QuakerQuaker

Friends deserve tremendous praise for taking unpopular stands and working for interracial equality throughout their history, but that does not make them flawless heroes or even all that different from their contemporaries.

There is only love or fear. One can be in-love, or in-fear. The “powers that be”, the systems of domination that keep recreating themselves for at least the last 5000 years maintain their power over us to the extent that they cause us, humans, to exist in-fear instead of in-love.

Imagine, if Ivory soap bars were dropped from the studio ceilings every time someone on television suggested that God is in favor of bombing people back to the Stone Age, or concocting increasingly depraved methods of torturing other human beings.’

Strategy, tactics, coalition building, and organizing all need to take place but so does gathering in community to tell our stories, be vulnerable, and share new visions that can replace the old ones. Safe spaces for communion, sanctuary, and healing are needed in a world that is too often aggressive, hostile, and dangerous, especially for marginalized communities. What if faith communities can help to create those spaces?

I love God and the church, but I don’t love the religion industry. I don’t love the many ways that the love of power and money has distorted Christian witness and suppressed spiritual gifts. As an adult convert who grew up in an atheist family, I keep hoping for evidence that this or that manifestation of church life is more than just the very tradecraft that Friends rose up to confront.

Meetinghouse is a gathered community where we seek — in our sharing, encouraging and listening together — how we might challenge the larger Friends (Quaker) movement to better engage the world on issues of authenticity, community, justice, equality, simplicity, nonviolence, and creation care.

I will carry the knowledge of Benjamin Lay standing barefoot in the snow, a door thrown open with a resounding “Yes! Come on in!” and the joyful life, energy, and uniqueness of children with me from this season into the coming year. I will remember the power of “Yes!”

In reality, it’s not that white folks in the Society of Friends are particularly ill-equipped to address these issues. It’s just that we often respond in exactly the same ways most white people respond. In a religious society that prides itself on being a voice of dissent in the dominant culture, it can be hard for us to admit when we sound less like the dissent and more like the culture.