A guest piece by Evan Welkin

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.
July 26th, 2005: Clarence and Lilly Pick­ett Fund project report

The pur­pose of my trip as out­lined by my let­ter of intro­duc­tion was:

“…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 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?