'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Quakers in America for 350 years

After arriving back in the US from Uganda, I spent most of last week at the Annual Sessions of Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).  For those who don't know much about the practice of Quakers (Friends), I should note that here along the east coast of the USA, we still organize our congregations in much the same way that they have been organized since the denomination was founded, during the whole ferment of religious innovation and expression that welled up during the civil war in mid-17th century Britain.  That is, we don't have any "hireling priests", or indeed any power-wielding religious hierarchy or fixed liturgy, at all.  Our internal organization is extremely egalitarian.  Our local congregations are called "Monthly Meetings", because while they gather once or more per week to worship together, they (we) conduct the business of the congregation during a special "Meeting for Worship with a Concern for Business" that is held once a month.  And then, most of the Monthly Meetings are grouped together in geographically larger organizations called "Yearly Meetings", which do their business together-- you guessed-- once a year.

My monthly meeting, Charlottesville, is part of Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM).  So what we were doing last week was conducting this group's business together. BYM brings together Quakers from Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, and some portions of southern and western Pennsylvania.  To our north is Philadelphia Yearly Meeting-- a large one, given that Philadelphia and its surrounding state of Pennsylvania were founded by Quaker colonists back in the late 17th century.  There is also New York YM, New England YM; and other YMs to the south of us.

I've been going to BYM annual sessions for four years now.  I really love Quaker process, which I think is a great gift to the world. For example, we always do our congregational business in a clear spirit of religious worship: what we are searching for together in these meetings is a Spirit-led unity; and often, when the way forward doesn't seem exactly clear, we will just settle into silent worship together and wait for the guidance of the Spirit. Also, we never take votes. Instead, it is the job of the person running the meeting-- the "clerk"-- to discern what the Spirit-led "sense of the meeting" is on any decision.  One deeply convinced Friend can hold up the attainment of a decision, and such a dissenter is always given a close and loving listening. Perhaps she or he is indeed the one who knows the truth or can provide the best answer!  As a result, the process of reaching a united "sense of the meeting" on crucial issues can sometimes feel very slow.  But once the meeting body has found such unity, then that unity is very strong.

BYM has a Presiding Clerk with great gifts of gentle leadership and spiritual centeredness.  Her name is Lauri Perman.  It is a joy to watch her working, and I always try to learn from how she clerks our big sessions there.

This year, we have been (quietly) celebrating the fact that it is exactly 350 years since the first Quaker "traveling minister" came to north America from Britain.  Her name was Elizabeth Harris, and where she landed was in Anne Arundel County on the Chesapeake Bay, which is currently part of Maryland but was then part of Virginia.  Friend Elizabeth preached a lot up and down the Chespeake, and soon there were enough Monthly Meetings founded in these parts to establish the first Yearly Meeting on this continent, which happened in 1672.  That was Baltimore Yearly Meeting, which this year was holding its 335th annual session.  We didn't hold it in Baltimore, however.  This year we were once again occupying a small (and air-conditioned) wing of James Madison University in the Shenandoah Valley area of Virginia, about one hour west of Charlottesville...

In our session, we certainly took note of these anniversaries. But we were also considering and praying on some very current concerns, including the wars raging in the Middle East, the militarism of our own country and its many harmful consequences, the endangered status of civil liberties in our country, the threats that our gay and lesbian members face in their lives-- and of course, the incredibly strong witness for peace and universal love that was sustained by our beloved Friend Tom Fox, who was killed in Iraq in March while working for Christian Peacemaker Teams. I went to three very moving sessions that focused on Friend Tom's life, work, and witness.  He had been a member of Langley Hill Monthly Meeting (in northern Virginia) for a number of years before he felt astrong leading to join CPT and go to Iraq with them.  I will confess that I feel I could receive a similar kind of leading at some point; and learning more about Tom's life, and the strong support system his meeting and other supporters established for him made me thinkthat  I should become a bit more intentional about some of the witness-type things I do in my life, too.

... One of the things I've come to understand better over the years is the degree to which we Quakers have done things-- here in the US as elsewhere in the world-- that, though they were generally very well intentioned, ended up being extremely harmful to other people. We haven't been saints in any way.  (Well, most of us, that is.)  For example, Quakers tried to deal fairly with the indigenous people whom we encountered here.  One famous New England Quaker, Mary Dyer, even ended up getting executed by the Puritans because of her stubborn insistence that the "Indians" here had souls and should be included in Christian congregations.  But the Quakers were, nonetheless, part of a much larger wave of European-origined colonists who swept over the land from 1607 onwards, protected by the armies of the British Crown as they grabbed the land, hunting-grounds, and fishing-grounds of the indigenes...  And in later years, Quakers were deeply implicated in undertaking the "cutural genocide" of Indian communities by participating in projects to forcibly remove Indian children from their families and (re-)educate them in whitefolk-run boarding schools... Possibly well-intentioned but in practice extremely paternalistic and destructive to the Indian communities.

For a century or so after their first arrival here, many Quakers here as in England were also-- along with members of all other denominations in America except, I think, for the Mennonites and the Brethren--deeply involved  in the whole institution of slavery: holding slaves, trading in slaves, and shipping enslaved persons transoceanically in quite large numbers...  It was not till the 1750s that a small group of Quakers in (mainly) Philadelphia began speaking out and saying that slavery was quite wrong and un-Christian.  And then-- with wrenching slowness-- attitudes within the Religious Society of Friends started to change.  Once they had changed definitively, by the 1790s or so, Quakers became firm upholders of the abolitionist cause.  Most of the Quakers who then lived in Virginia found at that point that the soil here was too poor to be able to farm it in an economically viable way without using slave labor... So they sold their farms here and moved to Ohio and the midwest, starting some large Quaker congregations there, as well.

So as I said, we Quakers haven't been saints at all.  But we have tried to do the right thing.  And equally importantly, we have tried to keep ourselves open to new insights, new evidence, and new revelations that would show us what the "right thing" to do is, in any situation.  Along the way, we have tried to hold firm to our basic testimonies: our testimony against war, violence, and militarism; our testimony on human equality; our testimony on simplicity; and our over-riding conviction that "there is that of G-d in every person."

Anyway, it's late.  I have a big week ahead.  But I did want to jot down these notes here, which are part of my continuing effort to figure out what it means to be a Quaker in America today.