Yesterday the family traveled north of Trenton to a living history farm to learn about maple sugaring.The kids collected buckets of sap, practiced drilling a tap, watched the boiling off process in a “sugar shack,” cut firewood, and then — yes! — ate some pancakes with farm-made maple syrup.
L.A. Kauffman’s critique of consensus decision making in The Theology of Consensus is a rather perennial argument in lefty circles and this article makes a number of logical leaps. Still, it does map out the half-forgotten Quaker roots of activist consensus and she does a good job mapping out some of the pitfalls to using it dogmatically:
Consensus decision-making’s little-known religious origins shed light on why this activist practice has persisted so long despite being unwieldy, off-putting, and ineffective.
All that said, it’s hard for me not to roll my eyes while reading this. Perhaps I just sat in on too many meetings in my twenties where the Trotskyists berated the pacifists for slow process (and tried to take over meetings) and the black bloc anarchists berated pacifists for not being brave enough to overturn dumpsters. As often as not these shenanigans torpedoed any chance of real coalition building but the most boring part were the interminable hours-long meetings about styles. A lot of it was fashion, really, when you come down to it.
This piece just feels so…. 1992 to me. Like: we’re still talking about this? Really? Like: really? Much of evidence Kauffmann cites dates back to the frigging Clamshell Alliance—I’ve put the Wikipedia link to the 99.9% of my readers who have never heard of this 1970s movement. More recently she talks about a Food Not Bombs manual from the 1980s. The language and continued critique over largely forgotten movements from 40 years ago doesn’t quite pass the Muhammad Ali test:
Consensus decision making is a tool, but there’s no magic to it. It can be useful but it can get bogged down. Sometimes we get so enamored of the process that we forget our urgent cause. Clever people can use it to manipulate others, and like any tool those who know how to use it have an advantage over those who don’t. It can be a tribal marker, which gives it a great to pull together people but also introduces a whole set of dynamics that dismisses people who don’t fit the tribal model. These are universal human problems that any system faces.
Consensus is just one model of organizing. When a committed group uses it for common effect, it can pull together and coordinate large groups of strangers more quickly and creatively than any other organizing method I’ve seen.
Just about every successful movement for social change works because it builds a diversity of supporters who will use all sorts of styles toward a common goal: the angry youth, the African American clergy, the pacifist vigilers, the shouting anarchists. But change doesn’t only happen in the streets. It’s also swirling through the newspaper rooms, attorneys general offices, investor boardrooms. We can and should squabble over tactics but the last thing we need is an enforcement of some kind of movement purity that “calls for the demise” of a particular brand of activist culture. Please let’s leave the lefty purity wars in the 20th century.
I must admit I’ve been thrown off my blog reading by the demise of Google Reader, closed July 1 with only a few months warning. I remember when Google’s was the newest member of the RSS reading options. Its simple interface and relatively-solid performance eventually won me over and its competitors gradually stopped innovating and finally closed.
In the last few months other services have taken up the challenge of replacing Reader, but it’s been a chaotic process and a gamble which would be rolled out in time. One of my go-to programs, Reeder, now works for the phone but not the Mac app. It runs off of the Feedly service, which I now use in the browser to access my feeds.
I rely on these blog reading services to keep track of over 100 blogs. RSS may not be sexy enough to be a mass-market service but for those of us whose temperments or hobbies run toward curation, it’s an essential tool. As the new systems mature, I hope to keep up with my Quakerquaker reading more thoroughly.
Combine glue, three-fourths cup water, and food coloring in one bowl. In another bowl, mix one-fourth cup water with one tablespoon Borax, and add this to the first bowl, stirring until it forms a Goop ball. Remove the ball. Again combine one-fourth cup water with one tablespoon Borax and mix it into the glue mixture, stirring until another Goop ball forms. Keep repeating the process until the glue mixture is gone. Then knead all the Goop balls together. Now you’re ready to play by pulling and patting the Goop into strings and unique forms. Store the Goop in an airtight container.
We only really managed one-round of Goop (see video). We also couldn’t find any food coloring on-hand and so made white Goop.
