Friends Journal / April 2012

Waiting with the Outcasts and Strangers

Mark Greenleaf Schlotterbeck
I have found in Durham (Maine) Meeting a community of faith with which I identify very much. At Durham Friends, I have begun to find a home, a circle of people whose weaving together of spirituality, integrity, and engagement in the world around us I take seriously. I have found people whose values and genuineness give me hope for what life can be. I have found people I like to be with.

Earl Mitchell To sit in this room on a Sunday morning, surrounded by the others, to sit in the quiet, to look out the windows at the trees and the sky, to find the Presence among us, to listen and wait, to talk with one another afterwards, to spend time in each others homes, to journey together through life and its days and questions and momentsthis is a gift beyond explaining. I long imagined the arc of my life as coming back to the Quakers. I sometimes saw my life as landing again among Friends, that body of people and that way I embrace and consider home. For 20 or 30 years, I said I could be Quaker plus music, and then I found Durham and its music. At the end of 2010, though, I stopped attending meeting for worship at Durham Friends. I felt, I feel, that I cannot participate in our discrimination against gay and lesbian people through Durhams membership in Friends United Meeting, to which we belong through New England Yearly Meeting. I am troubled by Friends United Meetings personnel policy, which bars people in committed gay relationshipsas well as any others who express their sexuality outside of man/woman marriage from appointments to FUM staff and volunteer positions. I dont want a community of faith that feels the way I do about everything. Heaven forbid. I dont want a community whose views regarding a given issue are forever fixed rather than evolving, growing, and being considered anew. But I felt, I feel, that our actions in this matter are so egregious, so

offensive, so unloving, so at odds with our description of ourselves as people of justice, and so apart from a tradition that welcomes the outcast and the stranger that I cannot take part. By being part of FUM, we ourselves, we Durham Quakers, participate in excluding gay and lesbian people from positions of service and employment. I thought I should leave Durham Meeting quietly rather than raise this question very strongly. I thought this for two reasons. First, I had been a regular attender for only two and a half years, and though I could not feel more fully or warmly welcomed, I think a relative newcomer should hesitate to press his or her perspective. Second, I have held clergy positions in the past and I have some strong feelings about how clergy folks who arent currently pastoring should conduct themselves. Besides observing other guidelines, we former ministers do well, I think, to avoid involving ourselves too intensely in congregational issues. I surely affirm that matters as deep as this particular question of justice are profitably discerned by the whole community of faith, the whole meeting. I am wary of one persons taking a stance without testing that stance with others in the meeting. Yet my conscience is clear that I cannot continue to attend meeting for worship when others, for reasons I cannot affirm, are not welcomed fully into our circle. And I felt that it was not I who should press our meeting to consider this matter anew. I told a few people in the

meetinggently, I thoughtthat I wouldnt be here on Sundays and why I felt I couldnt. Maybe they told a few others. Several people offered warm and supportive words. Two people had lunch with me. They expressed friendly encouragement and the wish for a continued connection. Daphne Clement, Durham Friends pastor, asked me to tea, listened, shared her insights, and invited me to write about the step I have taken and the way I see these things. Now I am sharing the words I have written with you. I am heartened by Durham Meetings wrestling and journeying over a period of years with questions of sexuality and faithfulness. When one of our members invited people to help celebrate her and her partners 25th anniversary, she reflected that earlier at Durham, she would not have been so sure that her announcement would be welcome. The shift she described is like a scrap of music that you hear in the air. How deeply our meeting has embraced these two women and others! Sometimes we have welcomed and included people and said that the word we includes all of us. It is good that we talk about these things, that we listen to one another and acknowledge that we are not all in the same place. As we celebrate our shift and our warm embrace of our sisters and brothers, it is also important that we face the reality of our continuing, as part of FUM, to discriminate, discount, and bar. In their book Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers,

African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice, Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye say many Friends today mistakenly hold that the early Quaker abolitionists, Underground Railroad activists, [and] Freedom Riders . . . represent[ed] the Society of Friends as a whole, whereas, in fact, for about 90 years, Quakers themselves bought, owned, and sold other human beings, enriching themselves in the process. Friends at that time who spoke out against slavery were often regarded in their meetings as disruptive, as acting too hastily and on their own accord, unwilling to wait for guidance from the Light Within. The prevailing view of Quietist Friends, McDaniel and Julye say, was that Gods will would be revealed in the silence of meeting for worship. Friends who dissented were seen as radicals. The vigorous action those radicals proposed namely, ending Quakers engagement in the slave trade was sometimes discounted as detrimental to religious spirit and solidarity (McDaniel and Julye 2009, xv, xvi, 46, 51). As a consequence, several more generations of human beings purchased, transported, owned, or sold by Quakerswere enslaved, mistreated, raped, and separated child from parent and spouse from spouse. The same can be said of Friends institutions of learning, most of which, from grade schools through the Quaker colleges, did not admit African American students as late as the 1940s, say McDaniel and Julye. Some Friends who asserted that the refusal to admit black students conflicted with Quaker principles were

