There was something about my mother’s faith in my innate kindness that led me, right then and there, to vow that in my life I would try to live up to her faith in me. Much later I learned how to articulate this vow: Say and do what you mean, and mean what you do and say, but don’t say or do it mean.
I first encountered “Quaker” the evening of my first day on the Swarthmore College campus as an entering student. Freshman orientation was held in the Quaker Meeting House. I was lonely and scared, terrified actually, but in that simple peaceful space, each ceiling beam and floor plank filled with the spiritual energy of years of silent worship and shared messages, I felt safe and supported. I would return to sit on the steps of the Meeting House many times in the years to come to gain a sense of light when the darkness of depression and despair was deepest. I do not know why it did not occur to me to explore what went on inside the building, especially on a Sunday morning.
I vaguely knew that Swarthmore had been founded in 1864 by Quakers like Lucretia Mott to provide an education to their children consistent with their social justice oriented faith. In accordance with these Quakers insistence on the equality of the sexes, the college was from the outset co-educational. The founders took the name, Swarthmore, from Swarthmoor Hall, the Lake District home of Margaret Fell, co-founder with George Fox of Quakerism. Swarthmore was also committed to scientific inquiry since these Quakers also believed in the compatibility of science and Quakerism. After all, George Fox famously proclaimed his discovery of the fundamental principle of Quakerism: “And this I knew experimentally.” (Italics mine, not George’s, though he may indeed have given the word with emphasis.)
At Swarthmore, I discovered the American Friends Service Committee, founded in 1917 in order to provide young Quakers and other conscientious objectors to war with an opportunity to perform a service of love in wartime. I learned that in 1947 the AFSC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with British Friends Service Council. The prize recognized 300 years of Quaker efforts to do the work of peace in a world where violence seemed to predominate. In particular, it named the work done by the two recipient Quaker organizations during and after the two world wars to feed starving children and help Europe rebuild itself. The AFSC hosted weekend workcamps in nearby Philadelphia as well as overseas international workcamps. Participating in these workcamps, I made a second vow: I would do my best not to contribute to the violence that existed in the world.
After I graduated from college, I moved to Boston and worked for the AFSC in its Cambridge, Massachusetts office. During my time there I attended an international workcamp in Poland, Quakers being one of the few groups allowed to do work behind the iron curtain, and a voter registration project in Jackson, Tennessee. I remained committed to Quaker faith and practice throughout my years as a graduate student at Indiana University. But the moment I moved to Philadelphia to begin my career as a professor, I ceased to attend meeting for worship or to engage in Quaker-based activities. Living in what my friend Rosalie called the Quaker Vatican, I let it all go. It was one of the worst decisions of my life.
Of course, I understand why I did it. If one does the academic job as defined by the tenure process, it is really three jobs in one: teaching, research and writing, and service. Despite the frequent public view of academics as close cousins to welfare defrauders, sitting in our offices popping chocolates, gassing to our colleagues, and occasionally strolling down the hall to chat up the undergrads, I worked pretty much all day every day, except Sunday morning and afternoon, from September until the end of June, nose to the teaching and administrative grindstone. In July and August I worked still harder, writing six to seven hours a day. Sunday morning was my one free time, a time to sleep in or have brunch with friends or call my parents. I couldn’t give it up.
I wish I had. I made some very bad decisions during my professional years. I do not think I was ever mean, but I do think I sometimes lost sight of truth. I do think I sometimes acted without integrity and perhaps even committed a certain kind of violence. Perhaps I would not have done so if my hand had been in the stream and on the rock that is for me Quaker faith and practice Had I stayed connected to a Meeting, I might also have stayed connected to truth, integrity, and non-violence. I would also have had a community outside the academy to ground me and direct me, a community with a very different ethos from that of the academy.
I did not return to Quakerism until near the end of my career as an academic when a personal experience of such extraordinary violence brought me once again to a vow of non-violence. I might not be able to stop others from their violence, but I could control myself and hopefully model a different way of being in the world. And so I returned to Quaker meeting and to my commitment to Quaker faith and practice. As the world seems ever more consumed by violence of one kind of another, I will try this time to stick to my convictions.
Unprogrammed Quakers do not have a creed that one must swear belief to in order to be called a Quaker. Rather we have testimonies, values to which we hope our lives bear witness. Each is, as one Quaker writer puts it, “a pinch on the individual conscience, a religious imperative for each person, a response to what they consider, as a woodworker might say, to be ‘out of true.’”
For me the key testimonies are the following: Peace, Equality, Integrity, Simplicity.
And I think of them in this way: If you want peace, work for justice. If you want justice, work for equality. This constitutes integrity. It is that simple.
I’ll keep trying.
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