I never fell in love in a library.

But several times I fell in love with a library, and the experience repeatedly changed my life.

The first time came flooding back yesterday, when I saw this news report from AP:

“Army and Air Force libraries have been told to go through their stacks to find books related to diversity, equity and inclusion, according to new memos obtained by The Associated Press.

The orders from service leaders come about two weeks after the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, removed nearly 400 books from its library after being told by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office to get rid of those that promote DEI.”

Hegseth is, of course, quite correct to aim his censorship artillery at such fortresses of freethinking. Once people begin to delve independently in un-vetted ideas, they are almost halfway down the road to perdition, or worse, might bend up dabbling in DEI.

For evidence of this sorry fate, I offer a real-life case history: mine.

If one was to turn my life into a cozy mystery, or a game of Clue, in the climactic scene, when the intrepid sleuth rips the veils off the villain and points the accusing  finger, the shocking truth will be: “It was the BOOKS that did it, with the IDEAS, in the LIBRARY!” 

My first time falling head over heels was in a military outpost: Ramey AFB (Air Force Base) in Puerto Rico, 1956. I was a rising sophomore at the base high school.

Puerto Rico was tropical, hot and humid year-round. Air conditioning was still a scarce upscale amenity. Our flat roof cinder block Air Force housing had wooden louvers rather than window panes –– they screwed down tight to keep out hurricane winds without the danger of sharp flying shards from exploding glass windows. Clumsy but smart, which we learned when Hurricane Betsy blasted right over us that fall, and we emerged damp, surrounded by mud, but safe.

Ramey’s base library was brand-new, well-lit, had new-fangled LP (long-play) records, a high fidelity player. Oh—plus lots of books. And, mirabile dictu –central air.

I was smitten from the moment I first pushed open its big door and felt the blast of cool inner breeze.  Introverted anyway, the place became my refuge for every hour I could manage. I read promiscuously,  fiction, nonfiction, whatever, following my nose and whims. My parents didn’t seem to worry, likely figuring that teenagers rarely came home from libraries as juvenile delinquents.

Not delinquents, maybe; but heretics quite possibly.

My family was Catholic. Mother fretted continually over keeping our immortal souls out of hell. Besides the temptations of the flesh, the Church frequently warned against heretical ideas, which could be as bad as, or worse than, booze, drugs, groping or gangs, and often lurked silently in books. Mortal sins could be committed between the covers and above the neck, as well as under the covers and below it.

And sure enough, while I searched fruitlessly for sex scenes in the available novels, I soon found stories and writers that dared to question, or even denounce Christian orthodoxies.

These encounters were low-key and not erotic, yet they began to pry open my very closed world.  The frisson of beginning to question and think outside the doctrinal box often felt as daring and even thrilling as the missing sex scenes. (Well, almost.)

In my junior year, I was sent  to western Kansas, my home state, to St. Joseph’s Military Academy, a Catholic boarding school in Hays. Doubtless my parents thought the cultural isolation of the Great Plains, and a cordon of Franciscan monks would help keep me safe and virginal.

St. Joseph’s did preserve my physical virtue; also my grades were good, and outward behavior compliant. But above the starched uniform collar, the inward stirrings quietly ran wild. After all, while Hays was small, it did harbor a rank den of my kind of iniquity: a public library.

There was also a teachers college nearby, and a small bookstore. In these I quietly accessed works by notorious corrupters of youth including Freud, Jung, and skeptical philosophers such as David Hume. A bonus was discovery of the once-controversial novels of Sinclair Lewis. Lewis had won the Nobel Prize in 1930 for his mocking fictional takedowns of Midwestern pomposity, pretenses and pieties.

This reading did not fill my mind with error and apostasy, the way trash fills up an empty wastebasket. The process was more like giving permission to think, speak and pursue doubts and questions which had been germinating in my subconscious for who knows how long.

