Beginnings
The first of five sessions on reparations as a spiritual practice began almost a year ago, in the depths of our first Covid winter. Portland Friends “really missed each other,” Maggie Fiori explains. “We were spending a lot of time on Zoom in ways that were mediocre. We were trying to have spiritual experiences on Zoom that were not letting Spirit in.” Folks in the meeting were yearning for each other and hungry to be less in their heads and instead to be embodied and reflecting on whole life changes.
In addition to this longing for spiritual depth and transformation, Jay O’Hara thought the time might be ripe for Portland Friends to delve deeply into reparations. The meeting had been immersing itself in anti-racist efforts and was beginning to have discussions about their large endowment. In response to these conditions, Maggie, Jay, and Emily Troll felt led to offer a ministry on reparations to Portland Friends. They invited Ann Dodd-Collins to join them as an elder.
The sessions took place over winter 2020 and spring 2021 with a total of 30 participants (approximately 25% of Portland’s members and attenders) ranging from millennials to retirees. Collectively they represented a range of resources from a lot to a very little. They were clear about the importance of doing this work within an existing community that has ongoing relationships.
In all, they created and offered five different two-hour sessions designed specifically for Portland Quakers who were in a position to give away wealth rather than receiving reparations.
By the fifth and final session, after much spiritual sharing, searching, and preparation, participants shared their reparations commitments with each other. Despite Zoom and pandemic fatigue, Jay noted that they “were able to build a strong enough container that vulnerability and intimacy happened among us.”
Reparations as Testimony
Maggie explains that they did not simply dive into the conversation about what money they could give away to whom, but wanted to “start way deeper.” To that end, they began with questions such as: What spiritual debt do we have? What ways do we operate from scarcity with our resources because of the condition of our spirits? What traditions do we have as Friends to light the way and figure out how to do this in a way that changes systems and changes lives?
From a spiritual perspective, we have to let go of the things that aren’t ours. Maggie explained:
We’re being asked by God to constantly … to look at aspects of our lives that don’t rightfully belong to us. We’re being asked to reckon with the fact that in order to be whole and to right our relationship to others in our communities, or to be able to build the beloved community, we have to actually let go of the things that aren’t ours.
This letting go could be of money, resources or time. It could also be letting go of grasping onto a sense of what comfort is or of dreams that we have.
“It's really important to understand that reparations is not charity,” Jay explains, rather “it is about returning that which I have stolen and which my ancestors, (my physical ancestors, my blood ancestors, and my spiritual [Quaker] ancestors) have stolen and appropriated.” He adds that we do this “knowing that anything we can return is only of a token gesture, given the magnitude of the theft, genocide, and destruction that white people have wrought in this continent”
“Even if your great-great-grandfather didn’t come to a piece of land and rob it from Indigenous peoples,” Maggie explains, “the treaties and the government and the military who murdered Indigenous peoples facilitated the stealing of that land, and then people went and lived on it because the government that said that was okay, and because it was available.”
In order to have effective reparations, Jay believes we need to view the economy and our economic lives through a different framework. “It is a huge leap to find the spiritual motion to be able to let go of things that I have been told my entire life are mine and that I deserve.”
The Five Sessions
“We didn’t develop a workshop,” Jay explains, “we developed a framework of things we thought needed to happen and then before every session we were meeting and discerning what was needed in the next session … it evolved organically along where we were being led.”
The five sessions built on each other:
- The first session focused on forgiveness and apology in participants’ regular lives.
- The second session introduced participants to a reparations self-audit and invited them to complete the first part by reflecting on their ancestry—where they came from and where their privileges come from. They were also introduced to the Quaker concept of transformation from conviction to conversion, from understanding the problem to transforming one's life.
- In the third session, they spoke about shame as it relates to money and economics. They then compared and contrasted our cultural patterns under capitalism with the gift economy, or a state of flow economics.
- In the fourth session, they explored atonement and completed the second part of the self-audit, which involved investigating one's own financial situation. In small groups they dug into the specificity of their economic lives and started talking about the tangible, material realities that they could shift.
- In the fifth and final session, they invited participants to consider the practical and logistical questions of ways to move money. In small groups they shared their reparations commitments with each other and made plans for supporting each other. In the large group, they brought their reparations commitments as offerings to place on the virtual altar.
A Continuous Conversation
It was important to first look at the concepts, then to deal with the pain and discomfort before jumping to solutions. “If you just ask, ‘what do we do?’” Maggie explains, “it’s not going to be genuine, or rooted in our faith, just rooted in our brains.”
