The dilemma of Quaker time

Quakers have a lot of terminology that can be overwhelming to convinced Quakers.  It can be daunting even for birthright Quakers.1  See what I mean?  We have our own terms for all kinds of things such as the Inner Light, after the manner of Friends, weighty Friend, open worship, recording, meeting house, and so many others, not to mention our many acronyms.  But a new term was introduced to me this week that I really like.  After one of the evening services at yearly meeting this week, the young adults invited the board of elders to come and listen to a great discussion that didn’t end until nearly midnight.  I was tired and still had to drive the forty minutes back to Forest Grove on entirely unlit backroads with someone else’s car.  On my way out, I mentioned to a friend to say a little prayer for safety and he responded, “Take your time--Quaker time.”  Immediately understanding the joke, I laughed.  But as I thought about it more, I considered the pithiness of that phrase, and I have decided it’s time to introduce this term into the lexicon of Quaker vocabulary.

Quaker time means taking the time you need to do something well and without unnecessary rush.    More like the kairos of time versus the kronos, to use old Greek examples.  In short, and slightly in jest, it means we take a long time to make decisions.  Indeed, one of my friends earlier this week compared Quaker decision making to the Ents of Lord of the Rings lore.  I had to agree and responded, “That is so true!” And then went on to quote Lord of the Rings because it’s always worth lingering on for just a little bit longer.

In Quaker tradition, we don’t vote on church decisions.  Church-wide decisions, local or yearly meeting level, are reached by consensus.2  This is no longer the case for all Quakers today, but it is still the way of doing business for many yearly meetings, including mine.

Consensus takes time.  Yearly Meeting annual sessions meet for a collective five days with the business meeting gathering for three hours a day on all but one of those days.  Easier decisions can be made over a course of a few days.  Harder decisions, ones with great potential to breed divisiveness, discord, damaging conflict and that come with an element of fear are approached lightly and with great deliberation before even reaching the floor of the business meeting.  These discussions can take years.  Sometimes the process does not feel so unlike the gathering of the Ents, and those who are unaccustomed to it, may feel much like the young hobbits desperate for the Ents to make a decision to fight.  “Our friends are out there!” they cry to Treebeard.  They need our help!  They can not fight this war on their own.”  Yet, Treebeard responds, “But you must understand, young hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish, and we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.”  That is not so unlike the Quaker passage of time.  It takes a long time to say things in Quaker-speak.  

And yet, some of these discussions come with a paradox, a sense of urgency, and the great quandary is discerning when to be urgent and when to be slow.  The paradox arrives when the sense of urgency and the need to be slow simultaneously hold incomparably dire importance.

This year, my yearly meeting has come to discover that we as a whole are not in unity over our feelings and understanding around homosexuality.  It was known that one church in particular held a different view than our conservative Faith and Practice statement, but that was about it until the conversation was broken wide open last year due to an outside concern from a mixed group of Quakers and non-Quakers.  When that portion of our Faith and Practice was brought to the floor of the business meeting this year, we discovered great disunity throughout our yearly meeting and recognized a need to have much longer conversations about it, especially with our local meetings.3  Because we don’t want a divide to happen, and because we recognize that God values time, too, that minds can’t be pushed to change, we know time is our only option.

Yet, equally paramount is the reality of the lives of gay children.  As a gay friend/Friend, who both stupidly and very bravely and wisely attended the sessions this year, stated in that above mentioned young adult discussion, children are dying at an alarming rate.  They are harassed, beaten up, disregarded, thrown out of their own homes, and given the absolute opposite of the love of Jesus.  With no where left to feel any sense of goodness about themselves, they take their lives.  And the worst contributor to this is the Church.

And so here Northwest Yearly Meeting sits, as with so many of the big questions in life, in a paradox.  We also rest, somewhat precariously, on the edge of a precipice we can’t yet see out over, wondering what we can offer to our youth, perhaps unaware of just how much our youth will end up offering us in this discussion as the years pass through.  

Many of us Christians are baffled by the strange story of Jesus’ progressive healing of the blind man, when it seemed to take him multiple times to accurately sharpen the man’s vision.  But that story carried a new kind of weight for me this week, a descriptive power I had never seen before.  Change and shift in thoughts and ideas don’t happen suddenly.  Life is constantly evolving; our thought processes are not exempt.  Like this man’s sight, clarity in our understanding of faith and issues comes slowly as we gather more information and stories so as to, as one of my seminary professors once said, give the Holy Spirit more to work with.  When a sizable group of people with differing opinions come together and desire to reach consensus on an issue, we have to recognize the time it will take for true clarity to come, and we have to be prepared to see in ways we never could have guessed.  

And yet, on an issue as urgent as the one before us, I am left holding a morass of questions.  We discuss homosexuality as an issue as if it can be shelved at inconvenient times, put on hold while we eat dinner and go to work.  But the LGBTQ community is more than an issue; it’s people.  It’s real human lives, and so many of them are hanging in the balance desperately wishing that someone would simply love them.  How many more children will die during the lengthy amount of time--years, I assume--it will take to begin making significant movement in this area as a yearly meeting?  But then how many lives would be lost if we rushed a decision and forced a gulf to open up between our churches and people?  Patience is a virtue, we know.  Yet when children are dying from utter despair, patience feels more like a necessary evil.  

It does, indeed, take a long time to say what needs to be said and to make decisions in the Quaker world.  We try our best not to do either unless we believe they are worth doing.  But we can’t deny the cries from those who continue to tell us their friends are out there, that they cannot fight this on their own.  What does it look like to be faithful to the Holy Spirit’s leading for the Northwest Yearly Meeting?  It’s hard to say.  Time will tell.  Quaker time.

1. A convinced Quaker is one who came into the Quaker church from elsewhere and chose to become Quaker.  A birthright Quaker is one who is born into the Quaker tradition. 

2.  Consensus doesn’t mean everyone agrees wholeheartedly with a decision.  It means all are given the chance to be heard, the holy spirit is given the time to speak, and a general trust is built around the community and the subject at hand so that if an agreement is reached to approve an action and there are still a few dissenters, these dissenters have come to trust the community even if they, themselves, do not agree.  If they strongly disagree, they have permission to put their names on the official minute stating so.

3. individual churches