In creating Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices, we attempted to make our process look as much as possible like our envisioned final product: ecumenical, multi-cultural, and international within the Society of Friends. For guidance and inspiration we had the work and wisdom of Friends organizations like Quakers Uniting in Publications (QUIP), which sponsored the book and its predecessor Whispers of Faith, and the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC), who have been building bridges and friendship among different Friends communities for decades. There is also the long and rich history of ecumenical work among young adult Quakers that stretches back several generations: the role of Hicksite and Orthodox young adult Friends in reunification of several north American yearly meetings, the World Gathering of Young Friends and its previous incarnations, the long history of Young Friends of North America (YFNA), and the work of the Young Christian Quaker Association (YCQA) among Friends in Kenya, to name a few examples.
There are several ways to talk about how cultural, theological and geographic differences were navigated during the creation of Spirit Rising. The honest and succinct way is to say that we navigated faithfully, carefully, awkwardly, and imperfectly. That gives you some sense of the multi-year, multi-faceted process that included dozens if not hundreds of Friends around the world.
Another way is to talk about the logistics. In early 2008 QUIP formed an editorial board of 10 young adult friends from across the theological spectrum of Friends and from around the world, including Bolivia, Kenya, Canada and the United Kingdom, but with a pretty heavy and unintentional weight towards North America and US Americans. We had three editorial board meetings. At the first in Greensboro in 2008 we crafted the language in the Call for Submissions and brainstormed ways to recruit submissions. At the second, on the Oregon Coast in 2009, we made initial and substantial selections for the book and noted what was still missing an still needed to be solicited. In Richmond this past April, which was more of a conference and celebration than a meeting, we talked about how to carry on the work and how to let it go.
In all of these instances the editorial board and QUIP Friends talked. A lot. We talked in our formal meetings and in informal social situations (like bowling alleys or at the beach). Much of our time was spent parsing out the differences between our traditions and learning each other’s languages of faith. That is, though we all spoke English and conducted our meetings in English, we quickly learned that we had very different meanings and relationships to certain words and practices.
When the editorial board selected submissions for the book we selected both for quality and for diversity, attempting to balance the two, and took turns facilitating our sessions. That’s a loaded sentence – an entire article could be written about that process, and different editorial board members had different experiences.
From my work on the youth book I’ve developed a rough toolkit for cross-branch and cross-cultural work which I think is applicable outside the Quaker world. It’s a work in progress, but here are the tools more or less in order:
1. Prepare and educate yourself in order to cultivate cultural sensitivity. I spent a long time among Friends in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting before I knew that pastoral meetings existed, or that the largest population of Friends in the world is in Kenya. It’s hard to engage with that diversity if you’re totally ignorant to it. If work among the branches of Friends interests you, undertake a project of self-education to support you in your work. The websites of FWCC or the Quaker Information Center are good places to start, as is reading Spirit Rising.
2. Cultivate your own Quaker translator. Think of the John Woolman story in which an indigenous Lenape leader hears “where the words come from” while Woolman is preaching, even though they speak different languages. If we can learn to listen past the words someone is using to hear their meaning, we can begin to understand what Friends hold in common as well as the very real differences that exist between us. If we get hung up on words we wont get very far.
3. Practice hospitality. When we really practice hospitality, whether we take people into our homes or show them around our cities or help them coordinate their travel, we’re taking care of them and accompanying them. This act of care or accompaniment is basic, tender, biblical even – if we share that act of humanity with someone, if we open our homes and lives, it becomes much harder to make someone an other.
4. Acknowledge the hurt, the distrust, and the history. This is not really the historic schisms and the relationship that your meeting or branch may have to the next meeting or branch. This is your own hurt, distrust, and fear – your relationship to religion, to Christianity, nontheism (etc.), to your own branch of Quakerism and what you secretly think and feel about other people who are different than you. Acknowledge what triggers you and makes you afraid. This helps build your Quaker translator and practice hospitality.
5. Once you have begun a friendship or rapport with someone, have the hard conversations. Certainly we should emphasize commonalities among Friends, but differences themselves are also life giving, and are very real. Gay rights, beliefs about Christ and relationships to Christianity, and the role of women in Friends communities are only some of the flash points that exist among Quakers. Don’t avoid them. There is nothing more transformative than a respectful, tender conversation with someone who is your friend but who believes very differently than you do. It may take awhile to get to a place where these conversations are possible.
6. Engage with the disparities of wealth both worldwide among Friends and in your home community. The misdistribution of wealth and the roll of US American imperialism and neo-colonialism in that distribution of wealth will make you crazy. As friends in the first world we are particularly implicated and challenged. Do your best to love around and despite of this reality.
7. Ask the big questions. The last point requires a little more explanation.
Something a QUIP Friend said early on has really stayed with me. I don’t think he was trying to be prophetic, but his words worked on me that way: “The work that you are doing,” he said, “is a microcosm for work that must be done with deep fissures in society.”
I think the question “What does it meant to be related to these people we do not know, whose lives and beliefs look very different from our own?” is the question right now, not just for Quakers but for all of us who live on this planet. Our technology, civilization and environmental degradation have both made us more connected and more aware of how we as human beings have always been connected and interdependent. How might knowing each other transform, nourish and challenge the ways that we live now?
I think we did our best to live into these questions – faithfully, awkwardly, imperfectly – in doing this book.
