Doug Gwyn is next up on Quak­er­S­peak, this time answer­ing What is a Quak­er Query?

The Quak­er Queries are a won­der­ful inven­tion of ask­ing our­selves some sim­ple ques­tions… I’ve heard it said that through­out much of our his­to­ry, we were shop­keep­ers and busi­ness peo­ple, and we were used to doing inven­to­ry all the time. And the queries are a kind of spir­i­tu­al and moral inven­to­ry that Friends do well to keep track of.

It’s become kind of easy to make fun of queries. The clas­sic use was as ques­tions for­mal­ly asked and for­mal­ly answered in Quak­er meet­ings for busi­ness. As Gwyn says they were a form of account­ing. Local con­gre­ga­tions would go though a set list and send them to quar­ter meet­ings to sift and answer so they could in turn send it up to year­ly meet­ing ses­sions. I’ve seen this process fol­lowed at Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing if a bit tedious.

I could imag­ine the process being use­ful if for no oth­er rea­son that it gave Friends a chance to pry a bit into one anoth­er’s lives. Do all the mem­bers of our com­mu­ni­ty have their alco­hol use under con­trol? Are we real­ly com­mit­ted to peace in our communities?

These days a form of over-simplistic query is are writ­ten on the fly, with an implic­it “or” that I don’t always find par­tic­u­lar­ly help­ful. “Do Friends avoid the use of sty­ro­foam cups?” [or do you all hate the Earth?]. Used this way, queries risk becom­ing a list of busy­body norms to fol­lowed. We con­grat­u­late our­selves for not using paper nap­kins at a con­fer­ence we flew to.

As Doug points out, it helps to have a lit­tle humil­i­ty when it comes to queries. They’re one of the more use­ful items in the Quak­er tool­box. A good query will have some­thing to say to each of us, no mat­ter where we indi­vid­u­al­ly are in our spir­i­tu­al journey.