Germinate they did: I finished junior year a barely-closeted neo-atheist. My apostasy was certified by a midsummer letter from St. Joseph’s, refusing me re-entry for senior year. Expulsion was not for misconduct but for heresy.

My mother did not give up. She sent me to St. Mary’s High, a day school, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the family had been transferred from Puerto Rico. I kept my head down in its classes, putting in my time pending an escape to college somewhere. But St. Mary’s hosted my next stunning library encounter, which was brief, but indelible.

As part of our senior-year experience, St. Mary’s took us on an excursion to Catholic colleges in Denver, Colorado. The plan was to steer most of us into those schools (to meet and marry other Catholics and produce more Catholic children; it is a simple strategy which has a two-millennium track record of success). A few would skip matrimony for careers in service to the church.

But, with me, the daytrip backfired. Visiting the library (of course, the library!) of the Jesuit Regis College (now Regis University), I stumbled upon a section of books enclosed in a gray steel jail-like pen behind a visibly locked door. A pleasant librarian explained that the equestered shelves held titles on the Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or Index of Forbidden Books.

That list dated back more than 400 years, and had long been used as an instrument of censorship and inquisition. My first adolescent thought was that was where the salacious  books were. Perhaps. But one of its earliest entries was a tome by astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). Not remotely erotic,  it was condemned rather for its advocacy of the damnable blasphemy of heliocentrism —the idea that the earth rotated around the sun, not the other way around, as taught by the Church, based on its (mis?)reading of the Bible. A student at Regis needed special permission from the archbishop to gain access to the prohibited books, the librarian explained.

I had heard of the Index, but confronting it as a present physical reality, right behind an innocuously modern-looking information desk, was something else. The sight was like a lightning bolt; the books behind the locked door — like (loaded) high-powered rifles in a gun cabinet — sent chills down my back. The Catholic Church, I concluded, not only wanted to save my soul, it also intended to blinker and control my mind.

It was a brief encounter, but an unforgettable one.

Fortunately, Pope Paul VI ended the Index in 1966.  But as Pete Hegseth’s current crusade makes clear, the spirit of theocratic doctrine-driven mind suppression still thrives.

Nor are such drives limited to one or two legacy denominations. As my own evolution took  me away from Catholicism to Quakerism (which is another story, expanded on in my books Meetings and Tell It Slant), I learned that top-down supervision of Quaker-oriented publications by Quaker authorities had been standard practice for several generations.

I made a double discovery about this Quaker version in the third major bibliophilic affair to be disclosed here, a midlife crisis connection that utterly captivated me.

This one began in the late 1990s, and the Friends Historical Library (aka FHL) at Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia was the object of my infatuation

I had many memorable sensual encounters at FHL, including getting to see (but alas, not touch) one of the original copies of John Woolman’s 1750s Journal; and later to view, up close, but also not to touch, a vivid and moving specimen of one of the famous Peaceable Kingdom paintings in the college’s possession.  (Hicks produced sixty or so, all on the same theme, but all quite different in intriguing ways).

Those were highlights of the many days I spent burrowing into and browsing the shelves at FHL; I often mused that if I were wealthy, I could disappear into their several tiers, have meals delivered, unroll a sleeping bag in a secluded corner, and happily never leave, except to send out articles and essays from my continuing safari.

But two particular discoveries concern us here: one was a 1660 broadside sticking out of a packed shelf of duplicates and discards, and the other was a long-lost liberal Quaker manifesto.

The broadside had a full title which was typical of its time in that it went on and on.; I called it, “A Visitation of Love Unto the King, and Those called Royalists. . . . .  A key sentence in it was:

”As concerning the Quakers, that are scornfully so called, we are at this day, and have been ever since we were a people, a poor, despised and contemptible People, in the eyes of the world, and deep sufferers under the injustice, and cruelties, and oppressions … and this hath been ever since the  Lord raised us up to be a people, though we have not been offensive to any just law …  and what we are as unto the Lord, if I should declare, it could not be believed by many: but we are his people, and he hath chosen us…. (Emphasis added.)

