrammed Quakers, I�™m hoping that we would move in the direction of strengthening our faith practice, and strengthening our faith practice with each other and be more clear and affirming of what we�™re able to say to the world, what we�™re able to carry out into the world.

1. There is a living, dynamic, spiritual presence at work in the world which is both within us and outside of us.
Quakers use many names to describe this spiritual presence. Among the names we use are God, spirit, the light, the inward light, the inner light, Christ, truth, love.

2. There is that of God in everyone.
This statement of belief is similar to the first statement, and Quakers will talk about there being that of God in everyone, and it is the belief that the creator has endowed each person with a measure of the divine essence, and that as a consequence, all of life is sacred and interconnected.

3. Each person is capable of the direct and unmediated experience of God.
Our belief leads us into a form of worship that does not rely on clergy or liturgy or creed. Rather, we come together in the silence. We sometimes refer to our worship as “waiting worship.” Waiting to hear—listen for—the still, small voice within, and listening for that of God—the still, small voice—speaking to us.

4. Our understanding and experience of God is nurtured and enlarged in community.
When we come together in community, each of us brings our own manifestation of the divine energy. When we come together in community, we experience and embrace our diversity; we experience a much larger understanding and vision of God.

5. The Bible is an important spiritual resource, and the life and teachings of Jesus are relevant for us today.
For many of us, the Bible is an inspired record of humankind�™s interaction with God through the ages. Quakers find that the truth and the teachings found in the Bible are an inspiration for daily living and also an inspiration for our worship together.

6. The revelation of God�™s truth is continuing and ongoing.
Quakers are very clear that the revelation of God�™s truth did not end with the writing of the Bible. We believe that God has continued to reveal God�™s truth and make God�™s will and energy, truth—known to humankind down through the ages, down to the present day.

7. We welcome truth from whatever source it may come.
We find that our experience of worship and our experience of the Divine is enriched by welcoming truth from different sources. We welcome spiritual truth from different sources.

8. Our inward experience of God transforms us and leads us into outward expressions of faithful living, witness, and action.
Individually and collectively, we witness to God�™s presence in our lives by the way we live our lives and the way we model God�™s truth in the world. One of the consequences of listening for the inward voice and being led into outward expressions of faithful living and witness and action are Quaker testimonies. Testimonies that are well known today are testimonies of simplicity and peace and integrity, community, equality and stewardship.

9. Modeling God�™s presence in our lives is more important than espousing beliefs.
Quakers believe that the way we live our lives in of much more importance than what we say. There�™s an old Quaker expression, “Let your life speak” and that�™s very much a part of Quakerism: the understanding that the way we model God�™s truth in our lives is to let our lives speak it.

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Quaker author Lloyd Lee Wilson believes that there are many paths to God, but that once you’ve picked one, you have to be “all in.” What does that look like for the Quaker path?

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I think one of the things that many spiritual traditions share is the teaching that the eye cannot see itself. In order for us to make even the individual spiritual growth that we desire, it’s necessary to have some other eyes than ours looking at us objectively and telling us truthfully what they see, or what they don’t see.

Committing to the Quaker Spiritual Path

I’m Lloyd Lee Wilson. I’m a member of Friendship Friends Meeting in Greensboro, North Carolina, which is part of North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative).

Immersing Yourself in a Faith Tradition

It is, I think, impossible to get the benefit of any faith tradition without immersing one’s self in it. I believe like the Sufis that where thee digs thy well and where I dig my well may be on different creeks, but they come from the same living water and they flow to the same ocean. I feel that there are in fact many paths to God, but they are distinct paths. If one is intent on making that journey, the best way there is to follow the path of the faith tradition thee has chosen.

The temptation if we don’t is to avoid those things we don’t like. If we begin to treat our spiritual growth as a buffet or a salad bar—we’re only human, we take more than we need of the stuff we really like and we shy away from the stuff that doesn’t taste good or that gave us heartburn. But it is the nature of the faith journey that it’s often those things that we don’t like the taste of that are making the growth in us that we need in order to go forward.

Exchanging Individualism for Corporate Discernment

We live in an age of rampant individualism. It’s all around us, we breathe it in with every breath. I think that one of the hardest things about committing to the Quaker faith tradition is exchanging that individualism for a sense of corporate discernment and corporate wisdom. We go through our meetings and we’re asking, “My meeting is not giving me the things that I need for my spiritual journey.” It’s a question that I hear all the time. But I think that the real question–the question that will help us more–is to ask, “How can I be the member my meeting needs me to be in order to do the spiritual work God has given it to do?”

