By Cara Curtis

Cara Curtis
Linda asks, “What does it mean to live from the center?” She is sitting on a log at a mid-summer firecircle, twilight descending as we settle into familiar silence. This is a query that isn’t particularly new to me—in one form or another, it’s something I’ve been challenged to answer my whole life as an unprogrammed Quaker. In cinderblock meetinghouses, at “Big Meeting” in Friends schools, dozing on friends’ shoulders at conferences, and finally this evening at Quaker camp: what does it mean to live from the center? How do we let our lives speak? What does it mean to walk cheerfully and to answer God? I think vaguely, look up at the tree canopy under a darkening sky, and come to some of the same conclusions as usual—this is comforting, but not all that illuminating. Little do I know, or ever expect, that it will take flying across the country and meeting Friends with an entirely different experience of Quakerism for me to find new, more well-rounded truth in this familiar query.

Fast-forward six months. I am sitting in seat 9F of Southwest Airlines flight 1852, the lights of Portland, Oregon growing steadily brighter below me. Rapidly, linearly, and unavoidably at this point, I’m being delivered to a town where, by my own slightly overexcited design, I will spend the next nine days in intervisitation with Friends whose spiritual language is quite different from mine, whose worship is programmed and whose practice it is to actively spread the good news of their faith (the word for all of this, charged as it is, is “Evangelical”). In my emails with my hosts, they have been more friendly and welcoming than I could’ve asked for—certainly more than I could see myself being if some impetuous college student had invited herself into my community for a week. And yet incessantly, recklessly, and, I think, humanly, I have a strong impulse in this moment to hijack the plane and drive it back to my warm, safe, familiar east coast bubble. Or at least curl up into a ball and feign insanity.

Newberg Friends Church* * * *
I didn’t curl up into a ball, in the end—the authorities would’ve been brought in and it could’ve gotten messy. So that meant that I landed in Portland and was met by an extremely kind man who drove me back to his community in Newberg, 45 minutes southwest of the airport. We chatted agreeably the whole way, Bruce intermixing sentences about his life as a Christ-centered Friend with reflections on how he thinks John Edwards is an important voice for the poor. During my time in Newberg I stayed with the Gathercoals, a family in one of the local churches: father, mother, energetic five-year-old, and 18-year-old college student. Roy and Kathleen worked tirelessly despite Roy’s significant and painful health concerns to help me make connections with Friends in the community (Newberg, a town of 25,000, is the home of six Friends churches, the Friendsview retirement community, George Fox University, and the headquarters of Northwest Yearly Meeting—affiliated with Evangelical Friends International). Rarely have I come across people who better live out Jesus’ call to be, regardless of geographic proximity, unconditional and loving neighbors.

Even so, on the surface level at least, the religious life of Friends in Newberg felt viscerally different from my safe bubble that continually asks what it means to live from the center. Most noticeably, Friends in Newberg are almost uniformly Christ-centered: as disciples who strive to live out his message, Christ is a part of their daily lives (one Friend was puzzled when I noted that Friends where I come from were more into the social justice piece of Quakerism than the Christ-centered aspect: “how can you separate the two?” he asked, “that’s at the foundation of what Christ taught”). This one main difference translates into a host of smaller manifestations that band together to make Evangelical Friends’ practice feel very different from unprogrammed Friends’. Direct vocal prayer and Christ language are common before meals and in worship, which is mostly programmed. Men and women tend to to get married in their early 20s, even while still in college. And in addition to regular conference-type events that would feel familiar to an unprogrammed Friend, youth in Northwest Yearly Meeting go to Bible Quiz Meets where they compete in game show-style battles to showcase their prowess in scriptural recitation (they also get to spend the weekend with their friends). Coincidentally one of these meets was happening the weekend I was in Newberg, so I actually got to watch. (“Do you have Bible Quizzing back east?” a Friend from Idaho asked me innocently. I smiled weakly at the thought of my meeting’s tie-dye clad youth getting up early to practice reciting Colossians and Ephesians with anything near the facility that these kids did.)

