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Steven Dale Davison Interview
Quaker author Steven Dale Davison was interviewed for his May 2024 article, “Speaking to Our Members’ Conditions.”
Steven Dale Davidson discusses his journey to joining a Quaker meeting and the challenges he faced as a new member. He describes how he was initially antagonistic towards Christianity, but over time came to appreciate the Bible and Quaker faith. Davidson emphasizes the importance of meetings supporting and nurturing the spiritual lives of their members, rather than just focusing on committees and finances. He highlights the value of having a “gifts and leadings” committee to help discern and support members’ spiritual callings. Davidson suggests meetings should proactively engage with members about their spiritual practices and sense of ministry, rather than waiting until they are deceased to recognize their gifts.
Previous Friends Journal articles by Davison include:
- The Quaker Covenant with Creation: A Testimony of Earthcare Love (Dec. 2023)
- Learning to Follow: On Being Led by the Spirit (June/July 2023)
- Quakers and Capitalism (July 2006)
Steven Dale Davison is a member of Central Philadelphia (Pa.) Meeting, now living in central New Jersey. He is the author of the Pendle Hill pamphlet The Gathered Meeting (FJ review) and of the Quaker blog Through the Flaming Sword. He’s also published chapters in several Quaker books, including “Quakers and Capitalism: A History of Paradoxes” in Quakers, Politics, and Economics (FJ Review).
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Matt Rosen Interview
Quaker author Matt Rosen was interviewed about his May 2024 article, “The Light Will Be Shining at the End of It All“
Matt Rosen, a convinced Quaker, discusses the distinction between convincement and membership in the Quaker tradition. Convincement refers to the transformative experience of early Quakers in recognizing God’s presence, while membership is a more formal association with a Quaker meeting. Rosen explains that these two aspects do not always align, as some convinced Quakers may not become formal members, and some members may not have had a convincement experience. He suggests that meetings should consider how to best support and involve attenders who may not be formal members, especially with the rise of online participation. Rosen also shares his personal experience of feeling called to travel in Quaker ministry, and how his meeting has provided valuable support and accountability in discerning and carrying out this leading.
Matt Rosen is a convinced Friend. He is a member of Oxford Meeting in the United Kingdom and worships with Oxford Young Adult Friends. He is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Oxford, and he was the 2023 Cadbury Scholar at Pendle Hill.
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Annual Report for 2023
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A Membership That Is Ever Flowing
There’s an old saying attributed to Hericlitus that roughly goes “No person ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and they are not the same person.” When I think about all the people associated with a Friends meeting, I think of that ever-changing river.
Though it’s an important administrative task, I’m not so very concerned about the official membership list we synchronize with yearly meeting records once a year. I’m more interested in the ever-changing, ever amorphous river of people who connect with us as they flow by.
As the clerk of a small meeting, I find myself frequently juggling these multiple categories of membership. When we had plumbing issues a few months ago, there were lots of emails with a core half-dozen regulars who I can depend on to help with logistics and contacts with local contractors (this group is so consistent that when I go to send a message to one, my email program asks me if I want to include all the others).
When there’s an event coming up, the email list expands to include a small group of recent newcomers who make it to worship a few times a month. Every so often I look over this list to see if there’s someone who’s dropped away, and I’ll take a minute to write them a special email asking how they are and inviting them to attend. I would hate for a semi-regular to drop away and think we hadn’t noticed.
There’s also a wide constellation of people who attend once in a proverbial blue moon. Some are members of nearby meetings who occasionally hit us up for a change of pace. Others are local history buffs who will come to hear a particular speaker but make sure to come early because they like their once-a-year Quaker worship. Few of these visitors will ever become regulars but they probably know someone who might, and their word-of-mouth recommendation could help connect a new seeker with our small band.
When it’s time to send out the annual fundraising appeal, I’ll reach out to another, rather special class of members, those at a distance, many of whom I’ve never met. They might hail from one of the founding families of the meeting; perhaps they grew up there themselves and have fond memories. It might be easy to forget about these members but that would be a mistake, as they remind us of the long line of faithful servants who have kept this special community going in the past.
And who’s to say our membership doesn’t include the red-shouldered hawk family who lives in one of the sycamores in the burial ground or the groundhogs, squirrels, and related wildlife who scamper about. The grounds provide our immediate human neighbors with a bit of open green space in the midst of suburban sprawl, another constituency we rarely meet.
Every generation of members has its plumbing headaches. Every generation sees seekers come and go. Those of us who have signed up for formal membership are hosts of a time set aside for open communal worship and also stewards of the physical space and weekly logistics. We’re perhaps the banks of the river, a container for the flow.
This issue of Friends Journal contains a number of attempts to define membership, but they all come out as provisional and expansive. Care, attention, and love are the glue that hold communities together through conflicting visions and occasional abrasive business meetings. I hope some of these viewpoints inspire attenders to consider formal membership, and I hope they’re also a reminder for us to notice and celebrate those who are just flowing by.
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Where the Light Comes to Meet Us
The growing sound of wailing led me to a fawn tangled in a blackberry thicket. She had been crying out for days and was slowly dying of hunger and dehydration. Generally, when encountering injured wildlife, I do not intervene, knowing that their being left undisturbed in the wild increases their odds of survival. Mothers often leave fawns unattended in a safe place, awaiting their return. To remove such a fawn could prove fatal. However, this instance was different. The mother was absent for many days, and the fawn was dying. In the state where I live, the only other recourse for an injured or dying deer was calling an agency to shoot her. Seeing this precious fawn, I felt there had to be another way.
Who I AmTo understand this story, reader, you must first know who I am and how that shows up in my writing. I am a multiracial, Mexican Indigenous, Autistic woman from the Otomí people. As a neurodivergent person, I embrace the wild beauty of my nonlinear mind. I chose to tell this story in the style of many nonlinear storytelling traditions that came before me. I invite you to appreciate the episodic vignettes that follow as somatic encounters, rather than an outline of rational thought only. This is a story for the soft animal of your body as much as it is for the muscle of your mind, not that any real distinction exists between the two. My encounter with the dying fawn will ebb and flow throughout, weaving together diffuse insights.
Many faith traditions and histories run through me. I am a transplant from Pennsylvania and currently reside in Oregon. The White side of my family affectionately identifies as Pennsylvania Dutch. The Latinx side of my family identifies as Mexican with Otomí ancestry. Neither side was particularly religious, except for a couple tias (aunts) who became Catholic nuns. Once I discovered in adulthood that my abuela (grandmother) was fully Indigenous to Mexico, I became curious about Indigenous worldviews, including such values as honoring ancestors, respecting the land, and cultivating an intimate, somatic orientation to the cosmos. While I don’t know much about the history of my White family, I do remember sharing an admiration for the simplicity that Amish and Quaker colonial narratives held in our collective imagination (despite how racist and romanticized they might have been). Sometimes I wonder whether this orientation was a reverberating memory passed down from my own Quaker ancestors. The orientation toward simplicity, silence, and contemplation ultimately led me as an adult to Zen and Christian contemplative practices.
Dancing Circle of Ancestors Membership Is BelongingBelonging is at the heart of membership. Whether we desire to become members of a group depends in part on how closely we see ourselves reflected by others, and how closely that reflection supports our collective becoming in the unknown future. It is a transformative, relational encounter with the constellations of our identities as individuals and communities. It is my experience that belonging is also shaped by my ancestors who drum their stories through my cells and cry out for the relational healing they needed but never received. In this way, the rhythms of past, present, and future resonate in anticipation of collective healing and possibility. Over the years, I have weaved together a vivid tapestry of my ancestors’ faith traditions while also learning about the traditions of my brothers and sisters around the globe. I’ve read the Bhagavad Gita; the Tao Te Ching; Buddhist sutras; the Qur’an; and the Bible, including three translations of the New Testament. I’ve worked with shamans and Zen masters, and I’ve given sermons at Christian churches. These non-syncopated rhythms also reverberate through me as I enter a Quaker meeting. These rhythms are fraught with conflicting histories crying out for belonging and reconciliation. How are these rhythms received in predominantly White, middle-class Quaker meetings? Are they reflected, refracted, or refused? The answers to these questions have a stronger bearing on my interest in becoming a member than the recruitment strategies of any given meeting.
I have been in and out of Quaker churches, meetings, online groups, and retreats over the last ten years. While I am not currently attending a meeting, I practice listening as a spiritual practice and regularly contemplate Quaker writings. I almost became a member several times at meetings I attended, yet those spaces were not designed to resonate with the rhythms that drum through me. While Quaker spirituality aligns ideologically with many of the value systems I embody, the normative cultures of those spaces—especially relating to the political polarization of Quaker denominations—do not. Conservative branches that are not LGBTQ-affirming and adopt a literal reading of Scripture are not an option for me. I refuse to attend an institution that does not affirm the identities of my loved ones, and I take Scripture too seriously to limit myself to a literal lens. However, while Liberal branches are more in alignment with my beliefs and values on paper, the racialized class cultures of those spaces are politely violent and quietly exclusionary.
As an Autistic person who is stubbornly hard-wired for honesty and transparency, I react strongly to cognitive dissonance. When individuals and communities adopt behaviors that contradict who they proclaim to be and do not wrestle with those contradictions to better align with their values, a sense of righteous indignation is triggered in me. When I encounter the cognitive dissonance of liberal racism, the rhythms that run through me are silenced, and my belonging is thwarted. When I enter a Liberal Quaker meeting that proclaims they are antiracist but have to endure members obsessing over the exotic nature of my Latinx name and my partner’s Indian name, belonging is thwarted. When I attend a Quaker retreat centered on Indigenous solidarity and the BIPOC affinity group is consistently undermined and overlooked, belonging is thwarted. When a featured speaker at said retreat responds to critical questioning from a Person of Color and incorrectly assumes that Mexico is not a part of North America, belonging is thwarted. When no one corrects the speaker, belonging is thwarted. When I attend a service on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and hear the entirely White congregation singing African American spirituals without care to the cultural and political context within which those songs were created and sung, belonging is thwarted. When I attend a Quaker meeting that feels more like a liberal book club without opportunities to critically explore Scripture or the Christian roots of our history, belonging is thwarted. When the cultures of other faith traditions not native to any present members are explored in a superficial way, belonging is thwarted.