I read this over several times; it took awhile to sink in.  That’s because its assertion of a “peoplehood” identity here flatly contradicted the firmly individualist liberal Quaker ethos I had breathed in ever since finding Quakers in 1967. That ethos, “mine” (tho I surely did not invent it), put my inward seekings and perhaps finding at the center and focus of Quakerness, with all our institutions as supports or instruments thereof.

But for the unnamed writer from 330 years hence, that view was entirely backward: Quakerism as the group, a called/chosen people, a flock under the protection and guidance of “shepherds”, was the reality; individuals like me came and went; the group continued and was paramount.

Was this “peoplehood” notion an outlier, one of the many weird variants that littered the religious landscape in which pioneer prophets like George Fox and Margaret Fell brought the first Quaker groups together?

Nope. More burrowing soon showed that “peoplehood” pronouncements were repeated and corroborated in numerous other formative early documents, including many of the printed books of Discipline, from 200 years later, right up to the threshold of modernity.

Did this perspective shift change everything for me? Not exactly. For all the talk of “community”, Liberal Quakerism is still solidly individual-centered in 2025, almost 30 years after. But I still grapple with its implications, and the task of melding or hybridizing these mutually exclusive views.

Yet one other discovery that grew out of this quest lingered and eventually turned into a major project, which enabled me to rekindle my FHL passion close to twenty years later.

While continuing to ponder this “peoplehood” heritage, I began to wonder:  what happened to it?  How, when and why did it change? At whose urging?

Some Friends even today are convinced that the change was a betrayal and a disaster. Not me. But I still wanted to understand how it came about and what insights its history might yield.

I knew something about the main major Quaker schisms, but most studies of them were by historians shaped by the Orthodox branch: there were then no substantial published accounts of the rival Hicksite stream.

Evidently, I concluded, that was because the Orthodox believed in history (and further felt it was on their side in internecine Quaker quarrels). For Hicksites and liberals, History was instead mainly a burden, a tale marred by oppression, a plight to be overcome and left behind. There were no substantial published accounts of liberal Quaker evolution; they hadn’t bothered with it, assumed their status quo was original and beyond the dead hand of the past.

But even then I suspected this last assumption was an illusion. Liberal avoidance was not okay with me. Whether or not it had been told, there was a sequence of events over a century —a history — that resulted in major changes in Quaker identity and its articulation,  at least in the liberal branch. This sequence deserved to be searched out and recounted. Rather than a burden to be shucked, to me it was a mystery to be solved  and understood.

My curiosity was ratcheted up several notches one morning in the spring of 2000 when, reading a report on the proceedings of Friends General Conference for 1926, the following closing paragraph appeared:

“The Discipline committee, appointed at Richmond [Indiana] in 1922, presented a printed report consisting of 140 pages. It presents a clear conception of Friendly faith, principles and business proce-dure, in modern language, so that not only those accustomed to Friends’ expressions but any interested stranger can understand. The Conference passes this proposed discipline on to its constituent Yearly meetings with the hope they will adopt it as way opens.” (FI 7th mo. 31, 1926: 623)

What this obscure paragraph disclosed was that FGC had once, after four years work, produced a Uniform Discipline!

The very idea seemed preposterous, utterly foreign to the pluralistic — not to say sprawling — individualist ethos of FGC as I had known it over the 30 years or so. Besides, during almost a decade on that body’s Central and Executive Committees, I had never heard a single reference to any such document in any session, or read of it in any report or publication. There must have been some mistake.

Moreover, such a project also seemed entirely out of step with what I knew of the Hicksite Quaker tradition of which FGC was the heir. Their forebears’ opposition to Orthodox efforts to define and enforce doctrinal uniformity was a key issue in the Separations of 1827-28 which brought their branch of Quakerism into being.

