When, at the department store where I work, I first announced my plan to walk from my North Omaha home to Virginia, most of my co-workers had very nice things to say. (Well, this is the upper Midwest. We’re nice to one another here.)
One of my co-workers, though, overcome by a momentary loss of inhibition, shook his head and said, “You’re crazy.”
A couple of my relatives (non-Quakers) have had similar reactions: they don’t see much good in what I propose to do, but they do see many dangers I might face walking solo through the hinterlands. Accordingly they have real doubts about my basic common sense.
Then there’s the Quaker community. Here I mostly get support — even, in many cases, enthusiastic support. But I also get the occasional Friend who tells me, very sweetly, “You don’t have to do this, you know. You can call it off.” And there are also Friends who have worried aloud that I might be doing this walk for self-aggrandizement — for attention, or a heightened sense of importance.
All these responses come down, in one way or another, to a concern about the nature of the thing that moves me to do this. Is it insanity? Foolishness? Stubborn self-will? A need for stroking?
Perhaps the most constructive way in which I’ve heard this concern expressed was the way it was put to me by another member of my monthly meeting, last November, and again by a New York City Friend last week. “How do you know it’s a genuine leading?” they asked.
Such questions of course have a make-or-break significance for my walk. Had I not been able to address them in a satisfactory way, at least among Friends, my proposed walk would probably not have passed the test of group discernment, I would not now be receiving the support I’m getting from Friends, and the walk would not now be about to happen.
But beyond that, a number of you may already have recognized that these are questions pivotal to Quakerism as a whole. They are a way of asking whether the divine is truly as Quakerism represents it: a more-than-force that can teach the faithful how to walk through the world and can give the prophets right words to say. They’re a way of asking if there is any way we can ever really know what God wants of us, or if all claims to know are self-deception. If such questions cannot be satisfactorily answered, the whole basis of traditional Quakerism falls to pieces.
Thus these questions belong to the class of questions that every Friend needs to be able to answer — not just me.
I do have my own answers to these questions, and I intend to present them here some time in the next few days.