“For all of the conversation and training and workshopping we did about actual reparations,” Maggie continues, “there was a lot of infrastructure for feeling safe to be vulnerable enough to talk about your own money and resources.”
In this and other ways, the five sessions were not isolated chunks of learning, but a continuation of one long conversation. They kept the same small groups throughout and folks had multiple weeks to prepare and dig down deeply into their personal histories. They regularly invited people to tell personal stories: stories of apology, stories of ancestry and stories of the alternative way of being that illuminated how we already have the tools and vision to transform.
These through-lines were part of what made their ministry successful. Jay reflected on this: “It really kept building on itself. It felt directional and gave people lots of opportunity to bring their experience and wisdom.”
Reparations Self-Audits
Maggie explains that the self-audits were “a lot of work—not intellectual work, but reflective and emotive work.” Participants deeply explored their family history, beliefs, and values and worked to come to terms with their own money and where it comes from.
While some participants could directly trace their money back to ancestors who colonized and stole land, Maggie found herself reflecting on her dad’s side of the family who were all poor coalminers or involved in some way in the coal trade. “For them to exist in the world, they relied on this resource that is destroying the planet.” Additionally, she recognized that in order to have coal, land was stolen. “My life is the way it is because of patterns of behavior that my ancestors took and also other people’s ancestors who look like me took,” explains Maggie.
In addition to deeply understanding where their money and property came from, the group also talked a lot about specific amounts of money. People talked about how much they have in savings, how much their parents were giving them as inheritance, and what to do with it. They touched on how parents express love through buying things for their children. Some participants were saving hundreds and thousands of dollars for their children. They wrestled with questions like “How much is enough to save for my children?” or “what am I going to do with the large amount of money I’m inheriting?”
Those who came from a working-class background, without much inherited wealth, still wrestled with what it looks like to be right-sized in terms of their finances and resources. For Maggie, this wrestling included reflecting on her family’s anxiety about her student loans. Her family wants her to be “doing the things in my life that are going to further me up the class ladder, which is what my immediate ancestors have been doing for the last 100 years or more.”
Maggie is more interested in how her life is going spiritually and what feels right-sized for her. Part of this relearning involved inviting folks to investigate how to make amends with our own ancestors. For Maggie this looked like “knowing and believing that I have grandmothers, long dead, somewhere who were whole and in right relationship with the earth and with other people.”
Transformation: Conviction, Atonement, and Conversion
To truly embrace reparations, one needs to embrace being changed and transformed. “Jay kept ringing this bell: ‘your life is going to change! You can’t do this and have everything be the same for you.’” Maggie explained that “it was hard for us to figure out what that meant for each of us.”
Jay lifted up the voices of the early Friend and explained the framework of conviction, atonement and conversion. The early Friends’ journals “are littered with phrases like: ‘I felt struck down to the ground by shame and grief'."
If there’s ever a time, Friends, as white people, or as perpetuators of Empire in the 21st century, whatever color we are, to be stricken down to the ground with our guilt and shame, our complicity and our place in these things, it is now.
That’s not saying we should shame one another, but that it is a holy natural reaction, when the light has penetrated our hearts and exposed this sickness that we have grown into to feel that way. So let's embrace that and talk about it and recognize it as the next part of our journey.
Talking about these feelings of discomfort is the spiritual experience that Friends have referred to as being convicted. Jay passionately invites us into this discomfort: “The convicting is the point of grief that really comes from fully understanding your complicity. The conversion comes when you fully see the material gifts and privileges that you’ve been given and choose to do something different with it.”
To choose to do something different is to repent.
To repent means to turn around. We need to do some serious turning around.
I have been raised and imbued in this sinful culture. I need to turn around from that, repent from that, grow from that and be redeemed from that. But to be redeemed requires my participation with God.
This is where conviction can lead to atonement or the literal “at-one-ment.”
Paul writes over and over again, "We are reconciled with God through Christ." What does that mean? For me, if we embrace the seed of Christ and allow it to grow, we can transcend those “sinny” parts of us that are embedded in the system and grow to be one with God, grow into that at-one-ness ...
The at-one-ment comes when you are convicted and then you stand up and act differently. It’s not enough to be stricken with grief—that’s the conviction part. The conversion is that you act as a new person.
The Gift, or Flow Economics
Rather than stockpile our money in savings and assets, this invitation to transform is an invitation to allow our money and resources to flow. “I’ve been calling it the difference between empire economics versus kingdom economics,” explains Jay. Empire economics results in accumulation or hoarding of wealth; in skimming carefully off of the top of what is owned; and in giving as a form of charity.
