The Messy Business of Relationships

Tending the Permeable Membrane

The moment is etched in my brain. We were pulling out of the driveway, leaving all the familiarity of my childhood home, and heading out for the big, scary unknown of college. I was terrified. And I didn’t look back. It felt like I was emerging from a cocoon. I had no idea what kind of person I might become, but I was ready to find out.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t belonged there. My parents had intentionally set up circles of belonging: a big, close family that was nestled in an intentional community and a new Quaker meeting. I think of Mary Howell, the little old woman in sensible shoes who stood at the door of the meetinghouse and greeted all of us, especially the children, every Sunday. Every year on my birthday, she sent a card. I felt welcomed and known.

I think of the Bengis-Weisbergs, two elderly Sephardic Jewish women and their husbands who shared a house. Though their lives were as different from mine as I could imagine and our relationship was not close, they claimed me, and I claimed them as fellow members of our community. I think of Charles Lawrence who lived two doors down, a big, warm Black man who always greeted me with a smile that I gratefully soaked up.

Within those borders, largely progressive and professional, there was richness and blessing. But others were clearly outside our circle: the plumber, the twins in my first-grade class who were “mountain people” and explicitly named as other, the working-class, trailer-park kids who were the first on our bus and always sat in the back, and the people who lived in the poor Black section of town. And I felt that somehow I was part of the barrier. By devoting my energies to these communities, I was doing my part to keep them strong—right up to their boundaries and not beyond.

When strong borders have been valued—as they were in my family—and when history has kept us separate from others, reaching out and crossing those borders requires being assertively proactive. We have to decide to change our filters to allow different kinds of relationships to come in more easily, to increase permeability for the unknown.

Looking back at that moment in the driveway, the metaphor that comes to mind is that of the permeable membrane. I was looking for something more permeable than the membrane my parents had chosen, where more of the world could come in and more of me could get out. While this experience could be explained by a general young adult need to separate, I believe there’s more here. The choices we make about permeability may turn out to be more lifelong and consequential than we have ever considered. They certainly continue to affect my life.

The nature of a biological membrane—whether permeable, semi-permeable, or impermeable—has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to best ensure the survival of whatever it is enclosing. Yet we now have the frightening power to adjust our own membranes through our consciousness, deciding what we allow to enter into our being and what we barricade out. And if we don’t choose consciously, we will be vulnerable to being shaped unawarely by outside forces—of which there are many.

A strong cultural ethos of individualism encourages us to protect ourselves from absorbing anything that impinges on our own will or wants. On the other hand, there are penetrating external forces at work. Peer pressure and advertising messages around beauty, success, or coolness can easily find their way through our very pores. We’re encouraged to absorb endless bits of data from school, the news, and social media. But all this accumulated clutter increasingly blocks us from the wonders of the earth—and is there anything more important than letting Spirit shine out from inside ourselves, and taking it in from others?

George Fox famously called us to a life that might preach among and to all sorts of people, allowing us to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone. And the result, he said, will be being a blessing in them and having the witness of God in them bless us. Yet transferring this hope for complete divine permeability to more corporeal relationships can be problematic.

If our membrane is completely permeable, we have no identity, either as individuals or as a common body. We have no way of naming ourselves—no ability to be conscious actors on behalf of ourselves or others—and are left vulnerable to being acted on by more assertive forces from outside. This dynamic can be seen in situations ranging from domestic abuse to communities that flounder for lack of an articulated common identity. On the other hand, if our membrane is completely impermeable, we have secured our borders at the cost of losing access to all the life-giving opportunities and possibilities that lie outside.

The relative permeability that we seek is a messy business. How do I fearlessly live out all the way to my own borders while still respecting my boundaries and those of others? How do I decide who to let in? How do I resist the urge to try to fix that which is not mine to fix, while still stretching to connect and identify my part? How can I remember that a response of I can’t believe they did that is an indication that I have work to do on my own ability to believe? When I’m in the position of greater power in a relationship (such as that of a parent) and we are in conflict, how can I listen for the true answer to the question of who is the one having the problem?

As I consider the nature of my own membrane, I think of experiences of others reaching through to claim me when I wasn’t expecting it. I think of times when I have intentionally adjusted my filters to open myself more fully to the “other.” And I think of difficult times when relationship challenges have led a community to adjust for less openness.

I was blessed as a child to be claimed by Mary Howell at meeting, and by many of the grownups in our community. But my most memorable experience of being claimed came when our older son wanted a post-high-school adventure and landed in Nicaragua with a Quaker-supported program for homeless youth. One of his friends came home from a visit with some messages and gifts for us, including a small canvas painting for me. On the back it said, “A mi mama, de tu hijo, Chino” (To my mother, from your son, Chino). This was the first I’d heard of having a son named Chino! It turned out that he claimed my son as his brother, and me, by extension, as his mother, and I was defenseless in the face of such a bold claim of belonging. When we visited our first-born in Nicaragua, I made a special effort to get to know my newest son. This was not simple, given my marginal Spanish and his nonexistent English, but we both persevered.

I knew he’d had a rocky childhood, but it was only after we returned home and he wrote to me with stories of alcoholism and thoughts of suicide that I realized the depth of his challenges—and of mine in parenting him. But I had been claimed. I spent hours pouring over the dictionary and composing messages of encouragement and unconditional love. It was some of the hardest parenting I’d ever done in my life, and perhaps the most significant.

