Relationships in the Quaker Community

Unusual Connections and the Joy of Helping

Are relationships in the Quaker community unusual in some ways? Well, generally they’re like any other relationships: some bad, some good. But when I compare relationships I’ve had or seen in the Quaker community with relationships at work, with neighbors, at school, or in other religious groups, I see differences. Two questions remain. The broader question is: what are these differences? The deeper question is: what causes them?

Helping

The most noticeable difference is a willingness to help others in need. I’ve seen people in my meetings go above and beyond to help each other. I never saw this kind of caring in the many other religious groups I’ve been involved in. The ones I’ve participated in for at least a year include the Presbyterian Church, Zen, the Neo-American Church, Siddha Yoga, Sahaj Marg, Vipassana, and Subud. Most of the religious groups I was part of focused on teaching people how to meditate and on providing a place to practice. In these groups, I almost never made friends or saw people organizing to help fellow meditators who were in distress. There wasn’t even a clear way to become well-acquainted with other members to know what problems they were facing.

By way of contrast, I learned that helping other members was possible and valued in Quaker meetings because I regularly saw it happen. I also read about it in Quaker teachings. As stated in my yearly meeting’s Faith and Practice: “All members of the Meeting community should share in the care of one another.” I want to be clear: I’m not saying that this kind of caring and helping doesn’t happen in other religious groups; I’m just saying that I didn’t see it in the ones I was part of.

A beautiful example of Quakers helping another Quaker in need is the relationship between two people in my previous monthly meeting: my friend Stanford Searl and a woman I’ll call Sofia. Stan was chitchatting with people after meeting one day and learned that Sofia had cancer and needed rides to get to her chemotherapy. Although he did not know her very well, he began regularly taking her. After completing her treatments, Stan went with Sofia to her oncologist, who told her that her tumors had only decreased a little, and the cancer was essentially everywhere. Devastated, they went back to her condo and cried.

Stan recruited people from our meeting to do her shopping and help her with dressing, bathing, and eating. They got hospice in, and they made sure her medication was okay, so that she wouldn’t be in pain. But the hospice didn’t do 24-hour care. That’s where people from meeting came in. Stan visited almost every other day, bringing his keyboard and Quaker hymnal. He’d play hymns, and they’d sing together.

Sofia was estranged from her mother, so Stan called her and urged her to visit, and she came. Stan said:

Sofia often would sit in a chair in the living room, and the light would pour in; it was so beautiful, especially in the late afternoon. Her mother talked to her, and one day, they held hands. She sat in the chair, and her mother said a presence appeared, and a Holy light surrounded her that came out of the top of her head in the midst of a bowl of light. Sofia and her mother had a kind of epiphany. It was how the Spirit found a way into their lives—to connect and heal them.

As Sofia was dying and drifting in and out of consciousness, Stan played through the hundreds of works in the Friends General Conference hymnal Worship in Song. Stan and others in the meeting helped Sofia in a big way, but I’ve also seen Quakers care for each other in small ways: like taking care of a friend’s dog and garden when they are out of town.

The Joy of Helping

When I help others in my meeting, I often experience real joy, especially if I’m part of a group effort. An elderly couple who had been active in meeting for decades eventually became too frail to come to our meetinghouse, so some of us would regularly hold worship at their farmhouse. I didn’t know them well, but I got to know them better, and there was real connection and joy among us.

One of the most joyous ways I’ve seen this helping happen is in work parties. The Spirit has always been strong in these. Although my current meeting is small, it has had several work parties in the last few years. One was for Stuart Smith, a friend from my meeting who had a stroke. His house is wood-heated, and the stroke prevented him from splitting logs into pieces that were small enough to fit into his wood-burning stove. So a work party was organized, and about 20 of us—from teens to seniors—packed our lunches, drove to his house in the foothills, and spent the day splitting enough wood to get his family through the winter. There was a delightful sense of connection in this work party.

Overall I’ve felt more of a desire to help others in my meeting than I have with people in other settings (with the exception of my family). Sometimes I find myself wanting to help fellow Quakers I barely know or haven’t even met. I’ve also seen this with other Quakers. This phenomenon is intriguing.

I first noticed this in my current monthly meeting. A man I’ll call Steve had been active in meeting for many years but hadn’t attended in the last several years. Steve’s health had deteriorated. He began losing control of his bowels and had to move from an assisted living facility to a nursing home. His condition meant that he couldn’t do the actual moving of his possessions into a storage facility or clean the apartment he was leaving, so several people from our meeting formed a work party to help out. The work went late into the night. There was a joyful quality to the work, even when running a rented rug shampooer over the carpet to remove the caked-on crap. The experience of joy was surprising, given what we were doing and since I hadn’t met Steve yet.

Sometimes this desire to help fellow Quakers extends beyond our Quaker meeting to the world Quaker community. Two Friends from my meeting, Amy and Chamba Cooke, had built a beautiful circular house by hand. It was adjacent to Sierra Friends Center, where our meetinghouse is, and was in an “extreme fire danger” area of California. A wildfire ripped through the area in August 2020 and burned down their house. Quakers from Sweden to Australia, most of whom were total strangers, donated money to help Amy and Chamba get back on their feet. They received more money than they needed, so they passed it on to other Friends whose houses had also been destroyed in the fire.

The stories of Steve, Amy, and Chamba led me to suspect that at some level, I have a relationship and connection with all Quakers, even those I may never know.

Even with many exceptions, on the whole, my relationships with Quakers have been deeper than those I’ve had outside of Quakerism. And this seems to be the experience of many other Quakers. 

