July 5, 2024

To All Friends Everywhere

Eleven Friends gathered this week at Haverford College during Friends General Conference, under the theme of Acting out a New Story, Singing A New Song.  We’d like to tell you our experience even if this expression is an imperfect sketch of something impossible to put it into words.  The work we’ve undertaken embraces emotion and spirit and imagination and can only be approximated here.

We met a wise teacher, Ishmael, from the book of the same name by Daniel Quinn.  Inspired by him, we found ourselves working together to pierce the mythology of our own culture which captures us in its exhortations to do, do, do … get, get, get … and consume, consume, consume; we understand that it threatens the continued existence of the world.  We are so sad and burdened to have been trained to think of creation as a source of raw materials to be conquered, extracted and used.  By making ourselves the Center of the world and taking it for our use, we ultimately destroy much or most of the life we know, and in the process take with us so many miracles of the natural world. 

Instead, we are exploring what it would be like to move toward a life-to-life relationship that respects the identity of the earth and the fullness of all its beings. That involves being responsive and attuned to the rhythms of living and dying all around us and not seeking to exempt ourselves from them.  Today might indeed be our day to die, participating in our sense of true Living rather than being controlled by our fear of Death.   

Through being truthful about our own full experience of the grief involved in seeing this truth – fear, sorrow, longing, and anger – we used art and words to develop individual visions using “What If” questions that stretched our imaginations of a new culture:  What if everyone had enough and no one had too much or too little?  What if we held in sacred trust the duty to listen, love and learn from the Earth and its Beings?  What if we actually considered others as being as worthy of Life as ourselves and our own tribe?  What if every person knew they began smaller than a mustard seed and that everyone has accomplished miracles?  What if Quakers claimed our prophetic voice and stopped fitting in?

Ishmael challenges us to change hearts and minds in our culture by teaching 100 people what we’ve come to know.  Some of us are realizing that the most powerful way of doing this in the world might be to bring the full experience of our whole complex, messy selves: listening with our whole hearts to others’ experience, discerning which part of our authentic self can be life-giving and healthy in a given situation, and being prepared to collide with the dominator culture whenever that happens.  Others of us are animated by a conviction that living in deep community is essential to growing and changing as we build a new culture. We are exploring a shift from a mind-set of ownership to one of shared membership.  Many of us struggle with fear and trepidation as we contemplate some of these concrete changes to our habits. 

We are heartened to realize that it’s necessary and possible to hope and dream – openings do occur when we hear each other into heart-speech.  We commit ourselves to continuing to seek them and be true to them.  We invite you to join us. 

• Dinah Bachrach
• Jude Brandt
• Walter Francis Elling
• Cassie Gafford
• Liz Kamphausen-Doan
• Carolyn Lejuste
• Joann Neuroth
• Steve Purpuri
• Riley Robinson
• Traci Hjelt Sullivan
• Walter Hjelt Sullivan