Staying true
Judy Kirby reviews an ‘idiosyncratic and surprising’ autobiography by Lynn Waddington
Lynn Waddington was a Huckleberry child. Her river was the Delaware, idling through South Jersey, shared with brother and sister and swimming muskrats. A child in a natural world, she wrote, ‘can hear the footsteps of beetles far away.’ The family home sat without neighbours for many years until the weekend cottagers moved in. It was, after all, an idyllic spot.
Such childhoods invariably produce profoundly reflective souls. Throw into the mix a generational Quaker family and you have more spiritual contemplation than expected in an autobiography, but Lynn Waddington makes her voyage idiosyncratic and surprising, right to the end.
Born in 1940, discovering that she was a gay Quaker might have caused conflict and anguish, but her mother’s philosophy of allowing kids a very long leash extended into all areas of their temperaments. Understanding and acceptance worked a fine magic.
If there is such a thing as an average Quaker family, hers wasn’t it. There were skeletons in this Quaker cupboard. Lynn discovered that her grandfather was, in fact, her father and her birth caused a lifelong rift in her parent’s relationship, even though her mother had been the victim of an assault. Somehow this family kept together. Perhaps the grit of trauma produced a pearl.
The facts of her life are interesting, if not spectacular: marriage, motherhood, a career in the visual and performing arts, including the art of neolithic times. But then the inner life emerges as the Staying True of her title. This is where the action is in this life: ‘If I’ve had a spiritual discipline, it hasn’t been one of emptying my mind. It hasn’t been one of service to humanity, or protest against injustice. That’s why I’ve felt such a failure as a Quaker.’ Her discipline, she felt, was to keep the connection with God alive and open. I rate that as success. Staying true to herself meant eventual partnership with women but also honouring honesty in all its guises.
‘These times we live in are marked by honesty’, she writes. ‘I like that people are naming and living in their spiritual truth. I’m not at all distressed by the number of atheists and agnostics among us, or the number who take their Sunday morning service in a little fishing boat… these peaceful hours in the fishing boat, or the garden, or the hiking trail may be the most common kind of church service we have today.’
Her loyalty was to the ‘brilliant original vision’ of first generation radical Quakers. The contemporary ones she knew ‘were greatly tamed.’ For herself, she lived ‘in the first not the second moment.’ And she was one who always needed to move, questioning the ‘one path’ vision. Whatever she invested in, she said, there would always come a time to lay it down.
‘The norm is to find your own unique voice and then develop it for the rest of your life.’ But not in her experience; accomplishments and accolades were traps: ‘If I’d stayed with them I would have stopped moving. It may be a terrible mistake, a serious lack of discipline. Staying true to yourself is not always a clear path.’
Lynn Waddington died in 2011 after a long illness. Her final months were accompanied by her long-time Quaker partner Margaret Sorrel, family and friends, recording the material in the book, often at her bedside. One startling observation made nearing death regarded the task the soul has in returning to God: ‘When we return, God’s pool of endurance grows larger. This is a revolutionary and important thought. God is not complete and finished. God is growing and evolving along with everything else.’
Staying True: Musings of an Odd-duck Quaker Lesbian Approaching Death, Lynn Waddington. Plain Speech Press, ISBN: 9780985649203, £11
