Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, where Illinois State University is located — and where I met with Friends the night before last — is home to a remarkably diverse small Quaker population.
There are about a dozen Friends involved in various ways in the local meeting — a liberal unprogrammed meeting, affiliated with Illinois Yearly Meeting and FGC, which hosted my visit to the town. Two other families in town attend an older, rural meeting with ancient Hicksite roots, also Illinois YM-affiliated, fifty miles away. There is one Friends household from an FUM background who do not presently worship with unprogrammed Friends of either sort. And there are a few Friends who are more closely tied to yearly meeting or broader Friends’ organizations than to any local group whatsoever.
I regret that I was unable to meet with any Friends but those in the local meeting. To my hosts’ credit, they tried to draw in other Friends, but without success. All the same, four Friends did take the time to meet with me, and together they comprised about one-third of the local meeting: a very good turnout, I believe.
Since we’d had a hard time getting focused on discernment in both the previous two communities I’d visited, I thought it might be good to begin with a longer discussion of the process of corporate discernment in the Friends tradition this time around. This seemed to be helpful to everyone, myself included. And yet we still had trouble staying on topic — and I confess that I was at least as guilty as anyone else there! So I think one of my top priorities is going to have to be to work on my own behavior. (Nothing new there.)
As before, I asked Friends present for their help in discerning answers to these two questions: First, What sort of testimony or testimonies might we be called to by God’s Spirit, that would speak to the question of how to live in harmony with all God’s creation? And second, How might we unite as Friends around a common testimony or testimonies in this area? — for we Friends are badly divided on such matters at the present time.
One Friend responded by asking, What is “harmony”? He offered the example of wind farms — they initial seem like a step toward harmony with nature, but there may be complications; harmony may turn out to be not what one expects.
Another Friend mused about harmony in the musical sense, about polyphony, and about discords that build to a resolution. He wondered whether living in harmony with nature might be a similar sort of thing.
A Friend offered the endangering and extinction of human languages (e.g., Hmong) as an analogy for the endangering and extinction of species, suggesting that the right responses to these two classes of problems might also be similar. She spoke of her struggles to preserve endangered spoken languages.
A Friend offered, as a step toward answering both the questions I raised: We are called to show up as love. This can be hard: in the context of nuclear power and nuclear waste, loving plutonium may not be possible. But being present as loving individuals is possible even when loving plutonium is not.
A Friend observed that part of the answer may be, We give back to the earth and to nature what we have taken from it. He talked about how we will need to learn to consume less, and how difficult that will be for us.
A Friend asked us to consider testimonies as processes, rather than as goals.
One Friend spoke of the frustration of being driven by a concern about an environmental issue, and finding no one in the larger community willing to listen. She had tried every sort of outreach without success. Indeed, one person’s response to her expressions of concern — asserting that she was perhaps not succeeding because she was not acting out of total love — had caused her to question whether she was led by the Spirit in this matter or not.
So much was said at this meeting that I cannot remember it all. (Should any Bloomington-Normal Friends chance to read this report, and remember some of the things I’ve left out, I hope they will help me fill in the missing pieces.)
After our meeting concluded, one Friend commented that the local Friends meeting had never really labored for discernment before. Another Friend said that the evening’s practice in discernment may have been one of the bigger benefits of the occasion. I was quite struck by these comments — and as a matter of fact, I’m still pondering them.
The Friends meetings where I spent most of my own adult life had to labor, while I was there, for corporate discernment on many, many matters: illegal immigration (“Sanctuary”) questions, gay and lesbian rights questions, questions of proper versus improper eldering, questions of granting or refusing membership to applicants who didn’t fit meeting expectations, and of course environmental questions as well. Some of these questions divided us deeply, and the fact that they did so divide us, took us by surprise, so that we could not evade the questions and pretend they didn’t exist, but were plunged into debate and crisis and forced to work the questions through.
I have been assuming that other Friends elsewhere have had similar experiences with divisive issues in their own meetings, but now I am realizing: perhaps this isn’t true. And while I wouldn’t have thought of my old meetings’ often agonized struggles toward discernment as a blessing, now, in retrospect, I am forced to think that perhaps they were.
