From Isaac Smith: Making Quakerism "Click"

Quakerism was a foundational part of my upbringing. I grew up in Frederick Friends Meeting; my parents brought me along to Quarterly and Yearly Meetings; I went to Catoctin Quaker Camp for six years, then did Teen Adventure; and I went to many Young Friends gatherings. Yet, when I went to college, I put that part of me away, like a winter coat in the summer. It wasn't until a few years ago that I took it back up, when I began attending this Meeting again. Since then, by some grace, I've been immersing myself ever deeper into what it means to be a Friend of Truth, as if for the first time.

As Quakers in the liberal tradition, we tend to take a hands-off approach to teaching our faith, even to our children; and there's much to be said for that approach, at least when compared to more authoritarian models of religious education. Yet it can leave the impression that faith in the inward Christ is something optional or decorative, rather than essential. That may have been why stepping away from the Religious Society of Friends was so easy for me. But, to paraphrase Quaker theologian Robert Barclay, everyone gets a day or time of visitation when one is confronted with the futility of living life through one's ego rather than through God. For me, the few years I spent living underemployed and unemployed, in the teeth of the Great Recession, struggling to support myself and my (now) wife, was that time of visitation. It was hardship--not only material hardship, but a feeling that my life had gone awry, and that whatever cleverness or ambition I had would not necessarily set it straight again. I came to understand it as a kind of religious test, about what exactly my life would be oriented toward--what it would worship, in other words. The novelist David Foster Wallace put it well when he said "Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship... is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."

Thus, when my wife and I moved to Frederick, I was more receptive to attending Meeting for Worship than I had been in years. Whatever might happen in the future, I wanted to have the support of a community, oriented toward the Spirit, that would help me endure trials, but also celebrate joys. These joys have included our marriage under the care of the Meeting, as well as the birth of our son.

I also wanted to give back to this community, and I soon realized there were huge gaps in my understanding of Quakerism: in the peace testimony, the business practices of Friends, the place of Christ, and so on. How, then, could I meaningfully contribute to the governance of the Meeting if I couldn't articulate why we do the things we do? So I read and read and read: Barclay and William Penn, Rufus Jones and Howard Brinton, and contemporary Friends such as Martin Kelley and Robin Mohr. Ultimately, I found, Quakerism did not make sense to me--did not "click"--until I began to comprehend its Christian roots. That the Religious Society of Friends is not a meditation club or a political action network, but a people gathered by God in Christ. Yet even this step wasn't possible for me until I came to embrace the universalist form of Christianity that Friends have preached from the beginning.  I take seriously the belief of early Friends that, in this Religious Society, "Christ is come to teach his people himself," however he chooses to manifest himself among us. No forms or dogmas are necessary to participate in the divine but a willingness to give up self-will and walk in the path of the Spirit.

Other things about Friends began to make sense to me as well. The peace testimony, for example: To be against war, not in most cases but even when the cause seems just, and to be opposed not out of cowardice or fecklessness but out of courage and love, is to say without equivocation "My kingdom is not from this world." (John 18:36) It is a challenging teaching, often more powerful than I can bear. Yet it has the ring of truth to it, and I hope, little by little, to have the strength to capably witness to it and other openings from that which was before the world was.