These are unprecedented times, both in the wider world and in our Quaker communities. The pandemic has touched every part of our lives. The unjust racist underbelly of our wider society and in our own communities has become even more exposed during this time. There is grief in all of this, just as much as there is potential for healing and a deepening of community.
Over the past month, I have facilitated conversations about our collective well-being at Putney, Mt Toby, and Sandwich Monthly Meetings as well as for the Northwest Quarter. While each conversation and setting had unique qualities, there was a common thread running throughout all of these worshipful sessions.
Rather than working to fix the issues we are experiencing, the conversations were a time to reflect together. In this way we moved with faith in the power of noticing and naming through small- and whole-group worship-sharing. Embracing our mystical tradition, we allowed the truth to unfold as we gathered together.
Collectively we shared, listened, reflected and prayed about the following queries:
- Reflect on your pre-pandemic self and who you are now. How have you changed?
- How have the events of the past 1 ½ years affected your relationship with our Quaker meeting and/or the wider community?
- What have you learned about being in community?
- What are we mourning? What have we lost? What has left you heartbroken, scared and/or uncertain?
- What are you longing for?
- What are you grateful for?
- How are we being invited to deepen our collective well-being?
Throughout each session, these queries built on each other. Our time together helped us both release some of our individual and collective pain as well as nourish our sense of well-being.
Food for Thought: Characteristics of Whiteness and Our Quaker Faith
As a founding member of the Noticing Patterns of Oppression and Faithfulness Working Group and long-time anti-racist educator, I have come to really know how we are unconsciously formed by the culture of domination and empire and the accompanying messages of whiteness that we all knowingly or unknowingly swim in every day. I also have come to understand that our Quaker faith tradition offers us many tools to counter the ways we swim in this oppressive soup either/both perpetuating harm and/or being harmed.
In order to reflect more fully on our collective well-being, I found it important to bring in both the lens of living in a society founded on and still serving dominance and Empire. Equally important to bring into focus was the lens of our faithfulness as a way to counter this oppression. We are all in different places in our understanding of these two dynamics.
So, I spoke of them in broad strokes, as a way of priming our conversations, rather than asking folks to learn concepts in the moment. As I spoke briefly about these two different ways of moving through the world, I invited Friends to allow the message to work in them from their own current understandings and allow the rest to just be. I invite those of you reading this to do the same with the next few paragraphs.
Whiteness is an ideology that any of us, especially those of us who are white, can unconsciously act out. Among many other things, it teaches us that we are separate individuals and as such there is danger in being vulnerable, asking for help, and even working for change in a compassionate and humble way. If we do decide to act for change within this unconscious framework, often we embrace the white ideology of superiority and saviorism: feeling good about ourselves in a way that unknowingly perpetuates the existing power structures and inequities. It helps me to understand that I am conditioned not to notice these dynamics which function to keep us separate, feeling powerless and preventing change from happening.
To nuance this a bit, it’s important to remember that the characteristics of whiteness and our dominant culture are also not absolutely the same in every situation. Each of us as individuals are complex human beings with many different influences motivating and guiding us consciously and unconsciously. And I find reflecting on the dynamics of dominance and whiteness that are playing out within myself and my communities to be very useful in loosening the grip they have on me, even if only a little.
Our Quaker faith, if we can truly and deeply live into it, invites us into anti-oppressive ways of being. For one, we believe in continuing revelation and listening to the next thing that we are led to do. This means to be faithful is to move towards change, rather than maintaining things as they are. We also believe that we cannot have the entire truth until we seek it collectively and gather all of the different voices. And we believe in our interconnection and dependence on each other, seeking our way forward not as individuals but collectively.
After introducing some of this as food for thought, I invited folks to reflect on how the dynamics of whiteness and faithfulness have played out in ourselves, our meetings and our communities in these very challenging times. This of course is not an either or, right/wrong, absolutely one or the other type of dynamic. Rather, as we become more aware, we can collectively move more deeply into the faithfulness of anti-oppression in the different ways we are being called to do so.
Multiple Levels of Stress
Collectively, we reflected on how we’ve been impacted on multiple levels by the events of the past 18+ months. In doing so, it became clear and significant to name that we have all been impacted in our individual lives, in our relationship with our Quaker meeting and by what’s been happening in the wider circles of our communities. Where normally, we might feel stressed in one or even two of these areas, now, so much more of our lives are disrupted and stressful. Over the course of the 4 conversations, I gathered and synthesized some of the sharing about these multiple levels of impact. These are listed below.