Cultural appropriation is common in Liberal Quaker spaces where identification with Christian roots is severed and members are privileged in ways that lead them to assume that taking what they desire from other faith traditions is an unquestionable right. These ruptures and refusals do not help me cultivate my relationship with the Light or that of God in each person, except through clenched teeth and a compassion that holds on by a string. It is simply painful and re-traumatizing. In such situations, it does not matter what recruitment strategy a meeting might utilize to encourage membership. Membership will never be an option for me because the rhythms I embody are silenced and thwarted.
The Twinkle in My Great-Grandmother’s Eye Fawn, Part 2There she was: a precious fawn tangled in a blackberry thicket. Fear, anxiety, and uncertainty drained from my body; I was filled with courage and conviction. I trudged through the thicket, scratching and bloodying my bare legs with every step. After freeing the fawn, I cradled her tenderly in my arms. There I sat: legs bloodied and embedded with thorns, holding a dying fawn, and without a plan or an easy solution. All I could do was offer my loving presence and witness her suffering. I listened.
God Comes to Meet UsThe Bible is rife with stories of men climbing mountains and building temples in search of God. As privileged members of patriarchal societies, their stories give us glimpses into the foundation of religious institutions. From the beginning, religious institutions were predicated on practices of exclusion wherein only privileged members of society could participate fully in religious life. The religious lives of men entirely relied on the everyday work of women and enslaved people who were prohibited from going on spiritual pilgrimages and entering religious spaces, and instead tended to children, food production, and other forms of reproductive labor. Exclusion was so vital to the fabric of religious society that all 12 tribes of the Old Testament prohibited women from entering the temple. Their status in society precluded them from membership: they did not belong. While some religious positions were open to women over time, women were still not permitted to engage in all aspects of church life. This patriarchal pattern persists into the present moment, as many churches still deny the right of women to become priests and pastors. They can become members but only provisionally. They still do not fully belong.
God is committed to meeting marginalized people who are excluded from religious life, whether exclusion is formally codified through religious dogma or informally ensured through liberal racism. In the Bible, God meets Hagar in the wilderness where she runs to temporarily escape enslavement and servitude. God gifts Sarah with a child while she is baking bread. Jesus talks with the Samaritan woman who is drawing water from the well, and she becomes the first evangelist in recorded history. In many Zen koans, women are enlightened while doing routine housework or otherwise existing in spaces outside the temple. Even when religious institutions deny their membership, God meets marginalized people wherever they are. This assertion is not meant to romanticize or justify the marginalization of women and other groups. However, such stories demonstrate God’s commitment to meet us and also exposes the emptiness of exclusionary religious practices. They serve as a reminder that the Inward Light shines within each person wherever they may find themselves, whether in a church, meetinghouse, or doing laundry on a Sunday morning. From this perspective, God has indiscriminately loved and embraced each of us as members of a higher order that can never be defined by the walls (or Zoom links) of a church or meetinghouse.
Resting in the Light Fawn, Part 3Cradling the dying fawn, I sensed a golden Light shining through and around us. The fawn immediately grew quiet. Her breathing slowed, and she looked into my eyes with a mild curiosity. A peacefulness came over us. I heard a voice say, “Rest,” and at that exact moment, the little fawn died in my arms. I sat for some time, holding her and bathing in the luminous glow around us. I felt a euphoric kind of sadness in which, deep down, I knew that I belonged and all was well.
Where You Can Find UsWe will not be found in your places of worship. We find ourselves where the Light comes to meet us. We are in the wild spaces of the forest floor: holding dying fawns, witnessing and reflecting each other in the rare and fleeting remembrance of our belonging. We are holding the memory that walls do not define our belonging. This is the gift of our marginalization. It is here in this liminal space between worlds that were not created for us that we encounter the Light. It is here that we are true members. It is here that we belong.
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The Light Will Be Shining at the End of It All
Elizabeth Hooton is often considered the first Friend to have been convinced by George Fox’s preaching and conversation. Even before the Quaker movement coalesced, with Fox preaching to thousands in northern England, Hooton had been imprisoned for the convictions that led her to admonish a priest. James Parnell was 16 when he traveled to Carlisle jail to meet an imprisoned Fox, and it was there Parnell was convinced. Only a few years later, he died in the appalling conditions of Colchester Castle’s jail. Elizabeth Fletcher was even younger than Parnell—a mere 14—when she was convinced, and she brought the Quaker message to Oxford and to Ireland before dying of injuries received at the hands of a mob of Oxford scholars.
These three were clearly Friends. Convinced by the preaching of itinerant Quakers, they turned inward, discerned a need to transform their lives, and began to obey the promptings of a Light that had been there all along. This led them into radical forms of witness, for which they suffered intensely alongside many other Friends. And yet, none of them was in membership of a religious society as we understand that today. Formal membership wouldn’t come into existence for nearly a century, and these early preachers traveled far too much to be part of any settled geographical community, like a local meeting. These Friends formed a loose network united by shared insights and concerns, a way to worship, an evangelizing impulse, and a growing set of friendships and family relationships. Their convincement and their willingness to suffer for it, if necessary, made them Quakers.
Over the next century, membership slowly took shape. In the early years, most people knew if you were a Quaker: You attended gatherings of eccentrics, dressed and spoke distinctively, and testified publicly. There was also an understanding that Friendliness was determined by an encounter with an inward reality whose outward fruits were manifest enough that no procedure was needed for confirmation. Being a Quaker came with a heavy cost, as Hooton, Parnell, and Fletcher knew, and suffering as a Quaker was plenty legitimating.
As the Religious Society of Friends grew and formalized itself, it became necessary for settled meetings to know who needed financial support and which births, deaths, and imprisonments to record. Meetings had to know who had a stake in their community and who could rightly speak on its behalf. Initially, membership developed for practical reasons, along practical lines. Its spiritual significance was secondary; it wasn’t to be conflated with convincement or inward baptism, with becoming a Friend. Spiritually, membership was an outgrowth of the desire to be in community with others committed to Truth.
In the centuries since, membership has grown in significance, to the point where it has sometimes overshadowed convincement. A failure to sufficiently distinguish between these has, it seems to me, led to difficulties with inclusion; anxieties about the meaning of membership; a loss of the concept of convincement, as it figured in the experience of early Friends; and fears for the future of our Society. I think we would be helped by once again recognizing the difference between convincement and membership in a meeting. This is not to downplay either but to suggest that seeing their difference is key to understanding their potential importance for us.
Balthasar Bernardstring, “Quaqueresse Qui Priche” (“Female Quaker Preaching”), c. 1736, picture book illustration.Historically, Quakers have understood membership to be a covenantal relationship between an individual and a meeting community. It’s a little like a marriage. The member commits to supporting the community, to fellowship and solidarity, and the meeting commits to supporting the member in ways both pastoral and practical. The process of applying for and being received into membership recognizes someone’s belonging to a particular community, as a Quaker marriage recognizes what God has done in the life of a relationship.
It’s possible, I think, to be a member who isn’t a convinced Friend, as well as a convinced Friend not in membership. Many of us experience periods of spiritual drought when our conviction wanes and the witness of the heart feels faint, but our belonging to a meeting community may remain constant. Many belong to our communities without having experienced the inward conviction and transformation that early Friends called “being convinced of Truth” and we can still recognize their belonging with integrity.
I’m suggesting that membership and convincement can come apart. A convinced Friend may naturally be led into a meeting community and may then be led to apply for membership. The application process and membership commitment can be spiritually profound, and our faith and discernment are often strengthened by our meetings. But convinced Friends may find that belonging to a local meeting isn’t feasible, perhaps because they are—like Parnell and Fletcher—in a wayfaring stage of life. Likewise, beloved members of our meeting communities may not understand their experience in terms of Quaker theology, and that needn’t always prevent us from recognizing and celebrating their belonging or from cherishing their commitment to the community and its practices.
This means that an application for membership is not a test of one’s faith but a chance for an individual and a meeting to acknowledge and cement a particular relationship that will inevitably have its ups and downs. It also means that Hooton, Parnell, and Fletcher were legitimate Friends, though they were never in membership, and that others may be convinced by itinerant preachers, pamphlets, or everyday experience of the living Christ outside the context of a meeting. The Quaker message will be alive so long as faithful people recognize the promptings of their Inward Teacher. The structure and significance of meetings and membership may change, but convinced Friends will recognize their Guide in the experience of others and seek each other out; Truth doesn’t stand or fall with our current structures. As twentieth-century songwriter Sydney Carter reminds us in the “George Fox” song, “the Light will be shining at the end of it all.”
I feel that I was convinced and saw the world through Quaker eyes long before I was at ease to come into membership. And I feel that on days when my experience of Jesus’s love and guidance is harder to access, my covenantal relationship with my meeting is a kind of life raft. Both matter to me immensely, but they matter differently.
FJ Quaker Author Chat: Show notes and additional information about this video.The post The Light Will Be Shining at the End of It All appeared first on Friends Journal.
Membership at a Distance
Isaiah is a homeless man in my neighborhood. He comes and goes at random. Lately, he’s been camped out on the street corner closest to my home. If he wanders off to another neighborhood for a while, neighbors will inquire as to whether he’s okay. Sometimes I’ve found him sleeping in my yard; sometimes I’ve found him defecating in my yard, which is more of a problem. Sometimes he is on drugs; sometimes he is very lucid. Sometimes I give him some money; sometimes I say, “Next time.” Sometimes he puts in a very specific special order when I’m on the way to the store: “Watermelon-flavored Arizona” was a recent request. Sometimes he smells terrible; sometimes he seems to have found a place to wash. Sometimes I’m happy to see him; sometimes I find myself bracing myself for the next request. But he always radiates an inner gentleness and kindness that makes him one of the easiest people in the world for me to discern that of God in a human being.
I start with these reflections on Isaiah because they humanize the issue of homelessness in a way that reveals a limitation of long-distance membership. I live in Long Beach, California, about 400 miles away from San Francisco (Calif.) Meeting, where I became a member in the fall of 2022. One of the current challenges to unity in our meeting is the rise of homeless encampments near the meeting. As I participate in discussions and listen to leadings in worship, I have to process very different ideas about what the meeting’s response should be. But since I participate in my meeting from a distance, these discussions remain abstract. I don’t have the full picture because I have no way to have real-life encounters like the ones I have with my neighbor, where the issue shifts from “homelessness” to “Isaiah.” In this sense, I see profound wisdom in the traditional practice of limiting membership to those who are geographically close to the meeting.
