What makes a Quaker community?
Alison Leonard considers how we can create a community in which each person is accepted and nurtured
Our registering officer arrived at the Meeting House for the wedding followed closely by her husband, who was loaded down with ledgers, blotting paper and pens. ‘I’m her bag-carrier,’ he said, amiably. ‘Every registering officer should have one. We Quakers spend our time doing, as amateurs, jobs that others do professionally. We need all the help we can get.’
I’m clerk of our Meeting’s funerals committee, so this comment struck me as important. This week I and another Friend have visited the bereaved, checked out the crematorium, made arrangements with the funeral director and planned cars, maps and food. All this would normally be done by a priest, minister, rabbi or imam – paid, trained and often supported by staff.
Official moments like weddings and funerals are the most public building blocks of our life as a community. More modest bricks in the edifice are our Quaker Business Meetings and our regular gatherings of elders, overseers, premises and nominations committees. At the heart, of course, lies Meeting for Worship.
Richard Sennett’s new book, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation has prompted me to ask how our Quaker communities survive and thrive. When people realise you’re a Quaker they often ask, ‘What do Quakers believe?’ That’s because most spiritual communities are unified by their shared, and quite specific, articles of faith. But Quakers say, ‘Each of us has a particular experience of God and each must find the way to be true to it.’ (Advices & queries 17) His book is for people like us: it’s about co-operation between people who think differently. He tells us that this task takes skill, and also takes practice.
Malcolm Gladwell asserts that to become truly proficient in any skill takes at least 10,000 hours of practice. Imagine practising co-operation-with-those-different-from-myself for 10,000 hours! That would be three solid years (allowing for eating and sleeping) at least. Yet it might be a bare minimum to accomplish genuine co-operation. Parker J Palmer (Quaker faith & practice 10.19) says: ‘In a true community we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives. Instead, our companions will be given to us by grace. Often they will be persons who will upset our settled view of self and world. In fact, we might define true community as the place where the person you least want to live with always lives!’ That quotation tends to raise rueful smiles of recognition on Quaker faces.
If it speaks true, we need tools to help us in our practice. One tool I’ve found useful is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This, by a series of questions, answers and interpretative work, helps you to understand why people respond in such different ways. As some sage put it, ‘Other people really do exist – they’re not pretending to be different simply to annoy you’.
If we honour our Meetings for Worship and for Business, if we turn up on time and smile at each other and discern when to speak and when to refrain from speaking, we are being faithful to Quaker ritual. When we get up early and travel far for yet another pondering of peace and social justice, we are at the same time celebrating each other’s humanity and divinity. This is how we create a community in which ‘each person is accepted and nurtured’ and where we ‘bear the burden of each other’s failings and pray for one another’.
Quakers have deliberately set aside the quest for joint beliefs, and have put the promptings of (many different sorts of) love and truth at the centre of our lives. So, in lay terms, community-building is our key task.
As I approach this coming Meeting for Worship to give thanks for the grace of God in the life of our Friend who has just died, I know that those present will be both young and old, bereaved and curious, Quaker and agnostic, believer and atheist, fearful and hopeful. I think – no, I believe – that we will experience it as an example of conscious, alert, loving community, slowly and quietly at work on one of the essential tasks of life.
