A Report from Our Participant Oberserver - No. 1

Q

I hear that you're doing your Drexel coop placement with Quakers? What did you think you were getting yourself into? And what is it really like?

A

Author's note: this is the first of what will hopefully turn into a recurring series of comments about my experiences at the Quaker Information Center. I invite you to read on and see the perspective of a non-Quaker trying to understand Quakers.

In September of 2009, I accepted and started at a coop internship position with the Quaker Information Center in Philadelphia. To be honest, I really had no idea what I was getting into. Being raised by Catholics and having spent my life before college in Catholic schools, I had never really come across any Quakers. The closest connection to Quakers that I was aware of in my life was that of my Congressman, Rush Holt, from my home in New Jersey. And since I do not actually see Congressman Holt on a day-to-day basis, I do not really know if that counts as anything. So, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Now, I honestly was prepared for anything going into my interview. I was half expecting that I would run into a carbon-copy of the Quaker Oats Man as my interviewer. I also expected see the Quaker values that I knew of, pacifism and plainness, being expressed to an almost cartoonish level between the current staff. However, this could not be further from the truth. My boss, Chel, is one of the most down to earth people that I ever worked for, and the other staff members are quite friendly and also, quite normal.

Another big surprise from working with Chel is that I was able to start up some rather large projects fairly early on with complete independence. The first two projects I was able to work on completely on my own were the creation of a QIC Twitter, which was fairly easy to do, but also required me to sell it to Chel, and the creation of an Excel-based inventory tracking sheet. With that second project, not only was I given complete autonomy, but I also became the “teacher” in a way, as I am the one in the office who has the most experience using Excel. Chel also was more than willing to let me be the lead on projects that I do not think I would have been able to lead had I worked at another place.

What I consider to be the most interesting experience of my time here so far was when I was able to attend a committee meeting early on a Monday morning in late September. Chel had prepared me for this meeting by telling me that Quakers never vote on an issue so I was quite confused as to how decisions were made. Needless to say, the meeting actually went quite well. I was shocked at not only how much got done, but also by how organized everything was. Unlike most similar meetings I’ve been to, no one was shouting over the crowd, and no one was cutting people off as they spoke. Also, because there was no voting, the committee actually got more done as issues were discussed and debated, in a calm and orderly fashion, until the group reached a consensus. After watching this process work successfully, I can honestly say that in my opinion, it works better than voting as committees that use a voting procedure will only call a vote when they have enough votes to pass a measure rather than agreement. Those rules of voting can alienate people, and that’s something the Quakers avoid.

So, in short, I have learned a lot in my first four weeks here, and hopefully I will continue to do so as time goes on.

Best regards,
Matt

Meeting for Business -- Why Is It the BEST Part of Being a Quaker?

Q
I've heard it said that Business Meeting is one of the best, if not the best, aspects of a Monthly Meeting, and that most people connected with Quaker Meetings do not have an understanding of this. Are you familiar with this line of thinking? Do you agree? I'm one of those who think it might be true, but I'm at a loss when it comes to articulating this sense. Please address this issue. Thank you. Tina Hallidy


A
Dear Tina,

Well, I'm definitely one of those Friends who say that “meeting for business is the best part of being a Quaker,” so I'll tell you my own thoughts on the matter. I should warn you, though, that five other Friends who make the same claim might give you five completely different reasons for explaining it.

Very often, I hear Friends say that meeting for worship is the essential core of what makes us Friends and of what sustains us as a community. Many Friends—including me—agree with that statement. But our ideas diverge about how we see business meeting fitting into that belief. Some Friends see meeting for business as a different kind of animal from meeting for worship, something ancillary or secondary to “real” worship. Others—myself among them—see meeting for worship for business as a special kind of meeting for worship, a deeper, more highly distilled worship that challenges us and requires us to fish or cut bait when it comes to the outward expression of the truths that we enjoy inwardly during worship. It is good to seek to know and follow God in worship. It is a harder but more rigorous kind of worship to seek to know and follow God while we are simultaneously deciding how to balance the budget or whether we must lay down the peace and concerns committee.

In meeting for business we are spiritually exercised. We have to decide when to insist on what we are sure is right, and when to submit to another's discernment; we have to be flexible yet strong, gentle yet plain speaking . . . and then, after our stumbling efforts, we have to walk out of the room and live with ourselves, each other, and the Spirit.

Meeting for business is where it gets real. It's where we succeed or fail at practicing what we believe. It's where we work together or where we fall apart. And it's where we shoulder the load of our shared responsibilities as a covenant community. We all have an ideal image of how wonderful such a functioning community should be. Meeting for business is where we discover who we really are in the ways that we respond to the disappointment of being a mismatched team, pulling the yoke at different speeds, and not always in the same direction. In business meeting we are required to forgive, to be teachable, to care, to take responsibility—both in the large matters of principle and in the tediously mundane details of life.

Like "regular worship," meeting for business can be deeply rewarding or frustrating, and most often it is a mixture of both. It feels great when we find ourselves being led by the Spirit as a whole community, when we find ourselves called to more creative and loving responses than we knew we were capable of, or when we look around the room in amazement and gratitude to be with such wise, bighearted, trustworthy servants of the Spirit. But let's face it, for every one of those really delicious moments, there are others where our desire to get some boring agenda item over with is thwarted by a discussion that just will not end, or when we are annoyed by other Friends' petty judgmentalism, their droning repetitions, their knee-jerk reactions, or their passive mannerliness. And just when we are about to offer a suggestive hint about the mote in their eye, we become aware of the beam that needs plucking from our own. Can we hear and follow our Guide in these circumstances? And if not then, when?

I have been blessed to take part in meetings for business where long, divisive, complicated disputes were finally resolved after years of struggle. These were hard decisions to make, and the topics were painful to some of the participants. But the best spoken ministry I have ever heard, the words that have most deeply moved me and called me closer to God, were delivered during these wrenching discussions that forced us to go deep.

Recently in my own meeting, as we concluded a decision that addressed complex, competing needs from different groups, a member of our meeting said, “Let’s reflect on whether we are being clear about our limits, and whether we are also being generous.” After some reflection—and a little tweaking of our conclusions—this member remarked that we had just completed a piece of work we could not have done in the same way a year earlier. When asked to explain, she used herself as an example, noting how she had become more flexible and more willing to be open minded. Meeting for business not only offers us the opportunity for such growth, but it allows our increasing spiritual maturity an opportunity to be expressed and to be celebrated.

I am one of those people who believe that you cannot be a Quaker alone. Silent worship by ourselves or with others is one way to encounter Truth—but outside of the context of a Friends community, it is too easy for Truth to be a solitary abstraction. It is in making decisions, in putting our limited resources to use, and in working together toward common and competing ends that we are called to make that Truth part of our lives on a minute-by-minute basis, not in ideal form, but in the reality of this flawed world filled with imperfect people such as ourselves. If being a Quaker is “real,” it is real in meeting for worship for business.

With love to the presiding co-clerk from the recording co-clerk of Goshen Meeting,
Chel