Still San Francisco Meeting has crossed into the territory of accepting members who worship at a distance. During the coronavirus lockdown, Zoom worship reconnected Friends who had moved away from the meeting and drew in people from various places. There wasn’t a deliberate choice to open membership to those at a distance. Rather, one person who had been participating in Zoom worship requested membership, and it was approved. I was the second person to request membership despite my living at a distance, and a member noted that the meeting had already opened the door to this new way of being a member. This decision will undoubtedly change the nature of the community in unforeseen ways. Some of those changes will strengthen the community; some of those changes will be challenges. Often major changes come about through subtle shifts that are hard to discern at the outset. Since it is far too early to see the implications of this decision for the meeting, I want to reflect mostly on how I approach my responsibilities to the community amidst the dizzying changes technology is bringing to our society.
A Friend asked me to reflect on this decision because I have a fairly unique relationship to participating via Zoom. I worshiped in person with San Francisco Meeting as an attender from 2005 to 2013. During that time, I served on and then clerked the Peace and Social Concerns Committee. When I moved away, I stopped attending meetings because I don’t have a car, and it would take too long to get to the other side of Los Angeles for one of the more local meetings. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, I started attending online worship with San Francisco Meeting. I was surprised, deeply surprised, by how Spirit-filled online worship could be. I found little difference in the depth of prayer facilitated by online vs. on-site worship. As pandemic restrictions eased, the meeting moved to a hybrid meeting. Some time after this, a Friend organized a Zoom discussion around the meaning of membership, which inspired me to seek membership.
Since then, I’ve taken a trip to San Francisco and visited the meeting in person, so I’ve had a reminder of what the differences are between online and in-person worship. One thing I’ve noticed is that I am significantly more attuned to worshipers who are gathered online when I am online and much more attuned to in-person worshipers when I’m worshiping in person. While this indicates a less-than-ideal situation for developing a deep sense of unity, I am grateful for the opportunity to have access to Quaker worship in a way that I had missed for several years. I am generally very averse to technology: I have managed to stave off getting a smartphone. But the way in which Zoom has allowed me to re-enter my Quaker community—and to enter it in a deeper way—has profoundly shifted my sense of the promise and perils of technological change in this context. While the limitations are apparent, the benefits are more so.
Perhaps long-distance membership is a way of extending the seeds of Spirit in a way that can transform more than a local community. As technology continues to transform the world we live in, we will continue to have opportunities to experiment, discern, and test the ways in which its transformations of community do and do not work.
One way that I have tried to minimize the gap between in-person and long-distance worship is to take on a project of sending handwritten letters to everyone in the meeting. (I haven’t done a good job of keeping track of to whom I’ve written and to whom I haven’t, so I’m not exactly sure of how far along I am.) Sometimes I hear back from people, either via letter or email. In some cases, people have responded by requesting Zoom meet-ups or phone calls, and I’ve had deep conversations with people I might only occasionally casually greet if I were there only in-person. So in these instances, the distance actually facilitated deeper connection. I have a hope that my letters give other people a deeper sense of belonging in the community, but for me, they definitely do.
I have also taken on the responsibility of serving on committees. Here the challenges of distant worship become more pronounced. I was first asked to serve on the Naming Committee, then the Nominating Committee, and finally asked to clerk the Welcoming Committee. I agreed to all of these requests. However, I declined a request to serve as clerk of the meeting because I felt that it was important for that position to be filled by someone who was in the area. Serving on the Naming and Nominating Committees poses particular challenges because there are members and regular attenders who have joined since I moved away. When other people name or nominate these people, I can’t always offer insight because I do not know them well. On the other hand, since I was so active in the meeting in the past, I have a deep connection with some of the more seasoned Friends and can understand some of the community dynamics very well. As clerk of the Welcoming Committee, I have to coordinate who opens the building for Sunday worship, and that is very much something for which I would prefer to be geographically close to the meeting, but it seems to be working out so far. So committee work is possible at a distance, but having a deep grounding in in-person worship certainly helps make it possible.
Will this experiment in long-distance membership prove fruitful? Does it further the aims of the Religious Society of Friends? Does technology offer a false promise, or is it an opportunity to discern Spirit in a new way? None of these questions are quite resolved in my mind. I feel the limitations of not having a regular physical sense of connection with the human beings who come to worship, but limitations are also a spur to creative responses. My weekly worship does strengthen my resolve to see that of God in everyone. It helps me bring that quest to my neighborhood: to approach my neighbor Isaiah with joy and to consider with equanimity the late-night motorcycle riders who’ve recently moved into the neighborhood. So perhaps long-distance membership is a way of extending the seeds of Spirit in a way that can transform more than a local community. As technology continues to transform the world we live in, we will continue to have opportunities to experiment, discern, and test the ways in which its transformations of community do and do not work.
The post Membership at a Distance appeared first on Friends Journal.
Speaking to Our Members’ Conditions
When I applied for membership in my first Quaker meeting, I was actively hostile to Christianity and the Bible. I told this to the Friends who served on my clearness committee, feeling that I should be honest about this for the process. Also, I later realized, I might have been putting them on notice that I would cause trouble—not consciously, but in effect.
But I wanted the meeting, and the meeting wanted me. My ex-wife (with whom I was on pretty good terms), my kids, and some of my closest friends were already members. The clearness process wasn’t quite a pro forma exercise, but nobody was surprised when the meeting accepted my application.
Then I proceeded to make good on my tacit threats. I harassed a Christian member for her vocal ministry. I acted to keep the First-day school from teaching my kids the Bible. I don’t remember anybody talking to me about my behavior, but maybe they did and I’ve blocked it out.
Several years later—against my will, more or less—I felt led to write a book of Bible-based earth stewardship theology. As I followed that leading, I regained the love of the Bible that I’d had as a teenager. I woke up to the harm I had been causing in my meeting and the wrongness of my militancy. And I developed a deep personal concern, born of my own experience, for how we approach membership and what membership means.
I do not fault my meeting or the Friends who served on my clearness committee. I am grateful that my meeting brought me in. But I wish they had said something like: Steve, we want your presence, your gifts, your spirit, but we’re a little worried about your attitude regarding Christianity and the Bible. As a meeting, we want to protect our worship and our fellowship from undue disturbance, so we ask that you labor with us some more about these feelings you have.
I would like to think that just being asked to work with the meeting on my attitude would have brought me around to a good state of mind right then and there. But I don’t think the meeting understood itself to be a covenantal community in this way. By “covenantal,” I mean a community in which members and the community have a mutual responsibility to each other for both nurture and correction under the guidance of the Holy Spirit: that the meeting’s role in one’s spiritual life includes active and loving engagement in our personal spiritual growth.
Photo by Marcos Luiz on Unsplash Membership and CovenantEmily Provance has a great definition of this kind of covenant in her blog Turning, Turning: “we give ourselves to God and God, in turn, gives us to a group of people” (for God, I think it’s fine to substitute Spirit or Christ or whatever your experience is). I think there’s a third leg to this triangle of meeting covenant: the community then gives us back to ourselves. The meeting helps Steven become a more loving, more whole, more aware, and more fulfilled person.
In the first leg of this triangle, we give ourselves to God by turning toward the Light within us, toward our inner Teacher and Guide, because we want to be taught, guided, renewed, inspired, healed, forgiven, and be made more whole. We want to be raised up to our true and better selves, and we know we need help with all that.
In the second leg of the triangle, God gives us to community because God’s primary agents for this kind of transformation are our fellow humans. This is one reason we are joining a Quaker meeting: we don’t want to pursue the life of the Spirit alone.
Sometimes, we grow out of our faults as a gift of divine grace. I came to my senses through just such a gift of grace. In a sense, my meeting “got lucky.” We both missed an opportunity in my clearness committee and my subsequent membership to help each other grow.
Our clearness committees for membership should explore the meeting’s role in the applicant’s personal spiritual growth. And that means that the meeting itself must be clear about its role. It must be prepared to elder those who are walking disorderly.
But that’s just the disciplinary side of eldership. More importantly, the meeting should engage with its members as active nurturers of the Spirit. This means proactively helping members to clarify their personal spiritual practice, identify and recognize members’ spiritual gifts, and discern their leadings and ministries. In this way, the meeting gives us back to ourselves.
More importantly, the meeting should engage with its members as active nurturers of the Spirit. . . . In this way, the meeting gives us back to ourselves.
The Clearness Committee for MembershipIn practice, this means asking two sets of questions that may not be on the list that our clearness committees bring to the clearness process. The first set is about what we invite members to bring to the meeting; the second set is about what the meeting offers the members, and I do mean “offers,” not coerces.
We tend to be relatively clear about what we want from our members: the classic triad of time, talent, and treasure. In concrete terms, this means service on committees and money. We often don’t ask, however, for something even more important: for members to bring their spiritual lives to us.
This is the “us to God” part of the covenant triangle. Once we give ourselves over to our Guide, we can expect to be guided, and some of this guidance will be for the meeting. And, if we at some point act out of our shadow selves, as I did, this will invite some pastoral care.
So this first set of questions might include: What spiritual gifts do you think you bring to the meeting? Do you already feel led into some activity that we might call a leading or ministry? And there is another question worth asking: Do you have any negative feelings about religion that we should know about?
This leads into the second set of questions about what the meeting is offering the applicant with room for the applicant to share what they’re looking for. These questions should be considered by the meeting: Are we offering covenantal community? What does that mean for us? One possible answer could be proactive help with spiritual formation, spiritual nurture, discernment, and support for callings of any kind.
This second set of questions about meeting involvement need to arise organically from the first set of questions. But in general terms, they would try to bring the applicant and the committee to clarity about how involved the applicant wants the meeting to be in their spiritual life. The committee should clarify what the meeting is offering and its approach and practice of active spiritual engagement.
This, of course, assumes that the meeting is itself clear about its role and these practices. I’m afraid some meetings are not even clear what I’m talking about. Some might be thinking, Isn’t being a safe haven and a caring community enough?
