A year ago last Saturday, the Friends Meeting I’m part of took a big step, for us: we rented a booth at the Alamance Pride Festival, held in a large park in downtown Burlington NC.
Outwardly, our booth was not particularly eye-catching. Amid the fluttering of a thousand floating rainbows, the yellow table banner we made for it is about as gaudy as we get. Spring Friends Meeting has been what many call an “affirming” congregation for more than a dozen years, and we’ve paid our share of dues for that. But we didn’t do it for publicity, and we haven’t done much of what many others call evangelism, which we’d rather name “outreach.” We have lots of opinions about things, but are mostly quiet about them.
Maybe too quiet. Spring has been gathering for Quaker worship in southern Alamance County for 251 years, but we soon found out in the booth that hardly anyone we talked to knew we were there. Which meant that Pride was a great opportunity for our outreach aspirations, but it also brought home the suspicion that maybe we had been a bit too ready to “hide our lamp under a bushel,” for much of those two-and-a-half centuries, which is something the gospel says not to do. There’s a false modesty which at bottom is mostly a mix of snobbery and pride.
So anyway there we were, on a clear autumn day, and we had a fine time, passing out flyers, talking about Spring Meeting and Bayard Rustin and other Quaker stuff.
We weren’t bothered when some local preachers showed up right outside the park fence, and decided to preach the Queer out of all of us, even the hetero sympathizers like me.
Of course, they thought they were doing us a big favor, saving us from burning in hellfire. But I long ago signed up with Mark twain’s sage judgment that you look to heaven for the climate, but hell is where the good company hangs out. Besides which my brand of Quakers don’t really believe in hell; that’s because we have committees instead.
I was impressed by the response of the Pride organizers and attenders: they avoided shouting or cursing back. Instead, an impromptu chorus gathered on the other side of the fence, and spearheaded by a guerilla guitarist named Daniel Ayers, they starting singing affirming songs with a lusty verve which made the sermonizing all but inaudible.
So all in all, this old Quaker was well worn out by the exertions, but when we were folding the tent and packing up, the conclusion was that Alamance Pride had been a valuable and rewarding venture, a full, fine day.
That upbeat mood lasted maybe twenty minutes, til I was in the car headed home, and turned on the news.
I think you know the rest. Another festival that same day, with ties to another religious group, and pursuing an ambience of peace and music, turned out cataclysmically different while we were frolicking in the Carolina sunshine. That was 6000-plus miles away, but the echoes of its screams, and the pall of the smoke and fires spread to cover much of America as well.
That was then. But this past Saturday, it was still now.
Was? Is.
Our booth looked much the same; our handouts were the same. The spirit of Pride was still strong.
But this year was different. Shadowed. At least for me.
No end in sight?
How does one square this circle.
Black lives matter.
All lives matter.
Palestinian lives matter.
Back then people jumped all over me for protesting that my Quaker convictions required me to declare that all lives mattered. The backlash today would be even worse (I fear) were I to assert that Palestinian lives matter.
War is the worst possible solution to every problem. It never solves anything and does immense harm to all sides. All of our telescopes point outwards in search of intelligent life. There is little enough to be found on this planet.
Good one, Chuck. Snobbery and Pride in the hell of committees. And Quaker tables at public events. Well done. Carry on.
Thanks Anne! I think such forms of outreach are an idea with legs.