Jon Watts

Transcript

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

How Quakerism Influences My Artistic Process

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

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

A Focus on Listening

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

Suspending Judgment

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

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

Being Comfortable With Not Knowing

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

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

Transcript

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

Growing Up Quaker in Indiana

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

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

My “Plain Quaker” Ancestors

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

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

The Influence of Holiness Revivals

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

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

Assimilation into the Protestant Mainstream

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

Transcript

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

Being a Quaker

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

Finding Moments of Prayer and Reflection

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

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

The Importance of Gathering Together

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

Welcoming Opportunities to Gather

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

Living with Attentiveness

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

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

Transcript

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

What to Expect in a Quaker Wedding

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

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

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

By the Power Vested in Us

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

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

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

What to Wear

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

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

It Starts With Worship

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

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

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

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

Settling into Silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exchanging Vows

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

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

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

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

Open Worship, Space for Vocal Ministry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End of the Ceremony

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

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

Hannah Mayer: The ceremony…

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

Hannah Mayer: And then comes the party!

Eric Peterson: Yeah!

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

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

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

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

Signing the Certificate

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

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

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

The Journey Beyond the Wedding

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

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

Transcript

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.

Transcript

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.

Transcript

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.

Transcript

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.

Transcript

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.

Transcript

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.

Transcript

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.

Transcript

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.