Photo by RU Recovery Ministries on Unsplash Vocal Ministry as LaboratoryOne area of meeting life brings all of this into clear focus: vocal ministry. In many ways, vocal ministry is the heart of our religion. It is the signature form of our spirituality as a community, a direct continuing revelation from the Spirit to the community channeled through its members. It is God giving God’s self to the community through us.
It could not be more important. Do our clearness committees for membership straightforwardly ask applicants whether they are open to the meeting’s engagement with their vocal ministry? Many meetings might share religious education resources and programs on vocal ministry, but what about personal spiritual mentorship or companionship, or even vocal ministry support groups? I would include eldering in this: Does the applicant understand that the meeting may request to labor with them if their ministry is inappropriate?
This would mean being clear about what “inappropriate” means. It also means having a unified culture of eldership in the meeting, such that the worship and ministry committee has a sense of the meeting’s support for this kind of eldership and some clarity about when it needs to be done, how, and by whom.
Even if the meeting has no such sense of the meeting about the eldership of vocal ministry, I still would not recommend sliding past this area of meeting life in the clearness committee conversations. I feel that the testimony of integrity requires that we say we are still working out how we elder vocal ministry, and so ask the applicant to discipline themself, to try to internalize the Quaker way of vocal ministry from the many resources given (rather than from the examples an attender may learn from in actual worship), and then to commit inwardly to bring Spirit-led ministry to the meeting. Of course, even saying this implies that the meeting understands itself to be a covenantal community in some way. I suspect that a lot of us don’t, either meetings or members.
One of the core missions of a meeting is to try to speak to our members’ conditions, to answer that of God in them, as God is trying to do. For we humans are the only agents here on earth that can serve the commonwealth of God. That’s what the meeting is for.
What Is the Meeting For?Many of our members, I suspect, want their meeting to be a safe haven from the turmoil of the world, not a spiritual “gym” for personal transformation. They seek a safe community as a refuge from some prior unsafe community. They see our worship as a recharging station, as a place to get away from the demands of the world. They seek the silence, the peace, and the people—not the crucible.
On the other hand, most people seeking to join a religious community presumably do so because they think it will help them realize their higher selves, whatever that means to them. So how do the spiritual desires of seekers who come to us match up with how the meeting understands its relationship with its attenders and members?
Some of our meetings will need to operate on two channels at the same time. For the members who did not sign on for the kind of proactive spiritual nurture I’ve been describing, we need to respect their expectations and give them the safe haven they expect. In many small meetings, this may be everyone. But for those members who want more from their meeting, we should try to offer that, as well.
In the case of meetings that don’t provide a more substantial covenantal community, members wanting that will have to seek one another out and perhaps go elsewhere. We are out there—quite a few of us—feeling just as bereft in our home meetings but still needing community.
Christ-centered Friends and theistic Friends more generally seem to feel this need and this pain most acutely. I think this is because, for these Friends, religious life is about relationship. In a personal relationship with Jesus or with God, the stakes for faithful discipleship are much higher than for those of us for whom the Spirit is more of a “what” than a “who.” In more post-Christian meetings, Friends who share or even understand this kind of religious life can be rare.
Small spiritual support groups of all kinds are emerging all over the place, and if you’re feeling this need, there may be a critical mass of such fellow travelers in your geographic region, or at least online, who can speak to thy condition.
In the meantime, we might explore whether there is a calling to season our home meeting’s culture of eldership ourselves, so that it might at some time in the future be mature enough spiritually to meet the needs of those who seek covenantal community. The calling is all we need; the strength, the wisdom, the “how” will come if we are faithful. At least, that’s our faith.
One of the core missions of a meeting is to try to speak to our members’ conditions, to answer that of God in them, as God is trying to do. For we humans are the only agents here on earth that can serve the commonwealth of God. That’s what the meeting is for.
FJ Author Chat Show notes and additional information about this video.The post Speaking to Our Members’ Conditions appeared first on Friends Journal.
A Family of Friends?
If the Quaker community were a household, who would be the owners and who would be the guests? Even a small meeting is usually bigger than the nuclear family household we often picture today, so it might be useful to think about communal living, extended families, or the sort of large household described in nineteenth-century novels. Those groups often center around a few people: a central couple, perhaps, or a core group who set things up. If your meeting was a big household, all living together, what would you feel your role to be? Are you an adult member of the core family, secure in your position and able to have a say in what happens? Perhaps you feel like a family member but not part of the core, perhaps like a child or an in-law or a distant cousin: acknowledged but sometimes ignored, not taken seriously for whatever reason, and sometimes anxious about whether you can stay or not. Perhaps you know you are a guest, only present on a temporary basis and happy with that. Perhaps you would like to join the family but get treated as a guest. Some big households have actual staff, and some treat certain members of the family like employees. There can be deeply ambiguous positions in such households: senior staff might be said to feel like part of the family, but what looks one way to the family may not seem the same to the staff.
Many of these things could be said of Quaker meetings. For example, I know small meetings that revolve around a strong couple who effectively leads the “family,” holding the community together in ways that can be both beneficial and constraining. It can be easy for a group to slip into treating willing and competent members of the community—people who have been nominated and agreed to serve—like staff: taking their work for granted, assigning them extra tasks without due consideration, and even being surprised if they choose to withdraw their gift of service. Similarly, many people feel the anxiety of the edge: from one perspective, firmly ensconced in the community and often providing significant service, they are nevertheless insecure about their position or how well they are accepted. Some of them feel that if their real views (theological, political, emotional, etc.) were known, they would not be welcome in a particular meeting any longer, even when those views are more generally recognized and accepted in the Quaker community. Others feel not fully accepted because of their background or social location: their class, gender, age, racial or ethnic identity, disability, neurotype, or something else about them.
From the perspective of my meeting, which I don’t manage to attend as often as would be ideal, I’m probably like an older teenager who stops by unpredictably to sleep for 12 hours and eat an entire box of cereal before rushing off again to a friend’s house: perhaps demanding, regarded with affection and confusion, and full of strange new ideas but trusted with the keys and able to trust the community to be there when needed.
Photo by fottooIf that makes it sound like this community thing isn’t worth it and we’d all be better off selling our huge, metaphorical house and buying one-bedroom flats instead, I can see your point.
I find exploring an analogy like this helpful because it can move us in the direction of identifying not just patterns of behavior but also feelings about being in these positions. We could provide a similar analysis in more literal terms, too, and that might be useful because it requires the identification and naming of some of the key features of belonging. To be a member of a family is a status that is widely recognized socially but also has gray areas: relationships by birth and marriage, by adoption and choice, or by long familiarity. There are different ways of deciding who counts as a member of a family, and sometimes we can put someone inside or outside that circle simply by how we treat them. (In your family, how literally are the terms “aunt” and “uncle” used? It varies a lot.)
Similarly, to be a Quaker or not is a position influenced by multiple factors. For example, we might talk about formal membership, about self identification and whether the person feels themselves to be a Quaker, and about behaving like a Quaker in all sorts of ways ranging from participation in Quaker events to holding Quaker views to the way someone acts in relation to social and moral issues. A simple Venn diagram that gets at a few of the questions might have three circles: behavior, self-identification, and membership. In that diagram, we would find—as we did in the household analogy—all sorts of situations in which someone is a bit Quaker but not fully. There are some people in the middle, whose membership, self-identification, and behavior all line up, but what about the others? There are people who act Quaker and feel Quaker but don’t hold formal membership. There are some who are doing Quaker stuff and holding formal membership but don’t really feel like Quakers, whether through their own insecurities or the way they are treated by the community. There are those who feel Quaker and are in membership but don’t act Quaker, and given how broadly I described the category of Quaker behavior, this could be anything from not attending worship to joining the army, including all sorts of ideas and actions affecting any part of life.
With that analysis in mind, I want to return to how this feels. Some of these positions can be incredibly emotionally difficult, both for the individual and the community. They often involve making judgements about ourselves and others. Do I act Quaker enough? This is not an area in which we can expect perfection. If we are very aware of the ways in which we fail to do what we are led to do, we may feel that we are not—and perhaps never will be—good enough to be a real Quaker, whatever that means: to call ourselves that, or to apply for membership, or both. Does Jane Doe at my meeting act perfectly Quaker? If I’m sure that she does, I’m probably missing some vice she doesn’t talk about; if I’m sure that in some particular way she doesn’t, I may not be aware of the factors that have led to her decision or the things that keep her doing whatever it is that seems unquakerly to me. Are my views and opinions welcome? Why does someone else with whom I share worship hold such apparently opposed views? It is easy to silence ourselves and others in the effort to avoid conflict, and there are times when it’s right to set something aside, but there also need to be times for open sharing, vulnerability, being truly known, and challenging harmful ideas: all of those times can hurt. Do I look and sound like the other Quakers in my community? If I am like all of them, I probably should be looking at the barriers to inclusion that are being put up. If I’m not like any of them at all, that in itself may be a barrier that prevents me from feeling entirely comfortable. All of these questions and many other related ones can cause anxiety; discomfort; the fear of judgment; negative judgments about ourselves; the frustration of wanting to share insights or advice and rightly or wrongly holding back; and, in many cases, also remind us of other previous painful situations.
If that makes it sound like this community thing isn’t worth it and we’d all be better off selling our huge, metaphorical house and buying one-bedroom flats instead, I can see your point. To keep going, we also need to connect with the benefits of community. A household that works well can be very supportive: family and friends provide emotional support; shared resources and chores provide practical and financial support; and some households play and worship together. In the Quaker community, the starting point is typically worship and spiritual support and learning together and providing moral support. In my own life, being part of such communities has provided all sorts of wonderful chances, including multigenerational friendships that helped me feel less alone as a teenager who didn’t get on with teens, opportunities to share and develop skills of all sorts, opportunities to learn from encounters that were difficult or upsetting at the time, times of worship that felt like peaceful connection, times of worship that challenged me, moments when I reached life-changing decisions, and moments when I was on the right track but needed rest or reassurance. For me, these have often been linked to Quaker worship and our practices of deep listening, expectant waiting, and valuing each individual as a child of God, although they can also appear in other places.
Photo by Monkey BusinessWe need to find ways to visit the outside of our institutions and to sit on our own doorsteps: to be with, to listen to, to welcome into our households, and to put first the people who are often left until last.
So what can we do in order to make our communities households in which guests can become family? We need to be clear that the communities we build are for the benefit of those who join them, and not the other way around. We need to be ready to change—not just in theory but ready to actually practice change. We need to test whether what has served us in the past is continuing to serve: not to throw out something good just because it’s old, but not to keep something old when it isn’t working.