Brent Bill is continuing his “Modest Proposal” series on Quaker “revitalization” on his blog Holy Ordinary. Today’s installment (part seven) is great but I’m not sure where it leaves us. He starts by talking about how some Quaker body’s books of disciplines (“Faith and Practice”) are becoming more legalistic as they pick up ideas from other religious bodies. He then challenges yearly meetings and other Friends bodies to a “serious examination of their purpose and programs” in which they ask a series of questions about their purpose.
I agree with a lot of his observation. But at the same time I’m not sure what a serious examination would look like or would produce. In recent years my own yearly meeting has developed a kind of circadian rhythm of constant reorganization, tinkering with organizational charts, legislative processes design to speed up decisions, and changing times and frequencies of events hoping to attract new people. And yet, as I wrote a few weeks ago, when I went to sit in on a meeting of the governing body, I was the third or fourth youngest person in a room of about 75 Friends. It was pretty much the same group of people who were doing it ten years and multiple reforms ago, only now they are ten years older. We actually ripped through business so we can spend an hour naval-gazing about the purpose of this particular governing body and I can report it wasn’t the breath of fresh air that we might have hoped for.
A big part of the problem is we’ve forgotten why we’re doing all this. We’ve split the faith from the practice – and I don’t mean Christian vs non-Christian, but the whole kit-and-kaboodle that is the Quaker understanding of gospel order, a world view that is distinct from that of other Christian denominations. Lloyd Lee Wilson calls it the “Quaker gestalt” in Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order. When a spiritual tradition has an internal consistency, and the process and theology reinforce each other. Architecture and demeanor, cultural and business values fit together. It’s never perfect, of course, and maintaining the consistency against new influences and changing circumstances is often the source of unnecessary petty squabbling. But even something as innocuous as a meetinghouse’s bench arrangements can tell you a lot about a group’s theology and its balance towards authority and individualism.
It’s our understanding of our faith and our concept of body-of-Christ community which undergirds our institutional structures. When we don’t have a good grasp of it, we do things merely because “we’re supposed to” and the process feels dry and spirit-less. We defend particular institutions as necessary because they’re codified in our books of doctrine and lose our ability to positively explain their existence, at which point frustrated members will call for their abandonment as unnecessary baggage from a bygone age.
As an example, about seven years ago my quarterly meeting went through a naval-gazing process. I tried to be involved, as did my then-Quaker wife Julie. We asked a lot of big questions but others on the visioning committee just wanted to ask small questions. When Julie and I asked about divine guidance at sessions, for example, one fellow condescendingly explained that if we spent all our time asking what God wanted we’d never get anything done. We really didn’t know what to say to that, especially as it seemed the consensus of others in the group. One thing they were complaining about was that it was always the same few people doing anything but after a few rounds of those meetings, we ran screaming away (my wife right out of the RSoF altogether).
Re-visioning isn’t just deconstructing institutions we don’t understand or tinkering with some new process to fix the old process that doesn’t work. If you’ve got a group of people actively listening to the guidance of the Inward Christ then any process or structure probably can be made to work (though some will facilitate discernment better). Our books of “Faith and Practice” were never meant to be inerrant Bibles. At their core, they’re our “wiki” of best practices for Quaker community discernment – tips earned through the successes and failures of previous generations. I think if we understand our spiritual roots better we’ll find our musty old Quaker institutions actually still have important roles to play. But how do we get there? I like Brent’s questions but I’m not sure you can just start with them. Anyone want to share stories of spiritual deepening in their meetings or faith communities and how that fed into a renewed appreciation of Quaker bodies and process?
A potential client recently came to me with an existing site. It certainly was slick: the homepage featured a Flash animation of telegenic young professionals culled from a stock photo service, psuedo-jazz techno music, and words sweeping in from all sides selling you the company’s service. Unfortunately the page had no useful content, no call-to-action and no Google PageRank. It was an expensive design, but I didn’t need to look at the tracking stats to know no one came this page.
So you’re ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynamic, something that will attract customers and interact with them. Here’s five tips for building a self-marketing website!
One: Useful Content for your Target Audience Give visitors a reason to come to the site. Text-rich, changing content is essential. In practicality, this means installing a blog and writing posts every few weeks. You’ll see measures like “keyword relevancy” increase instantly as excerpted text shows up on the homepage. Add videos and photos if your company or team has that expertise, but remember: when it comes to search, text is king.
