When We Do What We Love to Do
By Guli Fager
In 2005, my first year in the Adult Young Friends program, I attended my first fishbowl. The event brings high school and AYFs together for an evening of confidential, no-holds-barred, sometimes ridiculous conversation about sex, relationships, and growing up. It is also, to me, one of the most Spirit-filled events of the week.
Participants write questions on little pieces of paper that are passed around the group. The males and females make two separate circles (though we're changing this paradigm now to keep up with our leading to support gender nonconforming Friends) and when the girls have the floor, the boys stay silent. Then we switch.
While you're sitting on the floor, the questions are passed from hand to hand and when a question speaks to your condition, you stand up and answer it. Four or five versions of the "What do girls really think is hot?" question passed through my fingers before I felt the familiar Spirit butterflies and decided to stand and speak to it.
I remember saying that it was "totally hot" that Ben Stites had ridden his bike to Blacksburg all the way from Wisconsin. And that it was "totally hot" that, though I don't share his passion for classical music, my then-boyfriend played the cello, because he loves to play and it's his thing. I described the hotness that radiates from people when they do the thing that they really love to do. And I told them that, compared to "regular people," Quakers are totally hot because we are better in touch with our thing.
I think Gathering brings out the hot in people because we may spend the entire rest of the year maintaining the boundaries between our religion, our work, our hearts, our minds, our sexualities. Gathering is a place where I can combine all of my absolute favorite things: Quakerism, talking to people about sex, staying up late with my brother, and seeing old friends.
By the end of the week I am so energized by the support I receive for my ministry that I can't wait to get back to work. I see Adult Young Friends at their best during Gathering, whether it's giving massages (when your day job is as a computer programmer), teaching music to middle schoolers (when you wait tables all year), or providing spirit-led leadership to a business meeting (when your employer hasn't recognized your abilities).
At its best, the Adult Young Friends program encourages us to expand what we do at Gathering to other parts of our lives. I have been so blessed by my experience in AYF because it has taught me that I could combine the things I do at Gathering into an "all year" life—and I have. I talk to people about sex all day, every day. I write about it, read about it, and help people solve problems. I receive tremendous support for this ministry and far-flung Friends routinely email me sex-related articles from their local newspapers.
As of this writing, I am about to embark on a new journey as the Sexual Health Education Coordinator at the University of Texas. I waited and waited for the right job to come, trusting the leading that I honed at Gathering in 2005. It finally did. When I come to Gathering this year it will not be as someone who can only be myself at Gathering; Gathering has helped me to be myself all year long.
On the last day of Gathering in 2005 a large man came up to me to say goodbye. I didn't recognize him at first—until he thanked me for welcoming him to the Women's Center. He is a male-to-female transgendered person who is only comfortable being out as a woman one week each year at Gathering. His children didn't know, his work didn't know. She is an inspiration to me and a reminder that I can serve Friends by helping them figure out how to be out about who they truly are, all year long. And that, Friends, is totally hot.
Guli Fager developed the Gathering workshop Healthy Sexuality as Quaker Testimony, which she leads with Seth Barch. She is a member of Langley Hill Monthly Meeting in McLean, Virginia and an attender at Austin Friends Meeting in Austin, Texas.