One step is to be invitational. By this I mean that each step in joining and participating in our communities should be something we invite people to, not something we close away. Let’s not assume that people will ask. Let’s not assume that they don’t want to take a full role (even if we ourselves are overburdened and exhausted by our own roles). Instead, let’s ask. Would you like to come to meeting for worship with me? Would you like to come to a study group, borrow a book, or meet someone for coffee and a chat? What would nurture your spiritual life at the moment? How would you like to participate in our discernment? Given your skills and life circumstances at the moment, what can you offer to the community? Now that this is your house too, what would make you feel more at home?
Another step is to be honest. This takes many forms, and here are some that feel important at the moment. We need to be honest about what is involved in belonging to a community, and in particular, we need to reflect both the benefits and costs fairly. It’s easy to swing into constant complaint or into sugar-coating, but reality is usually more complex: If your community is really all sunshine and rainbows, great, and is it time for some awkward questions about helping other people? If your community is really causing you constant pain, are you being led to leave? We also need to be honest about our shortcomings, past and present, and what we can do to repair the harms we do. This is something we can practice as individuals but also need to work on collectively in an ongoing process of naming the ways in which the evils that surround us are also enacted in our own hearts and communities. Through prejudice, assumptions, stereotyping, and exclusion, we can fall short of the true equity we aspire to. The ways in which these harms occur is often hidden from those who cause them, sometimes with the best of intentions. Naming the patterns we observe, anything from outright hatred to accidental microaggressions, helps us to bring them into the community’s consciousness and address them. Often this will be a gift brought to us by people who are not properly heard in wider society, and we need to be mindful to hear the prophetic voice rather than blaming the messenger.
We can also take bold steps to adjust our practice when appropriate. This is not to compromise our core practices but to enhance our central commitment to recognizing that of God in everyone. In thinking about something like how to hold our worship or organize our membership processes, we need to balance many requirements. We need to know our tradition—not just what we do but why we do it and the history that has shaped it. We need to know the people in our community—not just what they tolerate but what they really need and what would set their spirits free to connect with Divine Love, however they understand it. We need to avoid shallow assumptions (for example, that people’s cultural background, class, race, or age dictates what kind of worship practices they will prefer) and automatic defensiveness (for example, instead of viewing a proposed change as a threat to the way things are, we can be curious about a new experiment). We need to learn from others, experiencing worship in other communities and sharing ideas that have worked elsewhere, and also maintain the specificity of our own communities, because what has worked for one group may not work for another.
Finally, we can look for ways to embrace the paradox of sitting on our own doorsteps. When we are in charge of the institution—the rules for membership, the ways of participating, perhaps a physical building—we become the establishment, at least for that specific community. But we also know that we are led to side with the oppressed, with outsiders, and to sit as Jesus would have done with the tax collectors, sex workers, asylum seekers, benefit claimants, trans people, and everyone else who is reviled and blamed by wider society more or less explicitly. In setting up an institution, we often fall into the same patterns of exclusion that are embedded in the world around us. Institutions are extremely useful, and we should maintain them so that we have the consistency, the accountability, the funding, and the safety to do exciting work. At the same time, we need to find ways to visit the outside of our institutions and to sit on our own doorsteps: to be with, to listen to, to welcome into our households, and to put first the people who are often left until last.
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Friends Seeking Non-Traditional Membership
Becoming a member of a Friends meeting entails attending worship regularly and discerning whether the meeting is one’s spiritual home. Those seeking membership typically meet with a clearness committee to discuss their faith journeys and determine how the meeting can partner with them to promote spiritual growth. Friends who live far from a meeting, as well as those who do not feel a strong sense of belonging in one, pursue membership in Quaker entities other than—or in addition to—local meetings, often called monthly meetings.
Monthly meetings are local or virtual congregations of Quakers that gather for worship weekly and conduct meetings for worship with attention to business each month. Quarterly meetings are gatherings of monthly meetings that meet to attend to business each quarter. Yearly meetings are regional Quaker entities that meet for business annually.
Quakers at Collington, a Kendal-affiliated senior living facility in Mitchellville, Maryland, formed a worship group in the early 2000s. Many Friends who attend worship there also maintain membership in the meetings they belonged to before moving to the facility.
Residents of senior living communities often have common spiritual needs.
“I think living in a retirement community changes the focus quite a bit. We’re in a community where people die and leave a spouse sometimes alone. I think that is a spiritual need that sometimes we fail to address. And that happens more here than it would happen in an ordinary Quaker meeting,” said Jim Rose, a Collington resident who attends the worship group along with his second wife, Susanna. Rose is still a member of Patapsco (Md.) Meeting, which he and his late wife were instrumental in founding.
Collington resident Evamaria Hawkins’s husband, Ted, died in December. In addition to the worship group, Hawkins belongs to a support group of Collington residents whose spouses have died; she is the only Quaker in the group. Hawkins previously worshiped with Bethesda (Md.) Meeting and is still a member of Annapolis (Md.) Meeting.
Participation in a worship group in a retirement community serves the spiritual needs of older Quakers. Similarly, some young Friends feel more at home spiritually in a yearly meeting than in a local, monthly meeting.
Pacific Yearly Meeting (PYM) is considering offering at-large or direct-to-yearly-meeting membership, according to clerk Laura Magnani. Some people who had moved away from their local meetings expressed a desire to attend annual gatherings as well as online meetings, according to Magnani, who previously worked for American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) for more than 30 years. While there she met young people who had life-changing experiences through their work with AFSC, a peace and social justice nonprofit organization that was founded by Quakers in 1917. The youth developed strong ties to AFSC but did not feel closely connected to any Friends meeting.
Young Friends who attend college away from their hometown do not always feel a strong relationship with monthly meetings, according to Magani. Instead young people in the yearly meeting build connections when they gather for retreats, usually a few times a year.
Discerning how to nurture Friends who primarily identify with their yearly meeting has led Quakers in Pacific Yearly Meeting to reconsider the definition of membership.
“We’re in some kind of transition,” Magnani said.
Young people in North Pacific Yearly Meeting (NPYM) have had similar experiences, according to clerk Paul Christiansen. Many of its meetings are extremely small and often don’t include any teenagers. Young adults often leave their meetings when they go away to college. When young Friends are in flux geographically, they find at-large membership attractive. Young Quakers feel a sense of community at the yearly meeting’s annual gathering because there are usually more people in their age group in attendance, according to Christiansen. For NPYM that number is around 30.
“That’s where they found community, more so than at home,” Christiansen said.
When Christiansen was a young Friend, about 15 years ago, he and some others his age approached the yearly meeting about establishing at-large membership. They were met with some reservations and did not continue to advocate for that membership option, according to Christiansen.
Ohio Yearly Meeting offers waiting membership for young associate members who are deciding whether they want to commit to full membership, according to Chip Thomas, a member of Marlborough Meeting, a Christ-centered meeting in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. The meeting assigns associate membership to children at their parents’ request. When young people who are associate members turn 25, the overseers committee at a meeting talks with them about whether they want to become waiting members, embrace full membership, or be released, according to Thomas. Each monthly meeting in Ohio Yearly Meeting is charged with ministering to associate members.
Members of the Collington Worship Group gather for worship sharing and discussion once a week. Photo by Jim Rose.Young Friends are not the only people whose life circumstances make membership in a monthly meeting a poor fit.
New York Yearly Meeting (NYYM) has five or six at-large members; the most recent is an incarcerated Friend who worships with the Otisville Prison Worship Group, according to Sarah Way, communications director for the yearly meeting. The worship group meets in the prison in Otisville, New York, and is one of several such prison groups in NYYM.
NYYM’s Ministry and Pastoral Care Committee takes responsibility for the spiritual nurture of at-large members. Applying for at-large membership requires Friends to describe their spiritual journeys, explain why membership in a local meeting is inappropriate for them, and demonstrate their active involvement in yearly meeting activities, according to Way.
“It was designed to be a place for people who did not find a spiritual home in their monthly meeting,” said Way.
Guinevere Janes became an at-large member of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting after she felt she was encountering unconscious bias in two monthly meetings because she lives with migraines, an invisible disability. Janes also believes she experienced unconscious bias because she could not financially support the meeting, as she lives on Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.
Janes has multiple commitments with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, serving as clerk of the Membership Development Granting Group, and as a member of the Quaker Life Council, the Addressing Racism Collaborative, and the Travel and Witness Granting Group. Janes is also a Faith & Play storyteller.
Janes decides on Saturday night which meeting to join for Zoom worship the following morning, depending on how she is feeling and which meeting would best serve her. One of the ways Janes connects with Quakerism is by taking online courses through Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, such as one on Quakers and enslavement that discussed abolition and gradualism.
At-large membership could serve as a tool for maintaining connections over geographic distances when the nearest worship group could be hundreds of miles away.
In addition to age, disability, and accessibility, geographic distance is a common reason for Friends to seek non-traditional membership.
Affiliate membership offers a spiritual home for Friends in Ohio Yearly Meeting who are geographically remote from monthly meetings. Affiliate membership is held at the monthly meeting level, according to Chip Thomas, a member of Marlborough Meeting in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Ohio Yearly Meeting has about 125 affiliate members.
At-large membership could serve as a tool for maintaining connections over geographic distances when the nearest worship group could be hundreds of miles away, according to Paul Christiansen, clerk of North Pacific Yearly Meeting, which comprises around 50 meetings and worship groups and covers a large region across five states. NPYM has some meetings in the urban corridor on the West Coast. Idaho has a few meetings in NPYM, but there are large distances between them and meetings in Washington State. There are more than 20 worship groups, usually consisting of ten or fewer members in geographically remote areas of the yearly meeting.
Christiansen served on the yearly meeting’s Outreach and Visitation Committee and took a long trip to visit geographically distant Quakers in 2019. From Christiansen’s home meeting in Bellevue, Washington, to Eugene, Oregon, it is a five-and-a-half hour drive. It took one-and-a-half days for Christiansen to drive from his home to meetings in Montana.
“There was a lot of gratitude for my presence,” said Christiansen. The yearly meeting’s annual sessions is also a crucial event for isolated Friends, he explained.
