Some time back in the 1990s I attended a retreat at Central Philadelphia Friends Meeting. One exercise broke us up into small groups of about eight Friends. I forget the exact query we were asked to consider but I remember being surprised and then shocked as one Friend after another confessed that they worried they weren’t a good enough Quaker.
Let me assure you these Friends were a solid cross-section of the meeting’s most responsible and spiritually grounded members, a few of them well-known in the yearly meeting and in national Quaker circles.
If these Friends weren’t proper Friends, who the heck was?
There’s all sorts of potential reasons for this sort of impostor syndrome. Those of us who weren’t born in the religious society don’t have the pedigree, perhaps? Maybe we didn’t go a Quaker school. Maybe we don’t have the silkiest tongues or fluency in Quakerese while give Quaker ministry. It’s easy to feel outside if you’re the wrong race or ethnicity, if you’re too loud or too opinionated. But I think part of it is also a long history of idolizing a few certain figures in the distant past. Who of us is up there with Benjamin Lay or Lucretia Mott or John Woolman? (This goes the other direction too, in which we sometimes overclaim these folks. See Gabbreell James’s “We Are Not John Woolman.”)
In the first video of QuakerSpeak’s eight season, Mary Linda McKinney asks, Am I Good Enough to Be a Quaker?
I always march to my own drummer and my drummer doesn’t play the type of music that anybody around me ever wants to hear. I’m pretty much a misfit in any community that I’m around, and that includes Quakers… But spiritually to be a good Quaker is to seek the will of God as an individual and corporally with others, and from that perspective I feel like I’m a good Quaker because I do want to live my life letting God’s will flow through me and I want to do that in community with others
I think the RSOF can use all the misfits it can attract.