Wait a Minute!

I can already imagine the online comments about this article: “That may be your experience, but it’s not at all like mine!” I realize that many people have not had the same type of positive experiences that I have. Their experience may be the exact opposite of mine. I even have friends who left their meeting feeling abandoned and betrayed.

I’m not saying that the two Quaker meetings I’ve been a part of are more caring than other meetings, that Quakers are more willing to help each other than people in other religious groups, or that I always experienced these positive relationships with everyone in my meeting. What I am saying is that even with many exceptions, on the whole, my relationships with Quakers have been deeper than those I’ve had outside of Quakerism. And this seems to be the experience of many other Quakers. This leaves the question: why are so many Quaker relationships like this?

A Sense of Connection

One reason is the sense of connection that Quakers often experience with each other. This can happen not only in mundane activities, like helping someone move, but also in spiritual activities like worship. As my friend Sharon told me, “I can feel the connectedness in meeting. There’s a warmth and connection in the silence.”

Sometimes, the connection during worship borders on the telepathic. Many people have said that they were thinking about something and just when they were about to speak, someone else stood up and said what they were just about to say. Sharon said that sometimes during worship, she’d “see movies” in her mind, and shortly afterward, others would say something that clarified what she’d been experiencing. These experiences reflect an unusually intimate connection that I’m not sure you see in many other religions.

A Feeling of Safety

This sense of connection often leads to relationships that are characterized by feelings of safety. I’ve noticed three types that often intertwine.

The first type of safety has to do with help. Not only do Quakers often want to help each other, but they also often feel safe asking for help for things they’d never ask for elsewhere. For example, years ago when I lost my job, I felt that I could call on other Quakers to help me by being on my clearness committee. There was a long tradition of helping each other in my meeting and in Quakerism in general, so I knew it wouldn’t seem odd if I asked people, some of whom I did not know well. But they all wanted to help. When I lost my job, it was fellow Quakers who spent hours helping me find a new direction for my career.

The second type of safety that characterizes so many relationships between Quakers is “psychological safety,” which is a technical term that refers to being confident that you won’t be humiliated or penalized if you speak up with criticism, bring up new ideas or concerns, ask questions, or point out mistakes. In Quaker groups, I feel that I can raise my doubts and concerns. This behavior has not been welcomed in other religious groups I’ve been in. My friend Dean, who was a Lutheran minister for 12 years, also values the psychological safety he experiences in Quakerism. He said of his previous church, “Questioning was not kosher. With Quakers, I can be honest. I can say, ‘I’m not sure this is right.’ Questioning is welcome.”

The third type of emotional safety allows me to be vulnerable in relationships with fellow Quakers. For example, it feels safe to talk with other Quakers about religion, spirituality, and mystical experiences. People often feel uncomfortable talking about these topics. In Mark Read’s dissertation research on Quakers in the workplace, participants said things like, “It feels harder saying I am Quaker to people than it does saying I’m gay.” Most people who have had a mystical experience don’t tell anyone about it—not even their spouses. But I can talk about my spirituality with fellow Quakers, knowing that we share our Quaker identity and most of the same values.

Most people who have had a mystical experience don’t tell anyone about it—not even their spouses. But I can talk about my spirituality with fellow Quakers, knowing that we share our Quaker identity and most of the same values.

Community

If the sense of connection between Quakers leads to a greater willingness to help each other and a sense of safety, what leads to the sense of connection? I think it’s the sense of community. Some people define community as a group of people who care about each other. A more technical definition of community is a group of people who share particular characteristics or live in the same place. It seems that the depth I see in so many relationships among Quakers happens because we are a community. But we aren’t just any community. As Amy Cooke once pointed out to me, historically Quakers “do not show up and are ministered to, but actively take that role in our communities.” Also our community isn’t based on being neighbors or a shared interest like a mutual love of Taylor Swift’s music. It’s based on our deepest values and mutual connection to the Spirit. We Quakers share common religious practices, beliefs, ways of conducting business, moral commitments, and values, as well as a common faith, history, and language. Our meetings (especially monthly meetings) share all these in addition to a common location. This sense of community leads to relationships that have greater personal intimacy, psychological depth, and emotional connection. It develops a feeling of fellowship with others, a shared identity as Quakers, and a community spirit.

The meaningful relationships with other Quakers that I’ve experienced and seen may come from our connection to the Spirit; the sense of belonging that comes from our monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings; and to Quakerism in general. We share a Quaker identity with people in these groups.

Years ago, my wife was suddenly struck by a severe illness of the inner ear. She was on bed rest, and she said the room seemed to spin because of vertigo. It was so intense that she could only make her way from the bed to the bathroom if she put her hands on my shoulders and I led her there. Then this happened: people from our meeting started showing up with dinner for us, a different Friend every evening. There were always enough leftovers for lunch the next day. My wife told me how she felt so cared for, and remarked, “If I’d ever had any doubt, then I knew: This is my meeting. This is my meeting.”

It was the people from our meeting community who brought food to our house: not our neighbors, not people from her workplace, and not people from an online community she participated in.

Belonging to the same community and the resulting sense of connection with one another softens the boundaries between members. It leads us to care for each other, feel comfortable asking for help, want to help others in our community, feel that we matter, feel safe with others in our community, and to be able to be more vulnerable with others. For many of us, this sense of community and the connection with each other we experience through the Spirit helps make so many relationships in the Quaker community deeper.

Friends Journal Author Chat