Friends in Europe and the Middle East who do not have yearly meetings in their areas can take advantage of international membership offered by the Europe and Middle East Section of Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC–EMES). There are 110 international members, according to Michael Eccles, executive secretary of EMES.
An international membership applications committee reviews requests for international membership. Applicants write letters explaining their intention to join; then Friends from EMES meet with them, usually on Zoom but occasionally in person, according to Eccles. EMES receives one or two applications a year for international membership.
When Linda Olsvig-Whittaker went to Israel for post-doctoral studies, she did not find any Quakers. She pursued international membership and was interviewed in Britain and in Prague in the Czech Republic. She became involved with a Woodbrooke-based group of Quakers and participated in Experiments with Light meetings. For the past 28 years, Olsvig-Whittaker, who is Israeli, has also been a member of a service-oriented messianic community in Jerusalem that includes Jews and gentiles. She has lived in Israel for 41 years.
Olsvig-Whittaker attended Ithaca (N.Y.) Meeting for eight years beginning when she was a graduate student at the nearby Cornell University. In addition to being an international member of EMES, Olsvig-Whittaker is also a Zoom attender of Manchester (UK) Meeting. She is currently discussing pacifism with members of the Quaker community in Manchester, a pressing concern because she is living in a war zone.
Other international members also previously worshiped with local meetings before moving and joining EMES. In 2012, Marco Bertaglia moved to Italy after having been a member of a meeting in Belgium. He had started worshiping with Quakers while living and working in the United Kingdom. Bertaglia previously went to Quaker worship twice a week. He currently attends online worship but misses the experience of in-person meeting. In Italy, there are small worship groups in Bologna and Florence, but Bertaglia lives far away from them in an ecologically focused intentional community in the Alps.
Bertaglia would like to build community with other international members. He noted that Woodbrooke and Pendle Hill Quaker study centers offer online worship through which such members can connect. He would like to enhance those ties and hopes the 2024 FWCC World Plenary Meeting in South Africa will help as many Friends from all over the world will be attending.
Astrid Bruhn learned of Quakerism while studying at Olney Friends School, a boarding school in Barnesville, Ohio, in the early 1960s. She later joined a worship group after returning home to Germany. After moving to the Canary Islands to join her husband, she found it easier to be an international member. Bruhn currently lives there and attends an online worship group with five to ten other Quakers from elsewhere in Spain. Bruhn has also attended Woodbrooke’s annual gathering in the UK in person. In addition, she maintains her connection to Quakers in Germany by reading their newsletter.
Quakers organizing against the Vietnam War in 1965 in Newburgh, New York, first attracted Nadyezhda Spassenko of Ukraine to Friends. As an international member of EMES, Spassenko has attended gatherings of Friends in Central Europe since 1996 and currently participates in meetings to plan those gatherings.
Connecting with other international members nurtures Spassenko spiritually: “Knowing that I am not alone in my community with God is comforting,” she said.
International members worshiping with the Central European Gathering of Friends recently formed a new yearly meeting, according to member Arne Springorum, a climate activist with German Last Generation whose earthcare advocacy dovetails with his Quakerism. The gathering was once an annual event that included members of ten nationalities for which English was the shared language. In 2014, someone attending the annual gathering said the event felt like a yearly meeting, so attenders decided to convene interim meetings twice a year. They established roles and structures. EMES had supported the group all along. A year ago, EMES executive secretary Michael Eccles said the group was ready to become a yearly meeting, Springorum recalled. The new yearly meeting is in the process of building structures and integrating members. International members in Central Europe can choose whether to retain their existing membership or join the new yearly meeting.
“It will be the biggest loss of international members, but it’s a joyful loss because we’re joining a newly formed yearly meeting,” Springorum said.
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For Hildegard
Her twelfth season tending
to my garden, she turns the soil
in flowerbeds, cuts back ornamentals
that would tangle in the trees, pulls
weeds, feeds seedlings she brings
with roots wrapped in wet paper towels.
This year she moves slower, as I do,
a mirror of my aging inside while
she works outside without complaint.
Sometimes, I can feel the ripples
of her anxiety blow across the mossy
ground. Her worries pop up like
Amanita after rain. I can’t soothe her
since she won’t say much, refuses talk
of reason, evidence. Terror comes easily,
I want to say. I grow old too. She still
promises, In fifteen years, this will
mature into a beautiful landscape.
We had our lovers before AIDS
and Herpes. We had the pill. Distance
from drones and bombs has helped
our pretense of safety: vegetables
from the garden. Tofu, beans and rice.
Nothing can go wrong.
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Oranges
When my smell came back, I caught
a whiff of lapsang souchong steeping
in the cup, unfiltered ions in the air
and into my brain. This morning, the grist
of Sichuan peppercorns lingers
in the kitchen as if the whole world
has adjusted its banking preferences
to include ordinary citizens like me
in this outpost of St. Paul.
In the compost bag, orange rinds
that had set sail past the dessert course.
Otherwise, their signal is still strong,
the invitation to salivate still holds.
Ginger, parsley, garlic. At bedtime,
I sniff the inside of your wrist,
the scent still faint. It’s very delicate you say.
The kiss that starts there and ends O Lord,
may it never.
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Garden Fires
In May I pulled away winter’s weeds,
spread manure, and fastened new
fencing. We made a trellis from pine saplings,
an art installation for tomatoes to climb.
Finally time to plant broccoli, lettuce, and chard.
When I didn’t want to think anymore about
fires in the west, when I felt helpless as so many
lost homes, my tears moistened
the soil. I imagined they were rain
falling in California.
Here it was warm enough in to plant
peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant. Wildfires
spread out west, consequence of climate
change. I weeded every morning, held tiny
cucumber blossoms in my finger tips.
I thought of smoke-filled skies,
outrunning fires.
Here tomatoes grew in profusion.
Winter squash
climbed the trellis,
down the other side.
Each morning’s grace was
a meditation. I imagined sitting
inside a golden squash blossom,
protected.
Bees buzz gently,
covered with gold pollen,
intent on doing only
one thing at a time, and notice only nectar.
I gather herbs and tomatoes,
listen to what the insects say.
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339 Manumissions and Beyond Partners with Howard University
Through a collaboration among Howard University, Haverford College, and the 339 Manumissions and Beyond Project, researchers intend to tell the life stories of more than 400 formerly enslaved people, mostly from the Philadelphia, Pa. area, who were freed by Quaker enslavers in the 1700s. Haverford College’s Quaker and Special Collections houses 339 documents promising freedom to 413 enslaved people of African descent between 1765 and 1790.
Howard University officially became a partner on the project in November 2023 and university students began preliminary research in September of last year, according to 339 Manumissions and Beyond founder Avis Wanda McClinton, who is an attender at Abington Meeting in Jenkintown, Pa. A representative for Howard University was unavailable for comment.
In addition to accessing the manumissions papers at Haverford College, researchers plan to use census reports, published articles, certificates of birth and death, records of churches and abolitionist societies, documents from insurance firms, and archives of historical associations, according to Friends Fiduciary Corporation, which manages a donor-advised fund to benefit the project.
Because Quakers have emphasized their history of abolitionism, McClinton explained, for many years, people did not think to look in Quaker archives for evidence that Friends had enslaved people. Formerly enslaved people who were freed might not have kept the names of the enslavers who had held them which complicates the research process, McClinton noted.
Research for the 339 Manumissions and Beyond Project draws on a digitized collection at Haverford called “Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers.” The results of the research will likely cause Friends to reconsider their spiritual forbears and question what contemporary Quakers can do to respond to past wrongs.
“It’s going to reveal hard things, and it is also really important,” said Mary Crauderueff, curator of Quaker Collections at Haverford College and also an organizer of the Manumitted collection.
Even if Friends acknowledge that their ancestors in the faith owned slaves, many erroneously believe that by 1776, when Quakers in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PYM) forbade members from enslaving people, all those held in bondage were immediately freed, according to Crauderueff. Some manumission documents offered freedom only after many more decades of enslavement, McClinton noted.
Many Quakers who refused to free the people they held captive were eldered and released from their meetings, Crauderueff explained. However, PYM and its monthly meetings spent years wrestling with moral questions surrounding enslavement, including how former enslavers should assist freedpeople. She noted that she had recently learned of the rare book A brief statement of the rise and progress of the Religious Society of Friends, against slavery and the slave trade printed by Joseph and William Kite in 1843. The work explores how meetings in PYM responded to Quaker enslavers and offers researchers a more complex account of the process.
McClinton appreciates that young Black students are doing the research so they can learn about African American history. Eventually, she would like to expand the project to include other historic yearly meetings in the United States such as New England Yearly Meeting and Baltimore Yearly Meeting.
The eight-person advisory board for the project includes people who are White, Black, old, young, Quaker, and non-Quaker, McClinton noted. Many of them are teachers. She hopes other Friends will join the project and share their skills, especially those with expertise in website development. McClinton also aims to hire a full-time genealogist.
McClinton considers the project a response to a leading that can benefit all Quakers. She believes God is blessing the work of acknowledging the humanity and inherent value of formerly enslaved African Americans who suffered under the absolute control of those who held them in bondage.
“I got to sit back and say, ‘God is amazing,’” McClinton said.
For information about the project, readers can contact Dennis Gregg of Ann Arbor (Mich.) Meeting at 931-210-3611.
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Writing Opp: Relationships
Fast Facts:
- Features run 1200-2500 words (General information)
- Submissions close June 17, 2024. (Ready? Submit here)
- Questions? Email martink@friendsjournal.org
The Quaker way is something that can be explored in isolation through books or correspondence, but it attains deeper context with the ongoing relationships, either in-person or online. I’ve attended memorial services for a few dear Friends and mentors this spring, and I’ve found something humbling about being around people who knew me decades ago.
September’s issue of Friends Journal will be all about Relationships—intimate ones, mentorships, friendships. How do they help you to be a better Quaker? A better human being? Are there ways in which friendships and your Quaker life conflict?
Some ideas we’d like to see:
Many families are like mine: religiously mixed, with partners and kids following different religious paths (I suspect this has actually become the norm). There are also so many forms of families, from the traditional nuclear ones to blended families, and co-parented families, to single-parent families and ones headed by grandparents or some other custodian. How do we manage the logistics of Quaker life—the Sunday morning trips to meetings, the evening committee Zoom sessions, the extended Quakers gatherings?
