I began this blog site two months ago to explore why so few Friends today engage in a substantial way with the historical and ongoing injustices against Black, Native, and other people of color during the settling of this land and since.
Asking questions is central to Quakers’ spiritual practices. Since Quaker meetings don’t have ministers, we have a practice of considering a set of questions together as a meeting. We sit together, or connect remotely, for about an hour. The month’s queries (questions) are read, then we sit in silence. Friends who have a response speak that into the silence. I like how that engages us all. How this is dynamic instead of static. These discussions help us share with each other how we are doing spiritually, physically, mentally. In my meeting there are twelve sets of queries, organized by topic. Here are the queries about personal responsibility, for example.
Queries on personal responsibility
- How do we center our lives in the awareness of God the Spirit, so that all things may take their rightful places?
- How do we structure our individual lives in order to keep them uncluttered with things and activities? How does Meeting help us examine our personal lives for simplicity?
- Do we choose recreational activities which foster mental, physical and spiritual health?
- How are our lives affected by tobacco, alcohol and drug use? What can we do to deal with problems resulting from their use? What can we do to recognize and deal with unhealthy ways we treat ourselves?
- How do we ensure that we act with fairness and integrity?
- Are we sensitive to our own use of language which may be offensive or oppressive to others?
Dynamic Queries and Responses
Our queries are meant to be asked again and again. But we have to guard against answers becoming routine. And the questions themselves can become dated. What often brings a query back to life is a story. When I can connect a query to something that actually happened, a new question usually rises out of the story. I’ve begun calling these dynamic queries.
Here is what that looks like with the queries on personal responsibility (above), using stories from my own writing.
How do we center our lives in the awareness of God the Spirit?
When I’m out with my camera, I walk slowly and in silence, and when a scene is complex I stop and wait until the image within it emerges. Over the years I’ve come to see this as a kind of meeting for worship.
Dynamic query: Where in our ordinary activities do we stop and wait for guidance?
How do we keep our lives uncluttered with things and activities?
In 1972, at the Friends Volunteer Service Mission in Indianapolis, a few of us began sharing meals and worship on First Day evenings. We refused to pay the telephone war tax, and I taught neighborhood kids to develop photos in a darkroom set up in our bathroom.
Dynamic query: What might we gain by sharing more of our daily lives with one another?
Do we choose recreation that fosters mental, physical and spiritual health?
When I moved back to Iowa without a car, I set out to ride my bicycle to Bear Creek Meeting, 44 miles away. The hills taught me quickly that vertical distance matters far more than horizontal.
Dynamic query: How might the way we travel to meeting become part of our witness?
How do we ensure that we act with fairness and integrity?
On the First Nation–Farmer Climate Unity March, I told my Native walking companion that I knew about Quakers’ part in the Indian boarding schools and that I was sorry. The next time we walked together, he shared a story from his own family. We became friends. I wrote about it in What does it mean to be a truth teller?
Dynamic query: What truth have we been hoping would not come up?
Are we sensitive to language that may be offensive or oppressive?
“Iowa was opened to settlement” names no one. Rewritten with an actor, it says the United States forced the Sauk, Meskwaki and Ioway from Iowa through coerced treaties and sold their land to settlers. That land is still held today. I explore this in Grammar of Silence.
Dynamic query: Which of our everyday sentences hide who did what to whom?
Find a Story
The stories don’t answer the queries. They open them up again. I hope you’ll try this with your own meeting’s queries. Pick one query. Ask what happened to you that it brings to mind. Write down the new question.
Where do you find stories? Besides the usual sources, I plan to explain about a new source for Quaker stories. This post is an introduction.
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