Nan­cy Thomas asks How weighty do I want to be?

But I am a Quak­er and “weighty Friend” is one of those delight­ful Quak­er terms that’s fun to say, although the exact mean­ing slips and slides around a bit. I ask myself, is this rem­nant from ear­ly Quak­erism still mean­ing­ful? Help­ful? And what does it mean in ref­er­ence to me?

I love the old tra­di­tions, even the archa­ic words. Some of them car­ry an ambiance of holi­ness, order, and, yes, Quak­er cul­ture. Some still man­age to be use­ful, even after all these years. Maybe “weighty Friend” is one of them?

I like the visu­al metaphor of slip­ping and slid­ing. I think it’s apt when using terms denot­ing a kind of spir­i­tu­al author­i­ty in Quak­er cir­cles. The author­i­ty is ulti­mate­ly com­ing from the Holy Spir­it and the Inward Light. But it’s use­ful to acknowl­edge that some peo­ple have devel­oped their spir­i­tu­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty over a long-enough peri­od that their opin­ion car­ries a lit­tle extra weight.

You’re in poten­tial trou­ble as soon as you name it though: humans seem to have an instinct to rely on social des­ig­na­tions like these and begin to rely too much on the opin­ions of cer­tain peo­ple over every­one else. Pret­ty soon there’s a new class of insid­er Friends and strug­gles over who gets to define that class. You get 200 years of schisms and the exo­dus of gen­er­a­tions of deeply spir­i­tu­al peo­ple who don’t want to bat­tle over the crumbs of pow­er. But Nan­cy includes humor in the mix, which I think is wise and per­haps a bit of an anti­dote to spir­i­tu­al selfishness.

I think one of the great­est gifts weighty Friends can pro­vide is to give sim­ple words of encour­age­ment. Years ago I taught a six-week Quak­erism 101 class at Med­ford (N.J.) Meet­ing. Most of its mem­bers come from a near­by Quak­er retire­ment com­mu­ni­ty and it is full of weighty and sea­soned Friends — euphemisms aside, I was lit­er­al­ly half the age of all but a few work­shop atten­ders. After one ses­sion, Margery Larrabee came up to me. Even in a meet­ing of sea­soned Friends, she stood out, hav­ing writ­ten pam­phlets on Quak­er elder­ship and being inti­mate­ly involved with the Lib­er­al Quak­er re-embrace of trav­el­ing min­istries in the 1990s. Feel­ing self-conscious, I start­ed ner­vous­ly apol­o­giz­ing, say­ing I should­n’t be out there in front, that I should be tak­ing a class from her. She smiled sweet­ly and said “oh no, you’re right where you are sup­posed to be.” Just a few words, but I instant­ly felt at ease. This was­n’t coffee-hour small talk any­more, but a con­fir­ma­tion that I was on the right path with my teach­ing min­istry, giv­en by some­one who’s author­i­ty came from a life­time of faith­ful ser­vice to the Spirit.