We’d also like to hear about romantic partnerships. How easy is it for single Quakers to date these days? What forms of non-traditional relationships are some Friends experiencing, like poly couples or non-monogamy? For those with toxic families of origin, how do we construct chosen families that will help us learn healthier forms of relationships? How do we navigate intimate relationships through tools like couple and family therapies or peer groups like the Friends Couple Enrichment program?
Another possible set of stories could include relationships within your meeting community. Both of my recently deceased Friends were particularly talented in hospitality to newcomers and adopted a succession of fledgling Friends over the decades, introducing them to new people and ideas. Who has done that in your life? I’d love to hear more stories of cross-generational Friendships from readers.
Submit: Relationships. Other upcoming issues:- Unthemed issue (October issue, due July 22)
- Quaker Fiction (November issue, due Aug. 19)
- Spiritual Optimism vs. Pessimism (December issue, due Sept. 16)
Learn more general information at Friendsjournal.org/submissions.
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Quakers, Birds, and Justice
The post Quakers, Birds, and Justice appeared first on Friends Journal.
John Andrew Gallery Interview
Quaker author John Andrew Gallery is interviewed about his April 2023 article, “The Gospel Model of Fatherly Love.”
John Andrew Gallery discusses his article “The Gospel Model of Fatherly Love,” published in Friends Journal. He explains how seeing the figure of Joseph at Christmas prompted his reflections on Joseph’s role as a loving father in the Gospel of Matthew. Gallery draws insights about fatherly love from the stories of Joseph and the Parable of the Prodigal Son, emphasizing the importance of letting go and giving unconditional acceptance as a parent. He also mentions his book “Living in the Kingdom of God” which explores how the parables of Jesus illustrate how one should behave as a person living in God’s kingdom. Gallery finds the poetic imagery of parents as bows and children as arrows, from Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet,” to be a powerful metaphor for the parental role.
John Andrew Gallery lives in Philadelphia, Pa., and attends its Chestnut Hill Meeting. He has authored many articles in Friends Journal and several self-published spiritual books. He has authored four Pendle Hill pamphlets, including the just-released Wait and Watch: Spiritual Practice, Rehearsal, and Performance. Website: Johnandrewgallery.com.
LinksJohn Andrew Gallery’s website: Johnandrewgallery.com
Read previous Friends Journal articles by the author.
Gallery’s Living in the Kingdom of God.
Pendle Hill’s interview upon the publication of Wait and Watch.
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Bearing Witness for Peace
Through the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), Quakers join members of other faiths to provide a supportive presence at the request of Palestinian church members in the region. EAPPI sends 25 to 30 accompaniers at a time and has provided more than 2,000 volunteers since the program began in 2002, according to its website. Israeli peace activists also offer protective accompaniment. Friends Journal talked with three protective accompaniers about their inspiration and experience.
Ian Cave and Debby, who requested that we use only her first name, are British Quakers who volunteered with EAPPI from mid-January to mid-April 2023; both were based in the West Bank. Jewish Israeli activist Sahar Vardi, who lives in Jerusalem, currently works with the New Israel Fund and provides protective accompaniment to Palestinians. Vardi previously spent about ten years with American Friends Service Committee, coordinating its Israel program, until she left in 2021.
Debby contrasted her sense of security at home in Britain with the experience of sleeping in villages where residents feared being killed or displaced.
“You take it for granted that you put your head on the pillow and you feel safe,” said Debby, who is a member of Surrey and Hampshire Border Area Meeting in the United Kingdom.
Debby found it unsettling to accompany Palestinian children to school when they had to walk past two Israeli settlements where they feared attack by settlers. Soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) walked behind the children to prevent the settlers from attacking them, according to Debby. The ecumenical accompaniers with EAPPI intended to make sure the military personnel showed up to escort the children.
The United Nations views accompaniers as the “eyes and ears” of the UN, explained Cave, because they are able to verify and report any human rights abuses they might witness in the ongoing Israeli military occupation of Palestine. During his time in the West Bank, Cave witnessed human rights violations by Israelis and also saw video footage of a Palestinian trying to stab an IDF soldier.
Vardi is an Israeli conscientious objector who is deeply involved in protective accompaniment for Palestinians. When COVID-19 restrictions froze international travel, more Israelis started providing a protective presence, according to Vardi. Israeli accompaniers persisted even since the October 7 attacks.
“Israelis were there on the ground and continued to provide protective presence,” Vardi said.
One person providing protective presence was killed since the October 7 Hamas attacks, according to Vardi. She added that violence by Israeli settlers increased significantly after the Hamas assaults. Israeli settlers displaced the residents of 16 Palestinian communities with which Vardi is familiar. In some cases protective presence did not prevent the displacement, and in other cases it helped stop the forced removal of Palestinians.
“That became one of the rare spaces where there was continued shared work of Israelis and Palestinians,” Vardi said.
Debby noted that an Israeli peace activist offered protective presence in the village where she was serving. Some Israelis with dual passports practiced protective accompaniment, capitalizing on their ability to talk with police and soldiers in Hebrew. Israelis regularly came across the border to protect Palestinian farmers trying to cultivate land, according to Debby.
An ecumenical accompanier with the EAPPI program walks behind two IDF soldiers while accompanying Palestinian children to As-Sawiya school in the northern West Bank. Photo courtesy of EAPPI.In addition to accompanying Palestinians, ecumenical accompaniers connect with Israeli peace and human rights groups such as Rabbis for Human Rights, B’Tselem, and Women in Black, according to Quakers in Britain, the group that runs the UK and Ireland part of EAPPI. Ecumenical accompaniers also meet with Israeli individuals, synagogues, and organizations that don’t support EAPPI’s work but want to be in dialogue.
A small portion of Israelis are ideologically motivated to be settlers in the West Bank, believing that God promised them the land, according to Cave.
“In many ways they’re doing what the Europeans did in North America,” Cave said of the Israeli settlers.
Most Israelis feel extremely concerned about security because they fear becoming victims of Palestinian rockets and suicide bombings, according to Cave. Maintaining the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza financially and emotionally drains residents of the region.
“It’s a problem that needs solving, but it seems insoluble,” Cave said.
Cave is reminded of the British Army occupying Northern Ireland, a conflict that started in the late 1960s and lasted decades. From the Palestinian perspective, Palestinians have been living on the land for generations and are now feeling intimidated and harassed. The IDF’s mission, Cave recalled, is to protect Israeli settlers, not to protect human rights.
Before October 7 Palestinian children had to go through checkpoints to get to school, but since October 7 many Palestinian schools are closed. Cave pointed to another historic example of inequitable military occupation: when the United States used similar tactics to invade Iraq in 2003 and maintained a presence there until 2011. International law allows short-term military occupation; the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been going on for 57 years, Cave noted.
Social, personal, and spiritual resources strengthen the accompaniers and help them continue their work. When Vardi was incarcerated for conscientious objection, she drew strength from developing relationships with other inmates.
Cave, a nontheist Quaker, also fortified himself with communal connections.
“It’s very much about drawing on the people around me and their sense of purpose,” said Cave, who is a member of Charlbury Meeting in the UK.
Since becoming a Quaker, Debby grew more committed to living out her faith commitments and becoming more politically active. She had previously volunteered in the region with a small Christian team to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes.
Spiritual practices that sustained Debby during her service included going to the rooftop of the home where she was staying to gaze at the expansive sky. In addition, she turned to Scripture.
“I actually found myself reading the Bible, which is not something I would normally do,” Debby said.
Debby’s childhood experiences inspired her to volunteer as an ecumenical accompanier. While she was growing up, her parents talked extensively about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the conflict in Northern Ireland, as well as fighting in Israel–Palestine. Over her lifetime, Debby saw progress in the first two conflicts, but the third remained intransigent.
It took a long time for Debby to feel ready to become an ecumenical accompanier. As part of the application process, she explained her faith journey and discussed how she interacts with different groups. She had to present a five-minute talk on an aspect of the political situation in Israel–Palestine. Trainees engaged in role plays and heard a presentation from a rabbi.
Debby believes that people in the West Bank desire peace; and she’s aware of many West Bank Palestinians who have participated in nonviolent resistance. One Palestinian family Debby spent time with included four young children whose parents were raising them to love others.
She recognizes that the ongoing war has traumatized both Israelis and Palestinians.
“Peace is possible, but we have to envisage it and work for it,” Debby said.
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Resonant Lessons from Nature, Scripture, and Experience
I don’t take for granted what a privilege it is to be able to write this column every few weeks for you to read. I always look forward to rereading the contents of the magazine and asking myself, how does Spirit, through the words of these Friends, resonate with me today? My answer today is that it resonates deeply.
Today, it’s a bright day in Philadelphia, on the doorstep of spring. As I write from my kitchen table, I find that I keep getting distracted by glimpses of the birds outside. Today a pair of downy woodpeckers have been frequenting the suet cage hanging on the stone wall outside my front window, their high-contrast black-and-creamy-white bodies hanging upside down, tails tucked, taking their time. House finches and song sparrows arrive like clockwork at the tube feeder for black-oil sunflower seeds. Brilliant red and golden northern cardinals swoop down to gather what falls, where they coexist more or less peacefully with the mourning doves who have been there all along. None of these birds is exotic where I live. They’re just our “everyday folks.” I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Like the increasing whiteness of my beard, the avocation of birding has settled in and become a part of my life over the past few years almost without me realizing it was happening. When I read Rebecca Heider’s piece for this issue, “A Quaker Guide to Birdwatching,” I immediately understood why I find this pastime so well suited to my Quaker countenance. Like Rebecca, I’ve come to love walking the paths at Dixon Meadow Preserve, the seasonal arrivals and departures of species familiar and novel, the discipline of returning to a place often, dwelling there, and being open to the lessons revealed.
John Andrew Gallery’s “The Gospel Model of Fatherly Love” is a lesson unfolding for me, too. With a poignant reminiscence as his starting point, John teases out meaning and queries from stories of fathers in the Gospels, finally reflecting on his own arc of fatherhood now that his sons are grown. As a father to two sons myself, I found his essay to be relevant and thought-provoking.
