One of the longest threads in my life has been my search for a Spiritual Path that would bring more understanding and meaning to my life. My mother talked often about her faith giving her strength, and I very much enjoyed the church community of the United Church of Canada as a child, but as I matured I found more and more places of strong discomfort with living within this traditional church organisation.
I explored a number of different churches over time, and became quite disillusioned. During my early forties I was working with a couple of Quakers on a social justice project in my town, and after a few long conversations and peppering them with questions, they invited me to come and check it out for myself. I wondered whether I could sit quietly for a whole hour. Although it was, and is sometimes still. a little difficult, I did have a very important experience and sense of connection while I was there. I took home some written material to look at and found myself crying that afternoon with gratitude for the sense of having found something that could really lead me back into a spiritual community.
I got involved and became a regular "attender" at meetings of the Religious Society of Friends, as they call themselves. Still it took me a long time to trust that any Christian organisation could really be as loving as this one seemed to be. More than ten years later I realised I really wanted to be able to say "I am a Friend", and I applied for membership.
The Friends meeting that I am involved with is part of the unprogrammed tradition of the Religious Society of Friends. This means we don't plan activites in our worship services, and anyone who is inspired to do so may speak during the meeting. Sometimes we are called "the silent Quakers", and there are often long silences in our meetings, but inspired contributions are always welcome.
There is another branch of Quakers known as the programmed Friends. They organise their meeting for worship with hymns, readings, led prayers, and a prepared message by a pastor or other speaker. Generally Friends in this tradition are more Biblically focused and more traditional in their interpretation of Christianity.
Quakers use a series of Quaker Testimonies as guides in our lives. While we do study the bible, and most Quakers consider themselves Christians, we are also inspired by other works of wisdom and other teachers.
Quaker Testimonies are based on the ideas of simplicity , peace , integrity , community and equality . They start with the assumption that there is some spiritual core that is essential "good" in every human on earth. This fits well with what I have always thought, that every person has the possibility to grow, learn and become a better person.
I tremendously enjoy the diversity among the Friends I worship with. We are made up of people with a very traditional view of Christianity, people who see the world from a more Budhist perspective, people who are practising pagans, and many you would call humanists. The amazing thing is how all these different perspectives find the trust and respect and affection to overcome the differences and allow them to worship together.
Quakers are idealists but they are certainly not perfect. Sometimes people who admire that idealism have a hard time with it when a Quaker stumbles on the road and fails to live up to that idealism. However, I have met many of the most forgiving and accepting people I have ever known in Quaker circles, and I have learned to be a much more forgiving and understanding person than I was before I met the Friends. This has made me a better person by far and I am very interested to see where this growing will take me.