Two: Give away something valuable or useful Many smart marketing sites feature some free giveaway right on the homepage: a useful quiz, professional analysis, a PDF how-to guidebook. A builder I worked with went to the trouble of posting dozens of floor plans & pictures to their website and compiling them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your contact information to get it. Once the free material has been compiled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!
Three: Ask yourself the Three User Questions! It’s amazing how focused the mind gets when you actually sit down to define goals. Just about every website can benefit from this three-step exercise:
Who is the target audience?
What would draw them to the site?
What do we want to get from them?
Get a group together to through your website page by page these questions. Brainstorm a list of changes you could make. You’ll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quantifiable actions do you want visitors to take? It might well just be the successful completion of a contact form.
Four: Test Test and Test Again Many small businesses now get a lot of their customers from their websites. Your website is an essential piece of your marketing and publicity and you need to be smart about it. Compile together your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up alternate designs incorporating the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Website Optimizer to put the alternatives through their paces. Which one “converts” better, i.e., which design gets you higher percentages in the Defined Goals you’ve set? Once you’ve finished a test, move on to the next brainstorming idea and implement it. Always be testing!
An extensive series of tests of one site I worked on doubled it’s conversion rate: imagine your company doubling its internet sales? It is completely worth spending the time and effort to go through this process.
Five: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Professional Help If you need to hire a professional to help you through this process you’ll almost certainly get your money’s worth! A recent projects cost the customer $6000 but I was able to document savings of $100,000 per year in his publicity costs! See my piece “What to Look For in SEO Consultants” for my insider-advice to how to pick a honest and competent professional web publicity consultant.
My Twitter followers will know I’ve been slightly obsessed by Google’s new browser, Chrome, since word leaked that it was going to be released today (Tues, Sept 2). I’ve been hitting reload on the download site fairly obsessively. A few minutes ago my persistence was rewarded and I’m writing to you all from the new browser (here’s the official release announcement).
Why a New Browser?!?
Before I begin, let me recommend the Google Chrome online comic book for those with tech interests. Google does a good job explaining why they’ve joined the browser wars. At first glance it seems a needless move: they already fund much of the development on the open source Firefox browser. But Firefox, like Microsoft Internet Explorer and every other browser, is built around certain assumptions about how browsers process applications. Google is starting from scratch and thinking about the browser as an operating system running increasingly sophisticated applications (like Gmail). Chrome separates memory process and internet permissions in new ways.
Obviously, Google is going after Microsoft (the initial release of Chrome is Windows only) – not just its browser but its Vista operating system as well. With the expansion of high speed internet access and so-called “cloud computing,” functions that used to require stand-alone clients can now be handled inside the browser. Email has probably become the most widely adopted browser applications but you can also do things photo editing and video recording through the browser. Google knows that once an application is running inside a browser, the operating system doesn’t matter. Gmail works equally fine from Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux.
It is in Google’s strategic interest to advance the state of browser technology and they do that with Chrome. But it is in the interest that everyone have access to these latest innovations and that all browsers can run the most sophisticated applications Google engineers can put together. So Chrome is open source and Google invites other browsers to incorporate many of its features.
First Thoughts on the Product:
The download was quick and easy (of course).
I was surprised that when installing it only offered to import my MS Internet Explorer bookmarks. My most complete and up-to-date bookmark list is in Firefox (synced among my operating systems by the excellent Foxmarks extension).
I went pretty immediately to Gmail. Google says they’ve rewritten a lot of the background rendering code from scratch and I was expecting to see instantaneous loading. Frankly, it seemed to load as quickly as it does in Firefox. Any apparent speed increase isn’t immediately obvious (this is a testament to how fast they’ve managed to get it to load in all browsers).
The interface is very simplified: few buttons, tabs up top, no status bar. There’s a lot of surprises here, like an automatically generated page with thumbnails of your most frequently visited sites (see image, right), an idea borrowed from Opera browser’s “Speed Dial” feature (available through to Firefox users through the Speed Dial extension).