It is always tempting to reflect on the present moment and claim it to be unique, unprecedented: extreme in some new way. While no doubt this can be true in some ways and at some times, as J. E. McNeil lays out in “Planting Ourselves in Time and Place,” I find it oddly comforting to recognize that the deep divisions I see all around me in my country and in our world are far from unprecedented. There is wisdom to be gained from Friend J. E.’s example of confronting seemingly intractable divides with a recognition of that of God in the other and an acceptance of the different paths that have led each of us to where we stand today.
Now it’s your turn: how does Spirit, through these stories, resonate with you today? I hope you’ll consider this query and let us know what surfaces for you.
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A Quaker Guide to Birdwatching
Rebecca Heider was featured in the April 2024 Quakers Today podcast.
Eight Lessons for Friends and SeekersWhen the Adult Class Committee of my meeting first approached me last year about giving a presentation on my new hobby of bird photography, I balked. ”I’m just a beginner,” I protested. “There are so many people in the meeting who are more experienced birders and better photographers! Besides, what does birding have to do with Quakerism?” The presentation didn’t end up happening that spring. But all summer, every time I was out with my camera looking for birds, I was thinking, What does birding have to do with Quakerism?
As I thought about it more, I found many connections between my new practice of birding and the Quaker practice that has long been part of my life. I realized that as a newcomer to birding, I may not have authority on the topic, but I had the perspective of a seeker: thinking intensely about it and learning along the way. So I find I have something to say about birding and Quakerism after all, which I’ve condensed into eight lessons from birding that can inform our Quaker worship.
Bald Eagle Lesson 1: Bald EagleI finally found time to explore nature photography during the COVID-19 pandemic. 2020 was my year of insects, when I spent long hours in sunny meadows chasing butterflies; 2021 was my year of mushrooms, poking around in wet leaves on the forest floor. In 2022, I was ready for the year of birds, so I purchased a camera with a telephoto lens. I thought our family trip to Alaska—specifically a day of rafting through a bald eagle preserve—would be the perfect time to launch my career in bird photography.
In fact, that was a foolish and hubristic plan. I could barely operate the camera, and the only halfway-decent photo from that day was this still from a video. I now realize that even a veteran photographer would find it challenging to get a good photo while bobbing over whitewater.
By waiting to begin my journey into bird photography until I had traveled thousands of miles to this one special place on this specific day, I had set myself up for disappointment. And I had missed out on opportunities to get started earlier closer to home. This brings me to my first lesson: If we look to connect with Spirit only in a designated sacred place or on a specific holy day, we limit our opportunities for spiritual transformation.
Song Sparrow Lesson 2: Song SparrowOn the opposite end of the birding spectrum from the bald eagle preserve in Alaska is a site a few miles from my home that I typically pass several times a day: Dixon Meadow Preserve in Lafayette Hill, Pa. Where the Alaska trip was costly in terms of time and money, I could fit a visit to Dixon into my day with no advance planning. Where Alaska was once in a lifetime, Dixon was three times a week.
As birding outings became part of my weekly routine instead of a special event, the pressure to glimpse a rare bird or to capture a stunning photo subsided. Even if there were no birds in sight, I felt nourished and restored by the beauty and peace of the meadow, like a meeting for worship when no vocal ministry is given.
At Dixon, the counterpart to the bald eagle was the song sparrow. On every visit, from a hot summer day to a blustery winter morning, these cheerful birds were there to greet me. Where the bald eagle is huge and majestic, the song sparrow is small, humble, and plain. Song sparrows are also cooperative photo subjects, perching at the tops of trees and singing their hearts out to announce their presence.
Over the course of the year, song sparrows gave me practice with my camera and taught me to appreciate how much beauty and variety there is, even in something ordinary; I’ve been able to capture many photos of song sparrows, each one with its own beauty. My second lesson became this: Practicing connecting with the Divine every day and in ordinary ways prepares us for worship and helps us go deeper.
Northern Flicker Lesson 3: Northern FlickerA transformative moment in my relationship with birds came at an Audubon event where a multi-generational group shared about their “spark birds.” Sitting in a large circle, we spoke out of the silence about the bird that first sparked our interest in birding. It was a powerful experience of sharing our deep emotional connections with nature and with each other, and it had the spirit of a Quaker meeting for worship.
My own spark bird was a northern flicker. I saw this bird with its beautifully patterned plumage in my yard and had no idea what it was. Breathless with excitement, I ran from room to room peering out my windows to get a better view. That night I eagerly reported the encounter to my family.
In the following days, I reflected on the immense and unlooked-for joy that bird brought me. The northern flicker had likely been visiting my yard regularly, but I hadn’t been paying attention before. It was an important lesson to realize the joy I felt that day had been available to me all the time; all I had to do was look for it.
As I began to notice birds, I was also more aware of what the people around me were missing. While I stopped to photograph a red-tailed hawk on Forbidden Drive in the Wissahickon Valley of Philadelphia, a dozen or more people made their way around me on their bicycles, or jogging, or chatting with friends. No one’s gaze followed the direction of my camera to see what I was photographing. How close we are to such transformative encounters every day! And how often we miss them.
Later, after photographing a goldfinch on a stalk of goldenrod, I was approached by a group of birders excited about a rare bird spotted nearby. “Did you see it?” they asked eagerly when they noticed me with my camera. No, this was “just a goldfinch.” It was nothing exciting, but another small miracle. That brings me to lesson three: The Divine is available to us everywhere and all the time. We just need to pay attention.
American Robin Lesson 4: American RobinOnce I started to truly pay attention to birds, I realized that familiarity had blinded me to their beauty. What is this lovely bird with its speckled breast tinged with apricot and its distinctive white eye ring? It’s the ubiquitous American robin, which we see so often throughout most of North America that we stop seeing them at all. How can we awaken ourselves to the beauty all around us every day? This robin paused while snacking on winterberries to pose for me.
In the right light, you realize that the humble, dun-colored mourning dove has complex patterns and rosy tones in its soft plumage. I was on my hands and knees under a rhododendron bush to photograph a mushroom one day when I looked up to see a young chickadee perched on the mossy branch right in front of me. Moments later an attentive parent came by to offer him a snack: so ordinary, so beautiful.
Throughout the summer, there is a constant thrum of ruby-throated hummingbirds visiting the feeders on our porch. They are just a whizzing blur in the background, until you stop to really look, which brings me to my fourth lesson: Truly paying attention to the world around us allows us to experience the Divine in the ordinary.
Palm Warbler Lesson 4 (part 2): Palm WarblerAs I began to visit Dixon Meadow Preserve three times a week, I became aware of how the population of birds changed over the course of the seasons: which birds were regulars and which were just passing through. The palm warbler was the first migrant bird that I really took an interest in. Stopping by twice a year on their migration, the palm warblers spend a few weeks enjoying the flowering goldenrod. The day I took this picture, I remember asking myself, “Could there be anything more beautiful than these sweet, butter-yellow birds among the goldenrods?”
I only saw an American tree sparrow once, on a winter morning. The orchard oriole was another bird that was only in town for a few weeks in the spring. This brings me to the second part of lesson four: Truly paying attention to the world around us allows us to experience the Divine in the ordinary and also in the extraordinary.
Indigo Bunting Lesson 5: Indigo BuntingI usually appreciate the serendipity of crossing paths with a particular bird, but I really wanted a good photo of an indigo bunting. These beautiful birds always looked blurry or malformed in the photos I took. Over time, I learned to recognize their call, and I knew what section of the meadow they frequented and at what time of day. Finally, all of this preparation paid off when I captured my favorite photo of the summer. This experience informed lesson five: Preparation through study and practice will help us find the rich experience of worship that we are seeking.
Hooded Warbler Lesson 6: Hooded WarblerMost of the hours I spend birding, I am alone. But one of the highlights of the summer was when veteran birder friends came to visit me in the Poconos. Birding with them, I noticed how much richer our experience was because we each contributed something. I knew the area and was able to lead them to likely spots. My younger ears could pick out birdsong before they heard it. And they had a wealth of experience and knowledge to share that guided us in spotting and identifying birds.
The hooded warbler was one of the more uncommon birds I photographed that summer. When I took this photograph, I was alone, but I wouldn’t have been able to take it without everything I learned from the shared experience of birding with friends. This reminds me of a question I reflect upon often: if Quakers believe there is a direct connection between an individual and God, why is it important for us to worship in community? Lesson six offers one answer to this question: Worshiping in community broadens our experience of the Divine by drawing on diverse gifts and perspectives.
Red-Winged Blackbird Lesson 7: Red-Winged BlackbirdOver the year, I learned that in order to capture interesting photos of birds, you have to adopt their vantage point. Seeing the world through a bird’s eyes, you notice the rhythms of their lives as they migrate, mate, and feed their young. When the red-winged blackbirds returned to Dixon in late winter, the meadow was filled with their raucous mating cries. In the fall, when the meadow was golden with wheat in the morning sunshine, goldfinches fattened themselves up for winter by eating the plentiful seeds and grains. I also observed an osprey feeding fish to its offspring and a tree swallow preparing to defend its nest (top of page, main photo) from an approaching house sparrow.
When we practice a radical empathy with birds, we remind ourselves of how connected we are with all creatures and how much their lives are like our own: filled with joys and challenges. At the same time, this inspires humility. There is so much more going on in the world than only our human concerns. This brings me to lesson seven: Experiencing the Divine involves cultivating radical empathy to connect with something greater than ourselves.
Red Fox Lesson 8: A Fox in Forget-Me-NotsI always have to remind myself not to be so focused on birds that I miss other miracles. One afternoon, I followed the call of a great crested flycatcher through the dense woods and into a sunny clearing filled with forget-me-nots. As I perched on a mossy log, hoping to glimpse the elusive bird, I noticed that I wasn’t alone. A red fox was silently nosing its way through the flowers nearby. I sat watching, entranced, until it made its way back into the woods. I had gone looking for a bird but instead found the most profoundly peaceful moment of my summer.
How often do we head into Quaker worship looking for an answer to one question, and find instead the answer to a question we didn’t know we had? I’ve noticed a perfectly formed spider web illuminated by sunlight, a mourning cloak butterfly resting on tree bark, and a Halloween pennant dragonfly hanging on to the tip of a branch; these moments lead to the final lesson: When we let go of our preconceptions, we may encounter the Divine in forms we didn’t expect.
Web extraThe author’s extended slideshow on Quakers and birding includes many more photos of birds mentioned in the article.
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