accused of wanting to destroy these Quaker schools, which since their founding had admitted only students of European ancestry. The oversight committee of George School concluded that the school should not put itself ahead of the parents or the yearly meeting by admitting African Americans. Thus, for about 250 years, Friends demonstrated little interest in educating students of color in the schools they had created for their own children (McDaniel and Julye 2009, 319, 323, 325, 326). Can we learn from this history rather than repeat it? Can we shorten the time in which we pride ourselves on welcoming the outcast as fully one of us, yet do not do it? I wish we would quit excusing our participation in the evil of this exclusion by saying that we are doing the necessary and more difficult work of engaging with those who feel differently. Yes, of course we must engage with those who see things differently. Of course we will acknowledge that Friends of faith and integrity see these things in a variety of ways. We will persist in listening, talking together, and inviting the Spirit to move among us. We may take part in New England Yearly Meeting gatherings and discussions forever and a day. But we will not do so as members of any body that excludes gay people. We know better. We have no excuse. To exclude gay people from staff and volunteer positions is morally indistinguishable from excluding people because of their skin color or gender.

I imagine sometimes that Jesus comes here on a Sunday morning but stands outside, knowing he cannot enter as long as others are told that after walking through the doors, they may not sit in every seat among us. I imagine that Jesus waits outside, just past our brick arches. He greets those who are fully welcome as they walk inside, and he stands outside with those who arent. It is a very clear, simple step to say that we will exclude gays and lesbians no longer. We too will stand outside as long as they must. How else can we consider ourselves human beings or Friends? If we cannot take this step of solidarity, I propose that we make a change to our meetinghouse, a change that requires only the services of a plumber: Let us have two drinking fountains installed in the vestry. Let us place a sign over each of them. Over the right-hand drinking fountain the sign may read, For genuine Quakers and our friends, pure as the driven snow, unsullied by a tendency to fall in love with people the same gender as ourselves, worthy of entering fully into each corner of our fellowship from this monthly meeting to positions of service in our larger associations. Drink here, O blessed ones. The sign over the left-hand drinking fountain may read, For the rainbow of others, neither real Quakers nor really our friends, not so pure as the driven snow, stained by the tendency to fall in love or partner with people the same gender as yourselves, welcome to sit in meetings for worship as if you

were genuine Quakers but unworthy, as sullied persons, of holding positions of service in our larger associations. Drink here, you strangers. Drink to your hearts content. This proposal cannot be taken literally, of course. So many words will not fit very well on a sign. Rather, over the right-hand drinking fountain, for those whose light is unrefracted, whose inner being remains pure and white as the driven snow, let the sign simply read, Whites only. Over the fountain for people whose light has scattered into a rainbow of colors, so that they are neither so pure nor so white as the driven snow, let the sign read, Colored only. With the placement of these drinking fountains, we will acknowledge the divided state of the welcome we offer. We will join those of our Quaker forebears who once declared those Friends divisive and unquakerly who said other Friends should stop buying, selling, and enslaving human beings. We will join those old Quakers from the days before Friends finally declared as one that enslaving other human beings is incompatible with the Light and impermissible, unimaginable, for Friends themselves. Durham Friends, I am happy to say, are different from those old enslavers. I started attending Durham Friends regularly during a difficult chapter of life. People simply, gloriously welcomed me and took me just the way I was. Just the way I was. At moments on Sundays I felt like a human being. That is Durham Friends. I dont

want to forget. So it is as a Durham Friend that nowadays on Sundays, in my mind, I wait outside the meetinghouse, being a Durham Friend for those who cannot go all the way in. Out there I am trying, in my way, to stand in for Jesus and be a Durham Friend. Mark Greenleaf Schlotterbeck claims Durham (Maine) Meeting as his community of meaning and spirituality. He values and misses its people, music, worship, humor and perspective on life. He presented the above words at a Durham gathering that focused on matters of inclusion. Mark composes music and lyrics for choral works rooted in spirituality, justice and whimsy. He teaches English language to immigrants in Lewiston, Maine.