So to make that switch first of all requires a great deal of courage. To give up the fact that I’m going to be my own defense here, I’m going to look out for myself and be responsible for my own spiritual journey. It takes a lot of trust to feel safe and secure, to feel that yes, these people are seeking to discern God’s will, that together we can discern it better and I have nothing to fear. That’s very hard, very hard.

Committing to the Quaker Tradition

Quakerism has not been a perfect journey for me. I have never sat down in the perfect Quaker meeting and never expect to. But even those difficult places are places where we grow and we grow as a community. So that’s the concept I’ve been trying to articulate in my writings and my talkings about Quakerism: that it’s not a salad bar situation. You have to step inside of the tradition: commit to the tradition. Commit to something larger than yourself and then you begin to understand, “OK, this it the part of the tradition that’s real for me, I can take this in.” But you can’t stand outside the tradition and even understand it, much less critique it.

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What’s the most effective way to encourage social change? For Quaker artist Joey Hartmann-Dow, it’s got to include vulnerability.

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Joey Hartmann-Dow: It’s like here we are, all connected to the same thing and yet we’ve found ways to separate ourselves from each other. I want to bring it back to the same thing. I want to celebrate our differences, and bring it back to us all being connected. And that’s a challenge, and that’s what I want to ask questions about in my art.

The Power of Vulnerability

I’m Joey Hartmann-Dow. I grew up going to Lehigh Valley Friends Meeting in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and I am an artist/human. It says that on my business card. I work mostly in 2D, mostly painting and drawing. So I use maps a lot, and I’ll often draw or paint directly on a map.

Connecting with Our Humanity and the Earth

The idea comes from me wanting to make work about the relationship between humans and the Earth, which includes all kinds of creatures. Maps felt like a really awesome way to do that. I would say that the creatures look most of the time vulnerable. That’s something that I put in there because I want it to seem like this thing that you should take care of and not mess up.

I would love if people looked at my art and saw the Earth as a living thing and asked themselves, “What if I treated this as a living thing that I maybe shouldn’t kick in the face but maybe take care of?” So I want these creatures to read as human but without any of the features that we use to characterize different groups of humans. Because we humans, we’re so good at that: boxing people into different categories like race and gender and age and ability and I wanted to represent humans without any of that.

How Quakerism Has Influenced My Work

I feel like the way Quakerism affected my personal growth, I would definitely say it affected my philosophy and how I communicate and how I am, and that feels very much interwoven with who I am as an artist. I want my art to be a reflection of who I am, and that very much comes from the John Woodman quote, “Let your life speak.” When I first heard that I was like, “Yes, I want to do that!”

Reconciling With the World

I would go to Quaker Meeting and hear all of this anti-war sentiment and I thought that was normal, but it turns out it’s not. That was something that I struggled with, separating this thing that I knew with what the majority of people were experiencing and feeling. It became this challenge to speak my truth in the face of other people’s opposing truths. How are we going to move forward if our truths are different? And I know that I have something in common with everybody, so that’s what I want to find. I think that the very obvious thing that I have in common with other humans is being a human, so that’s like my go-to, is to draw on other people’s experience of being human and go from there.

Encouraging Social Change

The thing about social change is it’s usually slow and what I’m thinking about is how to get a person to change something about their lifestyle that is going to positively affect the community and the Earth. I’ve noticed that fear and guilt doesn’t work, so I thought to myself: “what might work?” It does come back to vulnerability, because I think someone is more likely to really go there with an issue if they’re feeling vulnerable and they’re communicating with another person who is getting vulnerable. I’ve seen that individually and in groups when people can really let loose and be vulnerable with each other, all this truth comes out. And all this connection. And that’s where I want to go, because that’s where we’re going to see change.

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What do Quakers believe? As an experiential religion with no creed, there isn’t always an easy answer. We asked 26 Quakers about belief, and the resulting conversations were powerful.

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George Lakey: I believe that there is a spirit that delights to do no evil. (laughs) A spirit that yearns for me to be happy and to be able to connect on deep levels with other people. A spirit that wants me to search and to find, and to act. A spirit that wants me to be responsible and at the same time to be bold and take risks.