Looking back, I realize that I had been building my muscles to take on this challenge for many years. When strong borders have been valued—as they were in my family—and when history has kept us separate from others, reaching out and crossing those borders requires being assertively proactive. We have to decide to change our filters to allow different kinds of relationships to come in more easily, to increase permeability for the unknown.

As a young adult in a big, new city and largely Black neighborhood, I took such a step by signing up to be a tutor at the local community college, as a way of interacting with folks like the ones I saw on the street but perceived as other. Just that simple act was transformational for me. I also reached out very intentionally to a working-class woman I met through my job, excited about the potential of crossing that boundary. I made some bumbling mistakes around assuming that I had more to give in the relationship, and I regret how much I learned about class dynamics at her expense. But there was some real connection, and I was able to put that learning to use in other boundary-crossing relationships later on.

When our children were very small, we got to know a boy from the neighborhood who turned out to be a great babysitter. When we learned that he was in foster care and a new placement wasn’t working out, we made a general offer of support, and he showed up on our doorstep the next day. We ended up becoming his official foster parents till he aged out of the system, then unofficial parents ever since. I remember a moment, sitting on our couch together, my husband and I having decided that we were ready to take the leap, when I touched him and felt the miracle of being able to claim him as ours. The challenges have been ongoing: with race, class, age, and cultural differences to navigate along with all the bumps of adulthood. There have certainly been moments of extreme frustration and many mistakes but never a moment of regret.

Then there was the journey that started when my partner made friends with a Northern Ugandan refugee who had fled the brutality of Idi Amin’s rule. Our families grew to know each other, and we supported her efforts to return home and contribute to the well-being of her people. Her starting a school for war and AIDS orphans led us to more focused support and fundraising assistance, then to an eventual trip there ourselves, which was followed by more visits and the steady building of relationships in her community in Northern Uganda.

Over the years, I have become deeply embedded in a web of connections in that community. Many more young people now call me “mother.” There are joys when they celebrate achievements, head-scratching moments around cultural differences, and frustrations with technological obstacles to being in touch. And there is heartbreak. In addition to the pain of being witness to all the challenging and ongoing impacts of colonialism, we have known tragedy. One young man was caught in their carceral system and spent a year in jail, and another, dear to our hearts, was gunned down in civil unrest in neighboring South Sudan.

On a different front, when my partner and I realized that we had no relationships with Indigenous people on this continent, we adjusted our filters and began tuning our eyes and ears to possibilities. My sister and her partner had become deeply engaged in solidarity efforts with the Onondaga Nation, which had led to a solidarity paddle down the Hudson River to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first treaty with the Dutch, leading to a similar effort by folks from the Six Nations reserve in southern Ontario. They invited us, and we followed. So we have been part of the Two Row on the Grand canoe trip since 2016, an incredible gift in our lives.

We are likely to be aligned with Spirit when our borders are open to others. When we find ourselves closing them, perhaps the pathway of integrity calls on us to balance that closure by opening ourselves to even greater intentional permeability to the Divine.

All of these decisions to open and cross borders have led to miracles of connection. At other times, it’s less a decision and more just a matter of not conforming to assumptions about how open we can be. At work, the frame of professionalism becomes another kind of border closing that separates the helpers from the helped. But I’ve been rewarded beyond measure by a choice to buck the tide and reach for peer relationships. There was the time when I read in our meeting’s weekly bulletin that a Friend from Florida and her 11-year-old were moving to Philadelphia and needed a place to stay. Our youngest was 11 as well; a big room on our third floor was available; and we were used to sharing our space. So I reached out, we spoke on the phone, and Nadine and Sarah moved in sight unseen. They stayed for less than a year, but we’ve been enriching each other ever since. I had the opportunity to introduce Nadine to Friends Peace Teams, and she ran with it, opening doors for me to relationships throughout Asia and the West Pacific.

Then there are times when we lean toward decreasing our permeability, even closing our borders. Given our faith values around openness, and particularly openness to the stranger, this may be the harder choice. Sometimes such inclinations can be challenged. There are those within our borders whom we would prefer not to interact with, regardless of shared family, nationality, or social networks, but claiming them regardless of our feelings may be part of our work. At other times, it may be theirs to agree to certain basic human behaviors as a condition for being claimed.

Our Quaker community has been a rich source of relationships for which I am deeply grateful. As a meeting in the heart of Philadelphia, we get our share of attenders—more than our fair share, actually—and there’s nothing I love more than visiting during the fellowship hour after worship, showing up as fully myself as I possibly can, inviting people into relationship with me and with our communal life.

We’ve had a heartbreaking challenge recently with an attender whose mental and emotional reality makes her extraordinarily abrasive, accusatory, and unpredictable. For months, I found myself openheartedly willing to reach for that of God in her, seeing enough signs to know it was there, and rejoicing in every moment of clear connection. I know others were trying as well. It was a precious relationship: fragile but real. Then she did something with the little children that crossed a boundary and could not find a way to engage in conversation about it. She has been asked to not come back until she is willing to do that. I understand, and I deeply grieve the loss.

We are likely to be aligned with Spirit when our borders are open to others. When we find ourselves closing them, perhaps the pathway of integrity calls on us to balance that closure by opening ourselves to even greater intentional permeability to the Divine.