You can also “Create application shortcuts” which turn services such as Gmail into client-like applications that sit on your desktop (screenshot right). Open them up from here and the normal location bar and browser buttons are gone.
There’s a lot more to explore here. It’s obvious that Google has put a lot of thought into this. I’m not going to dismiss any feature or oddity too quickly. They helped a lot of us rethink how we organize email using a single “Archive” folder instead of the elaborately-maintained folder hierarchy. Google actually have put out a number of half-baked and under-supported services (Froogle and Google Checkout come most immediately to mind) but it’s clear that the Google Chrome browser is a very serious initiative by the company.
Will I Use It?
The big question, right? Actually, I won’t use it much for now. For one thing, I’m a Mac user. I have a Windows XP virtual machine running most of the time courtesy of VMWare’s Fusion. I’m sure Google has set a high priority to make Mac OS X and Linux versions of Chrome – they’re whole strategy rests on this being woven into the browser lingua franca that keeps Microsoft’s Vista at bay, remember?, but until that time Chrome won’t be my natural first choice.
But I’m also going to miss my Firefox extensions. I forgot that the web has lots of ads (Adblock Plus). And I don’t like the extra clutter of Gmail without Better Gmail 2 (just the “Folders4Gmail” feature of the latter saves my eye more scanning time than any speed tweak Chrome delivers). And these days the Web Developers Toolbar, Lastpass, FireFTP extensions are pretty essential to my work day.
But if a native Mac version was released? And if Firefox extensions started being rewritten for Chrome? I just flipped back to my regular browser to check something and even after an hour with Chrome, Firefox felt so heavy and clunky. It is possible to see Chrome could a serious contender for my attention.
Shortly after finishing my second year at Guilford College, I set out to understand what brought me there. During the stressful process of deciding which college to attend, I felt a strong but slightly mysterious urge to explore Quakerism in my undergraduate years. Two years later, this same urge led me to buy a motorcycle, learn to ride it, and set out in a spiritual journey up the Eastern seaboard visiting Quaker meetings. While Guilford had excited and even irritated my curiosity about the workings of Quakerism, I knew little about how Quakers were over a large area of the country. I wanted to find out how Quakers worked as a group across a wide area of the country, and if I could learn how to be a leader within that community.
“…the development of constructive and enriching spiritual dialogue between all branches of the Quaker community. I plan to travel from South to North, speaking with meetings about how (or whether) they feel their regional culture affects their theological beliefs with the intent of gaining a greater understanding of the ‘spiritual state’ of individual meetings.“
I was very committed to keeping this vision open-ended in order to identify common threads within conversations I would have with Friends. I hoped in the discussions I might identify whether there was some aspect of “regional flavor” to a Quaker meeting in South Carolina versus one in New Jersey, for example. I hoped to identify what these differences might be and somehow look for a common Quaker thread that ran beneath them I could address with all Friends. In addition, I planned to take pictures of meetinghouses along the way to see if what people said about their meetings was at all reflected in their meetinghouse architecture. In all honesty, however, I was most interested in simply gaining a greater understanding of how Quakerism is practiced over a very large area of the US. As a Quaker myself, I wanted to know what it meant to truly own up to and understand this part of my identity and to strengthen my spiritual being and hopefully inspire others.
My initial plans for this project were to purchase a motorcycle, learn to ride it and drive from Key West in Florida to Maine visiting Quakers along the way. I wanted to stay near the coast, if for no other reason than to have some kind of geographical continuity from the Atlantic to ground me along my way. The actual implementation of my plan differed slightly in it’s physical manifestation, but I still found it to be a spiritually and intellectually challenging endeavor. I traveled along the route indicated on the attached map, covering roughly 4,200 miles over the course of the trip. I began in Greensboro, North Carolina and traveled south to St. Petersburg, Florida. From St. Petersburg, I traveled all the way along the Eastern Seaboard more or less to New York City. From there, I returned to the South by way of Greensboro to finish in Nashville Tennessee.
The Route: I visited roughly 29 meetings houses and Quaker places of worship on my trip and met with groups from 15 of them. In a couple of instances, I only met with individuals from various meetings.
