Quaker : mackenzian

April 8, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The many meanings of silence

For about three years, I took spiritual refuge in an unprogrammed Friends (Quaker) meeting in West Texas.

The meeting didn’t own their own facilities, so we either met for worship in the children’s education rooms of a local community church or had brunch and bible study at the clerk’s home.

Each time, we all settled into silence for an entire hour.

The hour isn’t quite group meditation. It may include prayer. It is an hour of communion, attention, and what some writers call “expectant waiting.”

Perhaps through that silence, a member becomes moved to share an insight, thought, or line of scripture or poetry with the rest of the meeting; perhaps not. I never was so moved, though I did sometimes jot down notes and thoughts for myself.

Maintaining silence wasn’t so hard for me. My challenge was discerning whether my breaking silence to speak would improve on that silence or not.

Western culture values action over stillness and voice over silence. So silence, like bystanding, often stands in for failure: a failure to act, a missed opportunity to contribute. The violence of silence or silence as inaction and passivity was one of my writing and speaking themes last year.

Failure isn’t the quality of silence I’ve experienced with Friends. It’s closer to the quality of silence I grew up with in my own Adventist churches: a musical track not quite queued up right, a nervous singer filling in the spaces, platform speakers uncertain who speaks next, ad libs to cover their confusion or congregational impatience.

There was a fear of lost control and disrupted order: if we didn’t pour sound into silence, who knew what might happen?

After years of compulsive speaking and activity, I take refuge in attentive silence. I also think it’s important to acknowledge other kinds of silence and the weight they can force onto marginalized people.

That quality of silence is what poet and author Clint Smith spoke to in “The danger of silence,” presented at a New York TED event in 2014.

Click the video below to watch Smith in full flow: he includes a timely reference to the season of Lent, which ends next week.

March 4, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

A lesson in decision-making from the Quakers

The expectant waiting of unprogrammed Quakers was one of the things that drew me into the fellowship of Friends eight years ago, and I’m still learning about how local meetings practice it.

George Fox University professor Cherice Bock recently wrote a fascinating blog on the ways that Quakers worship and discern together. Bock is part of Oregon’s Northwest Yearly Meeting, which has been facing some heavy decisions about its membership and hosting no small amount of rancor.

It is so difficult, now, to even imagine trusting others, and in some ways I would like to just give up trusting people altogether. It would be much easier to just become cynical, and to attempt to use political means to manipulate my way in the future.

Much more difficult, however, is remaining vulnerable and open, trusting and hoping, and remaining open to the radical and intense freedom and joy of coming together as a group of Friends to discern together, fully and wholly, unreservedly, bringing our whole selves.

I say it is more difficult, but to me, it is also the only Way worth living… I will live out love. There is no other Way I would wish to go.” —Cherice Bock

The political environment is toxic right now. So is much of Christian culture, and people who work in either space have every good reason to throw up hands and take up a skeptical view of what’s possible among people.

So being part of a community that practices a contrary approach can provide a sanctuary. I still want to be part of groups, religious and non-religious, that treat vulnerability as a collective discipline, not a sign of weakness; that hold humility and learning as ideals to stretch toward and as processes that reform and re-form us as we live them.

What I love about Bock’s post is that it’s clearly influenced by the real life muck of community. She’s not choosing vulnerability in the absence of reasons to close her heart. She’s choosing it despite those reasons, despite those realities.

Sometimes that’s all I need to see: I don’t need guarantees about whether it all works. I just need to see field notes from other people, people I may never meet, people in entirely different contexts from my own: people still deciding to respond to hostility with wholeness and not give up.

Check out Bock’s article on her blog.

February 22, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The root of solidarity

All species and the Earth itself have interdependent roles within Creation. Humankind is not the species to whom all others are subservient, but one among many. All parts, all issues, are inextricably intertwined. Indeed the web of creation could be described as of three-ply thread: wherever we touch it we affect justice and peace and the health of all everywhere.” —Audrey Urry, in Quaker Faith and Practice (5th Ed.)

I’ve been reading through the essays in This Bridge Called My Back. A recurring theme in these essays, regardless of the authors’ identities, is their appeal for cross-community solidarity. Some authors describe the White women’s movement’s resistance to the concerns of women of color—a dynamic that has impacted contemporary groups like Pantsuit Nation and organizing communities like the Women’s March. Others explore diversities among women of color: class, sexuality, ethnicity, and national origin, for example.

When we’re in solidarity with one another, we will reach beyond our demographic or political groups and accompany others in their social change work. We don’t have to be immediately affected to act.

What makes this solidarity across lines and issues sensible is the sense of unity that Urry points to in Faith and Practice. There’s no reason we shouldn’t reach out to one another or act in each other’s favor if, as Rosario Morales writes, “We are all in the same boat.”

From all directions we get all the beliefs to go with these divisions we believe all kinds of things about: what real men really are what women must want what black people feel and smell like what white people do and deserve how rich people earn their comforts and cadillacs how poor people get what’s coming to them…

The basis of our unity is that in the most important way we are all in the same boat.” —Rosario Morales

I recently used the phrase “Earth-sized circle of concern” for an orientation to activism and problem-solving that’s broad enough to hold all life. I’ve been thinking about how this squares with the more popular neo-Stoic recommendation for people to shrink their circles of concern and focus instead on their circles of responsibility or action.

I still think there’s at least temporary utility in blocking out what’s beyond one’s control: I’ve experienced that usefulness personally. But it’s an individualistic, atomized way to approach the world long-term. It also makes sense that most of the people recommending it to me are part of the popular business and personal finance cultures.

Business and finance are two professions that have helped to build the world as we know it. Perhaps it’s time to try a new way.