What Do Quakers Believe?

Max Carter: Quakers describe themselves as a non-credal religious body. We don’t have our beliefs set out in formulaic expressions, like the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene creed. The experience of Friends is that religion and spirituality ought to be a direct, immediate experience of one’s own encounter with God.

Patricia McBee: George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, one of the earliest Friends, said that “You can say that Christ sayest this and the scriptures sayest that, but what canst thou say?” What do you know from your own experience?

“That of God in Everyone”

Jane Fernandes: Quakers see that of God in every person. I think that’s fundamental, and when you see that of God in everyone—that’s everyone—that changes everything.

Valerie Brown: The christ consciousness—the belief that each person has within them an energy that is unalterable of goodness—that is available to every single person, no matter your circumstance, no matter what you have done or not done or said or did or had or didn’t have. You don’t have to dress fancy on Sunday; you don’t have to speak a certain way; you don’t have to study a certain kind of text. Who a person is, by their very nature, we have that availability of God.

Mark Judkins Helpsmeet: So I would put that right at the core: this universal experience. And, that we’re usually distracted from that experience by something that grabs our attention, and our world is set up to distract us. So I think that at the center of Quaker belief, if you will, is this common-held knowledge, is that the way that you get to what’s real is that you clear off the distractions.

Waiting Worship

Lloyd Lee Wilson: For many folks coming into Quaker meeting for worship who aren’t already familiar with it, there aren’t many cues to indicate what’s going on, and it sometimes seems like we’re having worship based on silence but in fact something very different is going on. Sometimes this is called “expectant waiting;” in my yearly meeting, it’s more often called “waiting worship.”

Greg Williams: The uniqueness is that you’re sitting, waiting to be touched and to be moved. God is there, and God may not come to you in the way that you expect. If you’re centered, you can have a sense of that presence that’s within you.

Laura Goren: Through quieting ourselves, quieting our ego, quitting our racing mind, we can access that truth for ourselves and together as a community, that truth of where we are being led together. And that’s a mystical thing, I can’t explain that logically.

Kevin-Douglas Olive: When we come together in that reality, and we seek to be humble in that reality, we find ourselves connected in an intimate way. Sitting in silence with a group of people Sunday after Sunday, that’s as intimate as I can think of within a community like that.

We Are All Ministers

Ingrid Lakey: As a Quaker, I believe that we all have access to the divine, that spirit is available to us, there is God in everyone—including me—and that we don’t need an intermediary to be in contact with the divine. The divine is always with us.

Margaret Webb: Quakers believe that each person has a ministry, has a call, has something that the spirit is calling them to do, and because of that we believe that each of us has gifts, and that we each have a role in our meeting community. So we each minister to each other, within a Quaker community.

Deborah Suess: We believe that Christ is present, that Christ will speak directly to us, that you sure don’t need a pastor to do it for you.

Vanessa Julye: Each individual person has God within us, and each of us has a message or a gift from God to share, and we just have to be available to each other to be able to hear and to see those gifts that God has given us.

Mary Crauderueff: So, by extension, everyone can speak in meeting for worship and preach. In turn what this meant was that in unprogrammed Quakerism, we tend to think of it as that we don’t have clergy, but actually what early Quakers thought was: we have clergy. We don’t have laity. We are all the clergy.

Benign Sanchez-Eppler: The possibility that we don’t know who’s in charge, it’s very rich for me, because it’s a sign that the spirit may be in charge.

Inward Transformation, Outward Testimonies

Deborah Shaw: Quakers believe that through this interaction with God, with the Divine, with the Inward Christ—however we name that which we cannot name—through that interaction, we are transformed interiorly and through that inward transformation, that our outward lives will be joyful and of service, and there will be an integrity in our outward lives.

Max Carter: Quakers come out of a radical interpretation of Christianity, which means a desire to go back to the roots of Christianity, which means the Gospels, which means especially the Sermon on the Mount, the teachings and examples of Jesus. Out of that context comes an emphasis in Quaker belief on peace, nonviolence, simplicity and plainness, equality, integrity, a direct personal relationship to God, an openness to God’s leading and direction in one’s life. But Friends don’t have those ready creeds, so tend to talk about their beliefs as what “we testify to be true in our experience and in our community’s experience, and thus are expressed as “testimonies.”