Ann thinks about charity as “doing for” and reparations as “doing with”: “It’s not exactly the same, and that sort of difference is what we were discerning.”
Kingdom economics requires that we trust we’ll be given what we need tomorrow, if we allow our money and resources to flow among us. True reparations can only come from this sense of flow.
Jay emphasizes that
Jesus says over and over and over again: "Stop storing stuff! Stop saving stuff! Let it go and trust that you’ll be given the daily bread tomorrow." That’s a fundamental spiritual and material reorientation to the world and to one another in covenant together.
In addition to the Bible, they also drew from a book entitled The Gift by Lewis Hyde. Hyde describes how every Indigenous culture has its own way of taking care of its people without needing to hoard resources. The book points to different ways of looking at resources as something that should flow.
“We tried to take this as seriously as we could,” Maggie explained. “We are being asked by our tradition to circulate resources rather than hoard them. … This became an invitation to redefine what hoarding actually looks like. How much is enough savings and how much is too much?
A lot of Friends were also worried about the “right” place to put their money. They spent time investigating their assumptions and discovered unconscious biases about giving money away “to people of color who don’t deserve it or who are going to use it in ways that I’m not comfortable with.” Looking deeply at their motivations around money was a step towards the invitation to transform. Emily explained that her “experience with deep shame and silence helped me to speak to others in that condition.”
The facilitators spent a lot of time telling Friends that it’s essential to pick a place to give your money away, to know it’s not perfect, and then to spiritually let go of the results. Friends found this to be very challenging. Despite of, or perhaps because of this, there were a lot of moments, Maggie noted, “where Friends were really broken open.”
Touchstones and Ripples
Emily found the reparations commitments to be “the most powerful part of their time together. This concretely looked different for each person. Spiritually, we felt united in mourning, in shedding old ideas, and in taking steps towards repair and return. I hope that those emotional moments can remain touch-stones for all of us when we lose track of the work in our everyday meandering.”
“Despite the ‘Zoomage’,” Jay remarked, “we succeeded in building a strong enough container that genuine spiritual growth could happen. “It's fair to say that most people felt buoyed by the experience.”
Jay reflected on why the workshops had power:
We were deeply listening, deeply attentive, and deeply trying to follow both in the moment, day to day and session to session—not starting off with a grand path, but trusting that we would be given more Light as we lived up to the Light we were given. That was true. That model is true not just in spiritual terms, but that’s the reparations relationship, that’s the gift economy, that’s trust.
Since the workshops, Ann has been part of several conversations with other retirees about giving away their money as reparations rather than charity. “It's not even the question of how much do we want to leave to our children, but how much do we need to hold on to so that we don’t become a burden to our children if we become physically or mentally disabled?” She reflected further that this idea of burdening your children is part of the white mindset and another message to unpack. “I’ve had some conversations with my son about this.”
Jay urges us to remember the depths to which Quakerism can go: “This is an opportunity for us to live as fully as we can into the Quaker spiritual path. And to find succor in the fact that others have trod the path before us and have language and markers that can help guide us in this spiritual and physical turning over of ourselves, our lives and our privileges.”
The team is interested and curious about how the concept of reparations will move corporately among Portland Friends. While there have been a couple of gatherings for participants who wanted to start talking about how they can move from individual witness to corporate witness within the meeting, there has not yet been any meeting-wide conversation about corporate reparations.
Still, Maggie, Jay, and Ann have noticed some stirrings in this regard. For example, at a business meeting during what was supposed to be a routine report about the budget and the size of the endowment, Friends had questions: Where’s this money from? What are we doing with it? Where is it invested? Maggie noted, “If we had been in a room together [rather than on Zoom] I just envision everyone standing up and saying ‘what?!’ There was curiosity, but in a, we-need- to-do-something-about-this kind of way. Jay notes that “the number of people who came out of [the reparations sessions] raring to get rid of our endowment is pretty significant.”
“I think it has to start from your heart and your own transformation,” Ann observes and adds that the experience of eldering “was one of the most wonderful experiences I’ve had … . I’ve learned again what incredible work can be done when it’s grounded in Spirit.”
“The four of us were faithful to what we were given,” Jay summarized. “We discharged our duties as we were given them, faithfully. What comes to mind is a phrase in Hick’s journal: ‘Whatever glory there was is all of God and none of me.’”
If you’d like to start something like this in your own meeting to feel free to contact Jay O'Hara or Maggie Fiori.