As we shared these difficult and stressful experiences of our lives, we did so with reverence, love and compassion in a worshipful way. As you read this list, I invite you to put a hand on your heart and breath deeply and calmly. Hold yourself and all of us in the light. There is a power in our tradition of sitting in silent waiting worship.
I invite you to allow the naming of our collective condition to loosen anything you’ve been holding on to on your own. While this is just a snapshot of what was shared by the individuals who showed up, I truly believe that collectively we are all experiencing some variation of these things.
In the past 18 months, since the pandemic started, Individually many expressed:
- Fear of getting covid or of our loved ones getting covid.
- Fear of being ill and separated.
- Loss of being together without being so careful.
- Masked faces where we can’t see smiles and be seen smiling.
- Loss of loved ones.
- Not being able to travel to be with family, mourn in our usual ways.
- Inability to care for each other better.
- Loss of in-person connections of many kinds, extended family, friends, colleagues.
- Not being able to see our grandchildren or grandparents for fear of the virus.
- Grief for our youngsters who have lost not only intergenerational connections but so much more in terms of being able to socialize and learn.
- Loss of the chance to see each other out in the world, socializing, going to concerts, dancing, traveling, going to films, etc., unstructured time together in each other's homes, sharing life events, dinners together.
- Making new connections, maintaining a network of connections with neighbors and others.
- Missing/mourning, aching for hugs from friends.
- Being able to be of service in our usual ways.
- Feeling a sense of loss of certainty—about life in general, about our lifework, that everything will be ok and a loss of an unquestionable sense of belonging.
- Mental health challenges, loss of ability to get a good night's sleep, loss of energy, loss of self-confidence in our abilities to meet the challenges ahead, feeling defeated, depleted, sucked dry.
As Quakers collectively we mourn:
- The loss of intimacy of gathering for in person worship in the meeting house and spiritual connection that seemed more tangible when we could meet in person.
- Missing our usual connection with God/Spirit/the Divine Mystery.
- Missing Friends who we have not seen on Zoom or in person who used to be a regular part of our worship.
- Not being greeted at the door on Sundays or greeting each other at rise of meeting.
- Missing the lightheartedness before and after meeting, conversations and intimate contact with Friends. Fellowship and a chance to be with each other in community. Not being able to see each other in the kitchen doing kitchen cleanup.
- Missing Friends who have passed and a lack of opportunities for grieving together.
- Overwhelmed Quaker leadership as well as missing those who have needed to step down.
Some of the stressors in our broader community life:
- Grieving the loss of school without masks, school being less than what it was before, and a sense that the health of our communities has been the subject of political controversy.
- The terrible treatment of nurses, healthcare workers and doctors when folks do not protect themselves and cause health-care workers to be at risk.
- Missing the many communities in our lives in which we could gather and feel a sense of belonging; the ease of connection to our local community; and the fear that some events and gatherings will never be the same.
- The loss of certainty, humor, equality, patience, safety. Feeling more divided and mourning the loss of the sense that we are all one.
- A loss of innocence of a sort and losing the illusion that our nation is trustworthy. Seeing a lot of shadow in the world and others. Mourning the death of discourse; news bubbles that distort reality and the certainty that we live in a country dedicated to democracy; fearing an uncertain future.
- The dependability of the seasons, the threat of climate catastrophe with a rapidly changing environment and the loss of species, glaciers, ice sheets, etc.
- Fear about the future of the planet our children and grandchildren will inherit. Young adults unsure about bringing children into this world. Grieving the loss of the assumption of families, continuing on.
- How we are treating immigrants and the floods of refugees from war and environmental destruction.
- Worry and heartbreak about relationships across race differences, including in our meetings.
- Mourning the deaths of so many BIPOC folks around the world who haven't had access to vaccines or good health care.
- Increased learning gaps with children of color, inadequate housing for so many, increased food insecurities.
- Seemingly compromised democracy, the rise of white supremacy and fascism, the insurrection on the Capitol, fear at the upsurge the anger of white supremacist folks and by the proliferation of guns in our culture.