The preparation for my project was significant, most notably in respect to my transportation. Before my decision to take on this project, I had only once ridden a motorcycle, and my hazy memory of the occasion makes me think it was just a brief ride on the back. Purchasing, insuring, licensing and learning how to drive a motorcycle was a very involved undertaking that required a considerable amount of commitment to overcoming my fear. The process helped me become mentally prepared for the trip, though, by testing my physical self so greatly. In addition, I wrote to over 50 Quaker meetings all along the East coast introducing myself and asking them to consider meeting with me. As meetings responded, I gave them an idea of when I might be in their area and we set up tentative visiting dates. The purpose of the trip as outlined in that letter changed over the course of my project, but I will return to that. In addition to these two most time-consuming aspects of my project, there were quite a number of other smaller details to be taken care of that are inherent to any major travel. Purchasing gear, tuning up and preparing my motorcycle for long distance touring, discussing details with my home meeting about the trip, etc. were some of the other tasks to be completed. For the most part, I did all of this alone. While I had Max Carter to help with some of the preliminary envisioning and last minute contact possibilities, I took on most everything myself. My home meeting was far away and could practically offer very little in terms of coordinating efforts from that distance. I was not sure how to prepare for the trip spiritually but left with an open heart and a strong commitment to be as open as possible. I was presented with quite a number of challenges on my trip, and it appeared that those obstacles came either in the form of spiritual or practical trials along my way. Some of my practical challenges were the theft of my camera early in the trip, the matter of food and lodging and the sheer effort of traveling over very great distances day after day. The camera was significant loss because it made the process of gathering pictures for presentation much more difficult. I had to rely on the poor quality and much slower processing of a disposable camera for most of my trip. In general, I had a sense of who I would stay with city by city along my route, but it was difficult to not know any of these people in advance beyond letters and to rely on them so much for their generosity. I realize that this demanded quite a degree of flexibility both on my part and theirs; this, like my stolen camera, helped me learn to adapt and try to be as gracious as possible. The physical strain and mental alertness I needed to travel long distances was very taxing, resulting in my decision to not go as far as I had originally planned.
A practical issue that did affect the outcome of my project was which meetings ended up responding to my letter of introduction. I only received any word back from about half of the meetings I wrote to. Of those, I was disappointed that despite the fact I wrote to a large number of Quakers both programmed and unprogrammed, I received a much smaller number of responses from programmed meetings and of those I did, a number ‘disappeared’ after the initial contact. This may have been entirely by chance, but none the less I found my experiences with programmed Friends to be disproportionately enriching for their being so few and I regretted their brevity. Therefore, most of my observations were among unprogrammed Friends and I shy away from making comparisons between “unprogrammed” and “programmed” Friends in this report because I simply didn’t feel like I met with enough unprogrammed Friends to tell.
In addition, the internal challenge all these practical challenges brought on made it difficult to remain spiritually centered. Constant spiritual discussion left me struggling to be lighthearted. I can’t tell if this made my later disheartenment with group conversations greater or whether the discussions themselves disheartened me. As time went on though, my frustrations with the dynamics I witnessed in meetings right from the beginning of my trip onwards increasingly affected my openness. I relied more and more on a regimented conversation format, limiting opportunities for spontaneity of spirit. By the end I felt like a slightly strange gentleman who rises every week at about the same time in meeting for worship with a message that seems unfortunately similar to the same thing he said the week before.
With the goal of creating “enriching spiritual dialogue” so prominently placed as my goal for this trip, I spent a significant amount of time figuring out what this meant and how it might be achieved. If I were able to create this dialogue on my trip, I somehow felt that this would be immediately beneficial to both Quakers and Quaker institutions by creating a greater sense of vitality and unity within them. I began to realize how subjective unity and vitality are. A distinction I failed to recognize in my idealized conception was the difference between unity of individuals, such as a good conversation between myself and a host, and unity of meetings, such as a group meeting and sharing conversation. As time went on, I began to become frustrated in group discussions and to try to “argue” my interpretation of unity and vitality in much the same way I saw other Friends doing. I had hoped Friends themselves would suggest points of unity within Quakerism, but often I just heard folks talk about what they believed in to the exclusion of other beliefs. For instance, I asked many meetings what they might do as a group if someone rose in meeting and brought a very evangelical Christian message to worship. While at first many spoke about “trying to accept that message” as equal to any other, it seemed that in essence many felt threatened by the question and that I should ask it at all. It seemed that few meetings had any established process of “eldering” or holding individuals accountable for the group. I am certainly not evangelical nor am I sure I am Christian, but I somehow felt accused of being both in these conversations and therefore felt less welcome. There were several points on my trip where I struggled to find any hope Quakers could be lead to unite amongst each other, and it was the distinction between individuals and groups that made all the difference.