Tom Hoopes: And so when we talk about our testimony on nonviolence, that is a direct natural outgrowth of my understanding that my life matters and, it turns out, other peoples’ lives matter, too. If I live in a world where there is a very clear message or even institutional expectation or rules or laws or practices that demean some people’s lives, I can say that that is a straight-up violation of my beliefs.

Anthony Smith: Faith is about your entire life, and my faith means that those principles hopefully should be reflected in the wider world. It’s not just about how I live my life, it’s about the world that we seek. If I can do things, without being sectarian, per se, to put my faith values into action, I think I have an obligation to do that.

Mackenzie Morgan: You’ll find that Quakers nowadays and even in the past have been really socially active in trying to help others. For modern Quakers, you see lots of anti-war protests because we believe that war is wrong, that God will never call us to kill another person. We also campaign for equal rights and human rights, and that’s a thing that’s been going on for the last 150 years or probably longer. If you look at women’s suffrage in the U.S. and the civil rights era and things like that, Quakers were involved in those things and nowadays, right now, the sanctuary movement is a thing that Quakers are getting involved in again.

The Bible

Stephanie Crumley-Effinger: For me, the Bible is a really precious and important part of that seeking and guidance, and at the same time I want it to be used with great care because so often the Bible is used in ways that are not life giving, and that’s not its fault. It’s a library with the Holy Spirit inspiring but with fallible people writing, and it needs us to be listening for guidance as we approach it and make use of it, and wonderful gifts can come when we do so.

The Afterlife

Deborah Suess: I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about heaven and hell, at least this Quaker doesn’t. I figure that’s up to God. Early Friends talked about the universal saving light of Christ and that was one of the things that first drew me to Quakers. It made no sense to me at all that good-hearted people who seek to follow God would be condemned to hell because they don’t know the name of Jesus or weren’t choosing to follow Jesus. And so when I started reading about the universal saving light of Christ, that people of faith who live lives of love have encountered the spirit of Christ whether they know the name of Jesus or not, that was one of the things that drew me straight into the arms of Quakers.

Chris Mohr: Sometimes I think that fundamental Quaker belief of everybody having access to the Divine makes us all happier, peaceful people because we have this basic reassurance that, “No really, it’s ok. The world is ok. We mess up, we screw up, we get dirty, we have to wipe away our tears. But in the end it’s ok. And it’s ok now, we don’t have to wait until we’re dead for it to be ok.” But Quakers are human, we don’t really live that moment to moment. We aren’t really praying without ceasing. If only we could, maybe we would be happier, more peaceful people. I think Quakers have touched that sense of heaven on Earth enough that we have hope that we can be there together.

Christ

Thomas Hamm: We need no intermediaries between God and ourselves to experience God, to understand God. I think you would find a general acceptance, moreover, that the best and most perfect way to do that is by living the experience of Christ. For some, that would mean accepting Jesus Christ as a personal savior. For others it would be seeing him as a model, a teacher, a savior who shows us the way.

Stephanie Crumley-Effinger: I come to ideas and phrases like, “Jesus has come to teach his people himself” drawn from Early Friends, and that that means holy availability and that our responsibility is to seek to be guided and led, to take time to pay attention for what that guidance and leading may be, and to try to be faithful to it.

Continuing Revelation

Mary Crauderueff: So Quakers believe in this idea of continuing revelation, which means that God still speaks to us today. That didn’t end when the Bible was written, but even today even tomorrow, 50 years ago, 50 years from today, we still get to hear God’s message and have the ability to transform our theology and our love for each other based on those messages.

Vanessa Julye: One of the things for me within Quakerism is it feels, it’s alive and its alive because it can be responsive, that it’s not a religion that was set up and is stagnant.

Lina Blount: There is this possibility of spiritual connection and truth continuing to unfold in the world as we listen to it, as we act, as we’re prayerfully together in community, there is more being unfolded. I think that some take it specifically to the Bible, that the prophets are still walking among us or being spoken to now. For me, that’s a less compelling part to it as much as: things are still unfolding and God isn’t done talking.

Theological Diversity Among Friends

Doug Gwyn: The central paradox of Quakerism is the belief in a light that’s in each person’s conscience. Early and traditional Friends understood that to be the presence of Christ but they, from the very beginning also believed that that light was in everyone’s conscience beyond the realm of Christendom. So there’s this universal side, and then there’s this very Christ-centered understanding of the Light, and they exist in this dynamic tension that can generate a lot of good energy as well as a lot of argument and disagreement. But if we keep trying to come to the center of the paradox by trying to come closer to one another across that divide, good things will happen.

