The Carolina Quaker Split: Two Targets Say, “No Thanks!” Last Month NCYM-FUM’s Representative session agreed to begin discussions on a possible plan to split the YM. But now two of the Meetings among those slated to be moved out of NCYM into the as yet uncreated new YM have firmly turned “Thumbs Down” on the … Continue reading The Carolina Quaker Split: Two Targets Say, “No Thanks!”
In Washington DC, after a book party in The big Florida Avenue Friends Meetinghouse there. The book was a collection of stories by Russian and American writers, put together by a joint committee, and supposed to be a contribution to ending the Cold War. This Was just before Gorbachev came in and turned all that upside down. Garrison had contributed a story, and showed up at the party.
After I shook his hand, we both leaned over the refreshment table, and I Saw that it was just the two of us there for the moment; everyone else was in Scattered clusters, many of them murmuring in Russian.
I Figured I only had a couple minutes, so I pounced, and asked the question that had stayed with me all the years I had been listening tomthe show android eading his stuff.
It was the question that he & all U.S. Males of his generation had to answer. Including me. (If you’re of that generation, or think you’re familiar with it (us), think for a minute and see if you can guess what it was . . . .
As a Quaker Christian community, we at Spring Friends Meeting remember Jesus’ first public words. In the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4), he said he was sent to preach good news to the poor, deliverance to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and liberty to those who are oppressed.
We also recall his declaration that those who welcomed the stranger were in fact welcoming him (Matthew 25). At Spring Friends Meeting, we feel called to this same mission, and seek to do our small best, as way opens. As part of that effort, we now express our deep distress at the recent passage by the North Carolina legislature of what is called HB2.
This legislation is much more extensive in scope and insidious in intent than the widely publicized restroom provision.
• House Bill 2 specifically omits sexual orientation from a status that can be protected from discrimination.
• It specifically bans municipalities and other local governments from enacting locally-approved legislation such as a higher minimum wage, anti-discrimination for persons who are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender, safe-havens for undocumented immigrants or any measure which the State deems contradictory to its arbitrary will.
• The law also removes the ability for persons to use state courts for pursuing redress for discrimination.
We acknowledge the sincere fear that has induced many to support the law solely on the basis of its bathroom provision, and likely without knowledge of the bill’s other clauses. We believe this fear has been used to promote a broad range of real injustices through this law.
We see this law in its entirety as meant to increase oppression, reject and stigmatize those, who some see as strangers, and increase hardship for the poor and rejected.
We are even more dismayed and saddened that this action is supported by some in the name of Christianity, and what they call “religious liberty.”
Louisa Alger had been a schoolteacher. I never knew much of her personal history beyond that, and she didn’t seem interested in talking about it. Part of that was no doubt her native New England reserve. But another part, I believe, was also likely a veil over a personal story that had its compelling and tender moments, and probably loss and pathos as well.
I knew Louisa first more as a model of no-nonsense devotion to Cambridge Meeting, and concern to keep it productive in practical, undramatic ways. One of them, I learned, was beneath our meeting room in a large open basement. In it she ran a quiet but substantial clothing repair and redistribution operation, with numerous volunteers.
But she also had a watchful, and one hopes discerning eye. It was she who came up to me one First Day morning in the spring of 1969 after meeting had concluded, shook my hand, and then fixed me with a steady gaze. She was looking up, being shorter than me, though her straight carriage and dignified mien, not to mention her spiritual stature, made her appear taller. Perhaps she was in a simple dress with a subdued floral pattern and a lacy collar, something a 1940s schoolteacher might favor. Or if it was still cold, a beige suit; she was not unacquainted with tweed.
In any case, Louisa eyed me unsmilingly, and then said, “Charles Fager” (this was Quaker formality; though by testimony, as others had taught me, Friends shunned titles, being addressed by one’s full name indicated that a conversation was not mere banter), “don’t thee think it’s about time thee wrote the meeting a letter?”
And that, Friends, was my Quaker “Come to Jesus” moment. No fervent preaching, no invitation to tread the sawdust path, no altar call or emoting at the mourner’s bench. Instead, a brief, prim summons to write a letter, which was how one applied for membership.
And why not? St. Augustine heard a nameless child singing outside his window; a total stranger spoke to some Galilee fisherman; John Wesley listened to someone reading from Luther. Top billing in the annals usually goes to the blinding light, the talking jackass, or a burning coal to the lips; but they are neither required nor typical.
I thanked Louisa and mumbled some noncommittal reply; but then went home and wrote the letter. It was hardly a masterpiece; but after receipt, an ad hoc committee met with me, and on its favorable report, I shortly became officially a Quaker.
There was more to see on Bert’s farm than the fiery riot of the maples. He took us on a tour past his barn, down a path through a copse of these trees, beneath which the ground was crowded with seedlings and saplings, still green and fluttering in the morning breeze. Farther on, the path led us to his large woodlot, in which tall pines stood in rows.
We stopped, and Bert invited us to contemplate the two scenes we now confronted. On one side were the native trees, especially the maples, huddling together at random. But really, Bert explained, if we could see the world from their perspective, the air of vivid autumn exuberance was an illusion; in fact, they were caught in a desperate struggle: each tree was stretching for the sky, competing with all the rest to take in enough sunlight to make its food.
This was not a friendly contest, but life or death. And below, the riot of green around our feet was even more deceptive: practically all the slim saplings and seedlings we could see were almost certainly doomed. Crowded out by others, with the bigger trunks and branches blocking access to direct sun, only one in hundreds or a thousand would survive to become a tree.
I looked around the scene again; where had my naïve townie’s green eden suddenly gone?