Observing group dynamics and looking for continuity or unity within Friends Meetings as a whole along my journey was very hard for me. There were several notable exceptions, but as I finished my trip I found myself terribly disheartened in general by much of the group behavior I witnessed within the meetings I visited. In meetings were I felt most successful and useful the members appeared not only to care deeply about each other and the vitality of their individual meetings, but were strong enough to work outside their own communities to engage corporately in the wider body of Quakerism and the world at large. They had clear ways of holding individuals accountable to the group as a whole and did so. I did not feel I found this sense in many of the meetings I visited though, however briefly, and could not tell how beneficial my visit might be to them. I was surprised to be so disheartened after seeing folks so quickly, but often it appeared very obviously in group conversations full of Friends interrupting or contradicting each other or from side comments I heard from individuals later.
I struggle to write these words because I felt cared for and looked after by folks from all the meetings I visited, but I still could not help but feel sad when visiting meetings who steadily lost members, struggled to take care of basic business or suffered from internal feuds. Many meetings in Florida were in the process of building new meetinghouses, and while the common cause of such a large order of business seemed to bring them together, many Friends in these meetings expressed concern that it was only a temporary fix. In fairness, many of the meetings I visited along the way were in fact worship groups and not fully meetings, but rather than this being a stepping stone to a more established order, it seemed that many of these worship groups struggled to keep the few members they had and seemed to not feel terribly connected as a group.
What appeared to be the main causes of this disunity, however, was the unfortunate fact that it seems many Friends are Quaker for selfish reasons. I’m sorry to say it, but that was my impression of why so many meeting groups struggle to find an effective group process. In many of the meetings I visited it appeared that Friends not only expected complete acceptance of their personal spiritual path, but also their political, ideological and cultural ones as well. Like in the case of the evangelical message question, it appeared that an evangelical person was not simply threatening to individuals in their spiritual beliefs, but also in their inferred political leanings and culture. This seemed to show me that the meeting was not actually for embracing people in a group atmosphere as advertised but more a cultural, ideological and political support group for like-minded individuals. “Quakers couldn’t be Republican. I can’t stand Republicans” . This is where the realm of the individual butted up against the corporate in my eyes.
The beauty of silent worship, as many Friends agreed, was it’s ability to speak to so many different Friend’s conditions while still being such a crucially group-centered act. In the early days of Quakerism, it appeared that this act of worship was a cornerstone for the connection that could be felt between individuals in a group setting in business meeting, community dinners or the world at large. From what I saw on my trip, the gratification and fulfillment of the individual appears more and more accentuated as Quakerism progresses rather than fulfillment of the whole meeting. When faced with a confusing or chaotic business process, for instance, it seems in many cases that every person wants to revert to the way THEY make decisions best as the ideal way for the group. I would hasten to add that I did not even attend one business meeting along my trip, and that my concern for the issue of business specifically comes from many, many direct comments from individuals frustrated by their group’s business meetings. I saw on my own that many Friends have so many different interests and such completely busy lives outside meeting, it appears the most they can do to attended worship.
So perhaps the paradox of the individual and group within a universal spirit is what Quakerism can benefit from exploring today. I found my attention so often turned to the great folks I found along my way who spoke directly to my condition. I met so many incredibly interesting, thought-provoking, eccentric, kind and inspired people on my trip, I cannot help but be awed and impressed. I certainly found a kind of unity between them and myself. While I cannot be sure my actions benefited Friend meetings in totality, I know that my conversations with Friends were both inspiring to me and the people I found along the way. I believe I brightened some folks’ days and gave them a chance to tell their stories. The faith required to get on the road each day, not knowing where I would end up by nightfall was awesome and it stretched me considerably in a way that I think Friends appreciated. I am sure that I will continue to be in contact with Friends I met along the way and will continue to think about these issues with them.
