The Promise of Right Relationship

By Pamela Haines. Christian Alternative Books (Quaker Quicks), 2024. 96 pages. $10.95/paperback; $5.99/eBook.

In The Promise of Right Relationship, Friend Pamela Haines asks us to consider our material and economic lives in light of how we want to live our spiritual and emotional lives: in intentional relationships with one another and with those we love. This contribution to Christian Alternative’s Quaker Quicks collection asks us less about what right relationship promises us and more about how we fulfill the promises of our hearts to ourselves, our children, and our communities.

First, are we good? Is being good the point? Haines discusses her Quaker upbringing and how she never thought she had anything less than a good childhood until, as an adult, she understood what had been unspoken: a demanding father; an unfulfilled mother; and an expectation she would like school (when, in fact, she did not). But did she “have the right” to complain? Complaining about her situation when so many needs in the world seem so much greater than her own felt wrong: selfish. But then she realized that to be “opaquely” fine, to be simply good, in light of the suffering of the world, is to be “walling off great pieces of reality and agreeing to a small and defended life.” It is not right relationship with the world to be outside of it, as opposed to connected with it.

Truth-telling and negotiation with others is what Haines means by “right relationship.” This is a definition she perhaps shares with Quaker public Friend John Woolman, who also used the phrase in the eighteenth century. Woolman pursued right relationship with his community, the enslaved within it, and with Native people. It is he to whom Haines dedicates this little booklet.

Repair is essential in Haines’s vision. She repairs her clothes: something that puts her in touch both with her ancestors who made do and with her grandchildren who will live in a world of diminishing resources and also will need to make do. She finds that repair is essential to “human assets” as well. Though Haines recognizes how “convenience pollutes,” she realizes that not everyone has had the consumer choices she has now. It is also clear to her that “our wounds and insecurities [make] us so vulnerable to the lures of comfort” in the form of that which is wasteful, like paper goods and “junky plastic toys.” She struggles with her position: “I want us to be on each other’s side as we puzzle this thing out together.”

Work is not about a product, according to Haines, rather it is an expression of love. To-do lists are seductive to her continuing desire to be productive, so she names tasks for people and “other anchors” in a web of connections. As Haines acts as an elder to a younger climate activist, she discovers that mutuality helps her see that she doesn’t “know the answers.” What her wisdom shows her is that her eldership is about “provid[ing] an open space for the problem to be considered.”

Indeed, The Promise of Right Relationship is fittingly not a how-to book. It is a thoughtful source of queries as we all embark more deeply in relationship with a quickly changing world, where our childhood emotional and consumption habits are being effectively challenged.

Haines calls on us to have courage, and she courageously asks us to know her better through sharing her experience of challenge as someone who disdains its lack. “Rather than going on auto-pilot to do what seemed ‘brave,’” she writes, “I found myself choosing a path where I could stay more present and connected to myself, while still being involved in the action as a whole.”

What is clear from the promise of right relationship is that it never comes in a prepackaged box. Right relationship is a battle with contradictions and the challenge of moving closer to the truth with those we are in conflict with, and with those we already know we love in all their messy complexity. Right relationship is to be fully alive to the possibilities of Spirit with the eyes, hands, and feet that we have alongside those that are all around us.

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Windy Cooler, a member of Sandy Spring (Md.) Meeting, describes herself as a practical theologian, public minister, good Quaker pirate, and cultural worker.