So there it was, the community presented to me and in so many ways different from the Friends tradition that I know. Most viscerally jarring, I think, was seeing people put their arms in the air during musical worship—not too many did this, but a fair number of people did at some of the worship services I attended. At some deep level this struck my prejudiced, stereotyping liberal core (“gah! It’s just as I’d imagined!”). After a while, though, the practice grew on me a little bit and I was able to see it differently, a genuine idiosyncrasy of faith—not any weirder, say, than when we in unprogrammed meetings indulge in the endearing “silent clap” or look like we’re sleeping when we pray. And the further I went, too, the more I found practical differences like these receding under the swell of genuine unity on the most foundational tenants of our shared faith. The language of “that of God in everyone” might not have been the same (evangelical Friends were more likely to reflect on Fox’s revelation that “even Christ Jesus” could speak personally to one’s condition), but the experienced belief was still there, as central and fundamental as it is with unprogrammed Friends. I don’t want to gloss over things and make it sound like we’re exactly the same—we’re not, and some of the differences are difficult and painful to deal with. But differences also spice things up sometimes, giving us new avenues to find similar truths.

Between Newberg, OR and Haverford, PA, we also all seem to find both joy and struggle in the surrounding communities that inform our meetings and churches—be they made up of religion-suspicious east coast intellectuals or members of the evangelical mainstream. The symmetry that is present in this, actually, is striking: both in Newberg and in the mid-Atlantic where I’m from, Friends are working hard to love and answer our most radical convictions while also leaning towards the center of where Quakerism stands today. A story told to me by Northwest’s superintendent Colin Saxton resonated particularly: several years ago, he said, some Friends had felt a call to add “Evangelical” to Northwest Yearly Meeting’s name. The community had sat with the issue and struggled, but ultimately decided not to change the name for fear of isolating themselves, however symbolically, from dialogues with other Friends—I was reminded acutely of Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s struggle with Friends United Meeting’s hiring policies around homosexuality, capped by BYM’s ultimate decision to continue membership and dialogue with FUM.

Later on in my stay, I talked to Quaker students at George Fox University about my experience at Haverford College, where I’m studying now. Both they and I are in a significant minority by being Quaker (this is the norm at Friends schools) and as with the story of the yearly meetings, were pulled closer together by that shared faith. Specifically with them, I talked about the efforts of Haverford’s Quaker students to help the community remember that Quakerism is a religion and not simply a social justice mission. The George Fox students, it seemed to me, were doing the same thing in a very different context: the majority of their student body belongs to mainstream evangelical and fundamentalist churches, so that Quaker students are often in the position of educating their peers on what it means, beyond the peace testimony, to be Quaker. Their experiences and mine, rather than rigidly parallel as I had expected, really ended up presenting themselves as a symmetrical pattern of outreach from a center in Quakerism.

So after all of that, what does it really mean to live from the center? I had this query in mind again as my stay in Newberg neared its end, framed in this beautiful and confusing symmetry, wondering if this odd equilibrium could somehow be a map through the differences in our practice and help us pull towards the center as witnesses of the same Quaker truths.

And then Roy Gathercoal shook everything up. The afternoon of my last full day in Newberg, I stood by my host’s bedside as we talked about my visit. After listening politely to my symmetry paradigm, Roy announced that he thought reaching across the theological-cultural divide wasn’t actually all that important, that there were more crucial parts of Quakerism that needed to be brought out and held up. Roy envisioned a community composed of people whose sole purpose in life was seeking Light and Truth, a community of Friends that wouldn’t really pay attention to different branches or histories or conflicts within the faith. Answering that of God would be the most important thing to people in this community, a conviction that would lead them to take compassionate risks: whether legally, by sheltering unfairly-treated immigrants, financially by taking off work to protest treatment of U.S. detainees, or spiritually by constantly re-evaluating the source of their faith. But this is unrealistic, I protested—it’s not sustainable! It’s not practical! It would be really, really impossibly hard!

And it’s true: as much as my protests came from the same fear of risk that Roy was proposing to eliminate, living so radically from the center would be difficult—but perhaps that’s the point. Finding the center is not as easy as looking back to the Quaker testimonies, nor is it as simple as figuring out a way to compromise on theological or political dichotomies. To live from the center, to faithfully remain servants of the God within ourselves and everyone around us, is a constant struggle—and one we can engage in together. I’m grateful to Friends in Newberg for so many things, but especially for helping me find new truth in this old, familiar query.

I’d be glad to hear anyone’s thoughts, reactions, objections, or questions about my trip to Newberg and my reflections on it—I’m also happy to talk to people about the more day-to-day activities that I did, or offer help to anyone who is thinking of doing an intervisitation. ccur..reveal email..@haverford.edu.