In terms of this trip as a foundation for Quaker leadership, I must say I was a put at a bit of a loss at what that might mean. Someone mentioned it might be like “herding cats.” One leadership role I did see often, which worried me, was that of the “überQuakers,” as we at Guilford like to call them. It appeared that in many instances, I ended up staying with the members of meetings who were the “movers and shakers” of their meetings for their dogged dedication to the meeting as a whole. Sadly, in many instances these folks seemed to bear a disproportionate amount of responsibility for the affairs of their meetings, spiritually, logistically and energetically. They did not resent this role, but it appeared to me that they were rarely consciously chosen for that ministry by the group but instead had the position thrust upon them. These folks were complimented by an unfortunately large segment of Friends, often pleading busy schedules, who appeared to be unable to commit to the meeting beyond the catharsis of meeting for worship. Part of witnessing this left me questioning my commitment to Quakerism by the end of my trip. If this is how Quakerism works, why should I even bother developing ‘leadership’ to become an “überQuaker”? While it may not have burnt out those who I stayed with along the way, why would I purposely stick my neck out for the benefit of the group as a whole when it seems that few others are actually interested in anyone but themselves at the end of the day? It is not that I begrudge selflessness by any means, but Quakerism cannot survive on the selflessness of some and dependence of many. Or at least it should not in my eyes.
Perhaps what worries me is that with the amount of time and effort I put into this trip, I am already falling into the “überQuaker” mindset. “Well, if things aren’t going right I’ll just have to do something myself and decide how they can be fixed.” This is my great fear. This is not the thinking of a vital, post-authoritarian religious society. I imagine a vital Quaker community that is full of folks with various commitments, but all with a shared desire not only to come to worship together but to do business together, reach out and make sacrifices to bring in new members and actively take on projects as a meeting that all can agree are the Spirit’s will. I would like to see a much greater sense of group intentionality, but I know that is not something one individual can force. I have learned that I have a great deal of personal growth to go through before I am ready to contribute as I would like to the Quaker community. I think in many ways this trip made me feel more inexperienced and apprehensive with Quakerism but I strive for that place of faith and confidence. I am beginning a book about my experiences on this trip, in addition to creating a digital presentation featuring the meetinghouse pictures I took.
I wish I could say I knew this trip was God’s will, but the rhetoric with which many people have invoked God’s name in my life has blurred the lines between spiritual surrender and egotistical manipulation. As one particularly astute Friend put it “As with so much else in life, implementing our intentions should allow for the possibility of being self conceited.” Much of what I found along my trip reflected struggles within others about the will of God in their lives, some of which started early in Friend’s lives and some that only began when they took Quakerism as their own. Ironically, it appears that the difference I was looking for in geographic distribution was actually surprisingly absent over such a large area. All the Friends I talked to were in some way struggling with the issue of how they fit into the larger group, a community of the Spirit and of Quaker business. As I sought to find parallels in my conversations with Friends, I was constantly reminded of the push and pull of the individual will versus the will of the whole. In many Friends eyes, this struggle is fundamentally a dance between the individual and answering to the Spirit that is within us all.
Some Queries I made up for myself along my trip were:
How do I remain secure and non-threatened in my own faith to be open to others?
What are my blindnesses or biases from my Quaker roots?
What is selflessness and is it ideal?
How do I know what is my will and what is the will of God?
Yesterday the family traveled north of Trenton to a living history farm to learn about maple sugaring.The kids collected buckets of sap, practiced drilling a tap, watched the boiling off process in a “sugar shack,” cut firewood, and then — yes! — ate some pancakes with farm-made maple syrup.
I agree with a lot of his observation. But at the same time I’m not sure what a serious examination would look like or would produce. In recent years my own yearly meeting has developed a kind of circadian rhythm of constant reorganization, tinkering with organizational charts, legislative processes design to speed up decisions, and changing times and frequencies of events hoping to attract new people. And yet,