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.