Refusing to choose between spiritual paths

Thank you so much for Joe McHugh’s “A Graced and Authentic Place” (FJ Oct.). It was like someone had held up a mirror to me. I grew up Catholic, left the Church as a gay teenager when I came out, and was told by our priest that I had no place in the Church. Shortly thereafter I found Quaker meetings and inconsistently attended them until a few years ago when I started going twice a week pretty much without fail. Despite my love and appreciation for my Friends meeting, I never lost my deep connection to some aspects of my Catholicism. I still say the rosary every day, finding it a calming practice in the midst of anxiety. I still love the rituals of Catholicism, especially the sensory aspects of the religious service with its incense, hymns, stained glass windows, and candles.

It’s like two sides of a spectrum, each side offers something for me that the other doesn’t. I too refuse to “make up my mind” and prefer to participate in both worlds.

Matthew Wettlaufer
Palm Desert, Calif.

I am a Quaker and clerk of a progressive meeting. My background is agnostic, but I was baptized Catholic. I considered returning to the fold in college, but I realized I was only doing so to make my grandparents happy. After that experience, I spent four years angry at organized religion and furious at myself. Then I felt a new and very unfamiliar leading: to seek out a spiritual community.

I loved Pittsburgh (Pa.) Meeting with a deep and abiding love, but I never applied for membership until a Friend approached me. “Would you like to apply?” she asked. I told her that I would love to, but I was leaving for Illinois in two months and didn’t know if I would be back. “I read an article in Friends Journal,” she said, “that convinced me that we have to be more welcoming of young people. Go ahead.”

A clearness committee met, and one week before I left, I was welcomed into membership. I later found Chester (Pa.) Meeting, and after my second meeting for worship, I knew in my heart that I wanted to join.

And—and!—I still pray the rosary, and I go on occasion to a Catholic church to sit alone in Mass. There is an inexorable pull back to the rituals of my heritage. I am queer and trans, and I could never be a member of a church that did not explicitly affirm those things.

Yelena Forrester
Morton, Pa.

Learning about Quaker heroes

QuakerSpeak’s “Benjamin Lay: The Radical Quaker Abolitionist Who Challenged the World” (QuakerSpeak.com Oct.) is a must-watch video. It brings the past into the present with force and conviction, and challenges me to make changes to my own complacency.

Helen Holleman
Grahamstown, South Africa

It’s good to see the meetingroom where we worshiped throughout my 12 years at Abington Friends School. Unfortunately, as students we never heard of Benjamin Lay or of Lucretia Mott, who are now my biggest Quaker heroes (I’m class of ’61). I hope later generations of Friends school students are learning about them and other Quakers who were ahead of their times and laid the foundations of social advances we take for granted now.

Janet Nagel
Greensboro, N.C.

I’ve just read—well, re-read—Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains, about the 50-year-old struggle to abolish slavery in the British empire. An omission: he doesn’t name all of the 12 men in the committee that formed in 1787, all Quakers except for Thomas Clarkson, who did most of the actual work. Clarkson was educated for the Anglican church, but decided not to become a clergyman. He once said his soul was 90 percent with the Quakers (it may have actually been 100 percent). At his funeral, the Quakers in attendance did something they almost never did for any human: they removed their hats.

Elizabeth Block
Toronto, Ont.

The search for solutions

Thanks so much for this video of Steve Chase’s description of his initial Israel support and his support now for both a safe Gaza for the Palestinians and security for the Israelis (“Moving Closer to a Beloved Community,” QuakerSpeak.com Nov.). I have been through the same change in view over the past year. American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and other groups are coming to this position and looking for a solution.

Jonathan Collett
Albanty, N.Y.

Most Friends here support AFSC’s call for ceasefire and value AFSC personnel who on site are trying to bring food, medicine, and hope of some sort. On the other hand, we share the pain felt by relatives of hostages still unreleased and we cannot imagine an Israel no longer existing. Thus many remain inescapably in the middle. Nevertheless, we cannot applaud Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians.

Peter Bien
Hanover, N.H.

Correction

In “Indigenous Alaskans Plan Traditional Healing Center Partially Funded with Quaker Reparations” (by Sharlee DiMenichi, FJ June online; Aug. print), the $18,000 in reparations given by Alaska Friends Conference included funds collected elsewhere. What we called an Indigenous day school on Douglas Island, Alaska, also had some non-Indigenous and boarding students. The preferred term for Indigenous Peoples in the state is Alaska Native, not Native Alaskan.