[an open letter to Durham Friends Meeting (Quakers), 23 September 2021]
Dear loved ones at Durham Meeting,
I went to sleep last night meditating on the Black Lives Matter sign proposal, and woke up this morning with some images and thoughts to share.
Two years ago, I flew to Dallas, Texas for the wedding of dear friends. A gay male couple, they’d been together more than a decade; the Episcopal church had refused to recognize their union. But their local congregation, spurred by a long history of action and activism, arranged through a ‘legal loophole’ in church policy to get a sponsoring bishop from another state to ‘oversee’ a proud church/society wedding of about a dozen gay and lesbian couples, all united in one gorgeous ceremony. The papers came, it was a gala event — but for me, what was important was that of my two dear friends in this couple, one’s family had supported him for decades, while my other friend’s family was nowhere in evidence at this wedding. I was his family that day.
Why do I raise this now? I was reflecting on how I felt, arriving at an ‘uptown’ Episcopal church the day of the wedding. The first thing I noticed was the architecture. It was modern. There was a portico, with a covered porch area with a children’s painted stone garden: Take a stone if you need one, leave one if you wish. Good, I thought, they welcome children at this meeting. I walked in the door. The next thing that met my eye was a series of large, colorful, blow-up closeup photographs of clergy & laypeople — all in dyads — clergyman holds child, clergyman embraces African American elder woman, female minister dialogues animatedly with male layperson. Good, I thought. They care about *people* at this meeting — and their definition of *people* includes (again) children, women, and African American folks. I continued to explore the setting, soon coming upon the entryway to the formal ceremonial area of the building. The entrance hall was a giant labyrinth made into the floor of the space. Good, I thought. They care about physical movement, the arts, spirituality and mysticism. Even better, children were romping and playing, leaping onto and over stacks of chairs surrounding the labyrinth. In less than 5 minutes, I had learned a lot about this new place.
Following the ceremony (officiated in part by a nationally prominent openly gay bishop, who drew moans of rage, uncomfortable fidgeting, and storms of tears from the crowd as he led the entire gathered group through decades of social injustice in review…) as I was going home for the evening, a clergyman I’d not yet met, older, with a sparkle in his eye, warmly took my hand and said, “Good to see you here. Come back next week.” “Oh,” I laughed. “I live in North Carolina.” “Move here. We need you,” he said firmly, then turned to greet the next person behind me.
My reflections this morning are to name *all* the ways I knew I was fully, wholly welcome in that church, where I was a temporary visitor. The visual signs were all there. The human element was bearing out what I saw advertised in the signs. I was buoyed up by warmth, love, genuine affection. I was wanted. I was sought after. I mattered.
When I read through the Black Lives Matter chronology offered by the committee, clerks, and others, I found myself reflecting on the beautiful exercise we’ve been invited to undertake:
– How do we visually signal our commitment to faithful inclusion: from the road? from the yard? from the front door?
– How do friends, loved ones, new visitors, know they are, will be, welcomed?
– Who do we choose to welcome, and how?
– How do we wish to signal our loves, our commitments, in vibrant, artistic, living color? How do we build them in to the visual welcome we offer those who pass by, or arrive, or are invited inside for the first time?
I found myself taking inventory of other Quaker spaces, and their visual indicators. The mural of ‘they kindled a fire and left it burning’ in the Earlham College cafeteria. The ‘peace’ stick in many languages in the Earlham School of Religion / Bethany Seminary shared courtyard. The William Penn painting in which he dialogues peacefully with Native American friends in the dining room of Penn House in Washington, DC.
What is our equivalent? Whom do we welcome, and how? Visually, currently, we welcome children. The shared courtyard makes that clear, and that’s indeed an accurate impression. Who else do we want to welcome, clearly, from the road?
When I first moved to Durham — the first time, that is — in 2003, I was in a pinch. I had just received a grant from a national Quaker organization, to do a book tour interviewing Friends from around the United States on ‘gay and lesbian concerns’ (meaning in this case the full range from acceptance and embrace, to rejection, fear, barring of entry) and I needed my home meeting to administer the funds. So, practicality forced me to write a letter to business meeting before I had ever met the group, introducing myself and saying in essence, “You don’t know me, but will you do this for me?”
I was met, by the way, with a resounding yes. Joe Graedon had some kind of one-line quip that I’ve since misplaced in memory but it was something like, “Yeah, we want to be a part of that.” I knew going into that request that Durham Friends Meeting was inclined to support LGBTQ folks. There wasn’t a sign outside. There was a grapevine.
Contrast that with another (much smaller, in fact quite tiny) meeting where I attended, in Oberlin, Ohio. Now, Oberlin is a pretty open place. But in more than a year of going almost every week to meeting, I’d never heard anyone say word one about being accepting of sexual orientation. Then, I was approached to co-clerk the meeting. “Well, before I accept this position, I need to know, do you (we) support gay people?” I asked. “Why, yes, of course….” came the spluttering answer. “How would I know?” I challenged. “No one has ever said anything out loud in meeting about this. And there are no signs on the door.”
What this boils down to: I am grateful for the invitation to imagine, to enter into heart-space, with the community. Who do we choose to welcome, and how? While holding tenderly the hurt and specific and historical and present-day urgency of Black Lives Matter, I for one would welcome an even larger, airier process that nudges us to consider our visual presentation of ourselves to the world. Yes, Black Lives Matter is at the core. So is Quakers’ historical discomfort with visual signs and symbols. So is Quakers’ retreat into silence when performative acts (verbal, visual) are required. So is Quakers’ felt sense that ‘if the meeting as a whole isn’t ready we can’t move’ which is of course in tension with the very root of Quaker history (or as one person in that book tour of the early 2000s put it: “Let’s listen to individual Friends’ leadings and then we will see what Spirit is up to”).
Thank you, thank you, thank you to the Black Lives Matter committee for bringing these issues to the fore. I hope we can tenderly, lovingly, enter into a rich new world of visual welcome. I affirm the instinct for permanent signaling, and completely apart from any aesthetic choices (though they matter) I personally would welcome a community-wide imaginative exercise in which we dance with the question, “How do we signal our welcome? How do we embody Love in action in ways that may indeed feel uncomfortable, unfamiliar, even counter-cultural?” Yet that is exactly why we need these new ways of signaling, these new signs, because we are not only challenging ourselves to step out of the way we’ve always been, we are inviting the world to do the same.
In peace and with gratitude,
Kirsten Bohl
Kirsten Bohl: Nature, Play, Magic 