For that matter, controversy had long dogged the Orthodox yearly meetings’ own labors in this direction, Their Uniform Discipline, developed in 1900, had been a source of endless controversy among its member groups. For FGC to have  produced something similar seemed totally out of character. (Mekeel, Chapters VII & VIII.)

The staff at the Friends Historical Library, where I was doing this reading, shared my puzzlement: they had not heard of any FGC Uniform Discipline either.

But Mary Ellen Chijioke, the FHL’s very resourceful Curator, went foraging in the depths of their collection, and soon returned with a 140-page volume bearing the nondescript title, “Suggested Revision of the Rules of Discipline and advices of the Religious Society of Friends.”

The date was right: 1926; but it was (mis)catalogued as a draft revision of the Philadelphia (Hicksite) Yearly Meeting’s Discipline, a venture completed the following year.

Closer inspection of the title page, however, showed this classification to be in error. In small print near the bottom of the page was an overlooked, telltale notice:
“This book is offered as the text for a Uniform Discipline for our [FGC’s] seven Yearly Meetings.”

So there was the proof: FGC had indeed once had a Uniform Discipline.

Or had it? How come none of us in the FHL reading room, some extremely knowledgeable about FGC history, had ever heard of it?

Could the document, which was after all only “suggested” to the FGC yearly meetings for their “consideration,” have fallen on deaf ears and been lost in some obscure eddy of history?

Not at all, we learned. Soon there was a stack of these member YM’s Disciplines on the table, and they yielded more remarkable facts: All seven were revised between 1926 and 1930, and all but one did indeed incorporate this Uniform Discipline (hereafter UD) or almost all of it. Yet for some reason, the FGC offering was not identified in them as an Ur-text or template.

This process was confirmed by a review of the FGC Central Committee minutes: a 1926 committee report that came with it said the book

“presents a clear conception of Friendly faith, principles and business procedure, in modern language . .. .The Conference passes this proposed discipline on to its constituent Yearly meetings with the hope they will adopt it as way opens.”(FI – 7th mo. 31, 19)

“Modern language,” however, was by no means the UD’s only innovation. Even a relatively cursory comparison of this Discipline with its immediate Hicksite predecessors disclosed substantial changes in substance as well.

Here are a few of the more remarkable features: individual-focused spirituality; a congregational polity, with local meetings the basic units, and yearly meetings reduced to  cooperative associations, not rulers; it also ended the formal recording of ministers, the internal elite class, by not mentioning it at all. And its theology was minimal, privatized, with Jesus as a role model and teacher, with no talk of atonement, incarnation, salvation or miracles. The Bible was venerable, but not sacred.

Almost all these were drastic departures from the Disciplines  that the UD replaced. Yet to repeat, it was not imposed on anyone; the committee meekly “offered” it for member yearly meetings’ “consideration . . . as way opens.”

Reviewing this material, I soon guessed that its huge impact must have meant that, rather than promulgating new doctrines, the UD rather codified changes that had already been made, in piecemeal fashion. But how and when did these changes come about?

For that matter, how did this document (and for that matter,  the very idea of it) then get completely forgotten by the very group that authorized, approved and distributed it? How and why did it sit, miscatalogued, on that library shelf for nearly 70 years?

Maybe that last question is the most understandable: Jesus said that in his father’s house there are many apartments; just so, there are many shelves in the FHL, each with many books. (Think: needle; haystack.)

But I didn’t want to guess. I’m an old investigative reporter: I love to dig out hidden answers. I’m also a fan of mysteries, and have written two. I felt sure that the UD was the culmination of a long process of evolution, maybe with some struggle and conflict thrown in.

That added up to at least a substantial historical mystery, and might even be an exciting one, at least to me. And given that all the principal characters were likely dead, most of the remaining paper trail of evidence, and other clues besides the UD, were probably planted across the sprawling paper plains of the FHL.