Patricia McBee: While I never had a period in my life where I didn’t believe in God, I have spent my entire adult life remodeling what it is I think God is or does. A blessing to me about being a Quaker is I don’t have to make excuses for that. I don’t have to recite a creed with which I may find myself unsure from time to time.

A.J. Mendoza: There’s no Quaker Pope, so there’s no one to say who is or is not Quaker and what that leads itself to is a huge breadth of belief that’s held under the Quaker umbrella. Everything from more non theistic Friends to very programmed, very evangelical conservative Friends, and I like that. I like that it can all be held and that we’re all Friends.

A Living Faith

Kevin-Douglas Olive: Here at Homewood and in the meetings I’ve been in across the spectrum of Friends, Friends have found something. We’re not just seeking. We seek and find. And what we’re finding is a living water. An endless stream of power. It’s quiet though. It’s not loud. And we can be loud: “No justice, no peace!” We’re not whispering it on the streets, but it’s a living faith that goes beyond belief. So what do Quakers believe? We believe in a living reality and we believe in possibility.

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How do Quakers “love thy neighbor”? For Michael Birkel, it meant crossing religious boundaries to have meaningful conversations with his Muslim neighbors.

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There is within Islam a sacred saying called a “hadith,” in which God is speaking and God says, “I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known.” This was one of the motivations of the act of creation itself. “I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known.” If that desire— that deep desire—is imprinted on the very fabric of the universe, then our coming to know one another across religious boundaries is a sacred task and a holy opportunity.

Reading the Qur’an as a QuakerConversations About the Qur’an

So I traveled among Muslims who live from Boston to California, and I just had one question for them: would you please choose a passage in your holy book and talk to me about it? The result was a series of precious conversations, because what they brought to the conversation was their love for their faith, for God and for the experience they had of encountering God’s revelation through the Qur’an.

The Experience of Reading the Qur’an

One of my Muslim teachers told me, when I asked him, “what is it like to read the Qur’an?” and he said it’s this experience of overwhelming divine compassion. You feel yourself swept up into this divine presence where you feel so loved that nothing else matters. Any other desires you had in the world just disappear. You are where you want to be. At the same time, you feel this overwhelming sense of compassion for others. And he told me if you don’t feel that, you’re not reading the Qur’an.

A Diversity of Voices

I spoke with Muslims from many places that are within the spectrum of the Islamic community. I spoke to Sunnis, I spoke to Shiites, I spoke to Sufis, I spoke to men, I spoke to women. I spoke to people of many ethnic heritages. If there’s one thing I learned, it is that whatever you think Islam is, it’s wider than that.

One imam—who was by 39 generations removed a descendant of the prophet Muhammad himself—spoke to me and said that for him, one of the jewels of the Qur’an was this notion that you do not repel evil with evil. You drive away evil with goodness. And if you drive away evil with good, then you find that the person whom you regarded as your enemy can become your friend.

Another Muslim teacher taught me that according to the Qur’an, when we hear about good and evil, our task is not to divide the world into two teams—here are the good guys, here are the bad guys—but rather, our inclination towards evil is found in every heart and that is where the fundamental conflict resides. This to me sounded very close to the message of early Quakers.

Encountering the Qur’an as a Non-Muslim

I believe that for a non-Muslim, encountering the Qur’an for the first time might be perplexing. You might imagine being parachuted down into the book of Jeremiah. There you land: you don’t know the territory, here are these prophetic utterances (which is how Muslims see the Qur’an) and in Jeremiah they don’t always have names attached to them. They’re not in chronological order and they’re not thematically arranged. I believe the Qur’an can read like that to a newcomer. That’s why I think it’s valuable to read it in the company of persons who have been reading it their whole lives.

What is it like to read someone else’s scripture? I think it’s quite possible that it can change you in ways that I can’t predict for any reader, except to say that it will make your life richer. It will make your life better to know this. I am not a trained scholar of Islam. I did some preparation for this project, but mostly what I did was go out and talk to my neighbors, and it changed my life. And so I would like to encourage anyone who’s hearing these words to go out, cross religious boundaries, talk to their neighbors, because your life will be changed too.

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