- Fear that we collectively won't have the power to save our beloved planet and our compassionate humanity and the challenge of finding joy when the world looks pretty bleak.
- The sense that things are worse than we express and are getting worse, and yet love and justice kindness is present and Presence will continue among us, as we continue on.
The lists above are a compilation of four different conversations. As we named these multiple heartbreaks, many of us felt heavy and sad. Some felt the desire to escape and others allowed tears to shed. For some of us, the spiritual work of countering white supremacy, is to breathe into the discomfort of being present to (rather than avoid) all of this grief and stress.
One Friend noted the challenge in just being embodied because of the great amount of fear and uncertainty they were experiencing right now. It’s very easy to let our minds go to all the stories that have been running rampant. Together we sought to feel the power of our faith and its reminder that simply sitting with hard truths can help shift our relationship with them. Another Friend reflected that God is working to bring into being a world of love and justice, and this divine action moves forward in very uncertain ways.
We can lean into our faith to calm our bodies and sit with hard truths. So, as the discomfort arose, we sat in worship, seeking the deep peace and reverence of surrendering to the divine.
Deepening Our Collective Well-Being
Beyond holding our grief, we also held the vision of healthy, vibrant communities. Specifically, Friends were invited to reflect on the queries: What are we longing for? How are we being led to deepen our collective well-being?
We named a longing for many things including:
- To spend more time in person, laughing and talking and smiling together so that we can counter the isolation we’ve been feeling.
- For support in finding ways to be faithful, connecting with each other and the earth.
- To have possibilities before us and to open our hearts to them.
- For a way to get out of the climate disasters we're heading into.
- To have great faith in the power of love and not to be overwhelmed by our fear of what often seems like the torrential power of hate and ignorance.
- To end our huge lack of ability in dealing with what’s hard and to remember and trust our common humanity. To constructively and passionately disagree and come together through those disagreements.
- To move beyond the easy and superficial discourse that is based on a lot of assumptions. To live connected to our deepest selves and to the earth and from that place of connection and groundedness. To open, tell our stories, listen to others and to understand the many multiple perspectives and experiences - including the wise voices we are missing right now.
- To be in community with a sense of spirit, lightness and joy at being together and sharing the vulnerabilities as well as the joys of our lives.
A Friend noted the immensity and the power of the grief that we hold and how different it feels to hold it with one another. Collectively we felt the power of witnessing and of being witnessed, of simply naming these truths rather than trying to fix them. One Friend noted that our longing speaks to our heartbreak. Another Friend expressed appreciation for how their thoughts and fears resonated with other folks. Many mentioned feeling lighter for having spent this time together.
This process gave us a felt sense of being together in these unprecedented times. It also reminded us that we have choices for how we move through the challenges. One Friend spoke of planting seeds and patience it takes to tend to them and allow them to grow. Another Friend noted the feeling of compassion for all of us and our suffering and the faith that our suffering is transforming us. There was gratitude expressed for realizing that we are always changing and can connect with each other about this change. There was also gratitude for realizing that we each have something to contribute (when many of us have felt so powerless). Another Friend spoke of being grateful to know that we can talk about the hard things. She noted that things are just going to get harder and we need each other.
Where are we being led now? Certainly, it is not simply back to where we were pre-pandemic, regaining what we’ve lost. How do we reimagine and open our hearts to possibilities? Several Friends made commitments to reach out and build connections with others: either asking for the support and connection that they need and/or offering it to others—giving and receiving freely. We noted that these connections are not just individually important, but collectively vital for all of us. A Friend noted how the Love at the heart of the universe is ever and always breaking forth in the world—and expressed a longing for seeing more signs of that Possibility in the world around us.
Already, the core leadership teams, who helped me organize these conversations, have begun talking about how the fabric of their meetings can be tended to. Across all of our meetings, there is a felt need for creating more opportunities to connect and know each other on a deeper level and address the many stressors in our lives. Along the same lines, one Friend noted a need for more pastoral care for members who are really struggling. Another Friend has already noticed how this experience of reflecting on our collective well-being primed their meeting to be able to more deeply hold a Friend’s own story as they shared deeply of their struggles in a programmed session. We will continue to wrestle with the query: how are our meetings being called to transform to meet the needs of this moment in history?
If you are interested in holding a session similar to these, feel free to reach out to me.