Not least, it was clear I had this “cold case” all to myself. None of the very small band of serious Quaker historians was interested. And when I suggested a serious exploration of  FGC history with the group’s executive committee, the response was incomprehension: “Why would we want to do that?” I was asked. When I tried to answer, “For starters, to know ourselves better,” it was eye-rolled and brushed off.

Sure I was disappointed, but not discouraged. I had written books before on my own. I could do it again.  And there was one welcoming, affirming, almost affectionate and steadfast companion, namely FHL, ready and waiting. Solving this mystery, and writing it up would at least be personally satisfying, should be enlightening, and maybe even fun.

All good; but the research would take months, then the writing more. When might such a stretch be available?  This leading took shape as the millennium turned, and I was approaching sixty. Even tho I had managed to spend many days happily with FHL, I was still a working stiff, and nobody was ready to underwrite the expense of it.  Way wasn’t yet opening.

So I kept the day jobs, set up a file for the UD “cold case” project, and added bits and pieces  when I came across them. Would I ever get to do it?

For awhile the prospect looked very distant. Not long after the horrible terror attacks of September 2001, I was called to staff a Quaker peace project in North Carolina, near a major military base but hundreds of miles south of FHL, just as wars approached in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There I was intensely busy for more than ten often traumatic years. I never forgot the FHL and my ”cold case,” but attended to a welter of daily duties. I also worked to live up to the counsel of John Woolman in his Journal, to be “preserved in a good Degree of Resignation,” i. e., leaving the cold case project up to Fate or Providence.

Finally, way did open: in 2012, I qualified for Social Security and retired from day jobs. Then Pendle Hill offered a Cadbury Scholarship,  room and board for an academic year on its campus, only a stone’s throw from FHL, to study Quaker history.

Thus in 2013-2014 I spent a blissful nine months (with breaks) shuffling between being closeted in FHL and then holing up in a cell-like room at Pendle Hill, researching & writing like a monomaniac.

I pretty well cracked the “cold case,” and the story filled not one but two books: Angels of Progress (a documentary history), and Remaking Friends, (a narrative).

They had almost everything a reader could want: Quaker heroes (and villains); strong, brave (& virtuous) women Quakers (also men); suspense, triumph and tragedy; Quakers fighting to end slavery without a war (failing at that, tragically) and emancipate women (made strides; still ongoing); Quakers fighting each other (yep, it happens).

And not least facing sometimes deadly violent censorship of their abolitionist views, then living thorough a civil war about it. And as one ultimate outcome, Quakers changed many old ways and dumped a bunch of formerly sacrosanct testimonies for a batch of new ones; less dramatically, they unearthed and detailed the origins of the long-lost UD; plus profiles of some Quakers in politics (which —uh-oh—usually didn’t end well) . . . .

Those Cadbury months were the peak of my affairs with libraries. And I wonder how crippled they would have been if someone like Pete Hegseth, or the priests who ran the Catholic Index, were in charge of what could be on the shelves at FHL, or at the small public library in Hays, Kansas.

Many militant church folks didn’t cotton to irreverent scribblers like Sinclair Lewis in his 1920s heyday. Some especially disliked his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, which described the rise of a populist-fascist dictator who takes over the U. S. Government in 1936 and — well, you know the plot, even from just that much.

It wasn’t Lewis’s best novel, but day by say it’s turning out to be the most prophetic. As I write, Pete Hegseth and the heirs to the Roman Index are stalking libraries, on military bases and off, determined to purify the shelves, end such spectacles as drag queens reading children’s stories — and to make sure there is no more episodes of youthful philosophical debauchery or midlife historical hanky-panky such as those in which this writer indulged, before the crusading cavalry rode to their version of civilizational rescue.

Well, he may be riding high right now.

But when my shipment of the new spiritual version of the little blue pill arrives, we’ll just maybe have to see  about that.