A Friendly Religion

I first heard about the Quakers from my mother. Born in 1903 to a very large immigrant family in a Jewish farming community in southern New Jersey, Woodbine by name, she remembered how, during economic hard times, the Quakers had supplied her family with food, clothing, and other needed things. Now my mother, like other Jewish immigrant children of her generation, never had much good to say about Christians in general, but when it came to the Religious Society of Friends, that was a different story. As we would say today, they walked their talk. And as far as Mother was concerned, they were okay...

I really had no connection with Quakers or Quakerism—sophomoric jokes about thees and thous aside—until much, much later. My second wife, Cedar Barstow, though of an old New England family of Congregationalists, attended a Quaker-affiliated college, Earlham in Indiana; like what she found there; and joined the Meeting. By the time I came into her life in 2009, she no longer attended Friends Meetings but occasionally went to Boulder’s First Congregational Church, where the senior minister and her husband were Cedar’s friends. As it happened, she, and then we, lived a few blocks from the local Meetinghouse, where our spiritual practice took place twice a week. By this point I was transitioning from Catholicism to Episcopalianism—referred to by some as “Catholic light”—and in any case was interested in learning more about the Religious Society of Friends, whose worship space I was so frequently in. Here is some of what I learned.

The 17th century was a period of religious turmoil in England. With growing literacy, people were now reading and discussing the Bible on their own, and many were bothered by the discrepancy between Jesus’ simple life and his teachings of love they found there and the high rituals in the Church of England. This was also the time when Calvinistic Puritanism was in the ascendancy with Cromwell and his Round Heads coming into power. Born in 1624 in a village in the English Midlands, George Fox, the son of a weaver, showed a strong interest in religion from an early age. Although he worked as a shoemaker, his true calling was to create and spread a version of Christianity based on his personal revelations, or “openings,” as he called them. His worldview was based on simplicity, humility, honesty, and the avoidance of luxuries. Most importantly, he believed that every human being carried the “inner light” of the Holy Spirit within them and that they should look there, not to learned church officials and ecclesiastical dogma, for guidance in life. He became an itinerant preacher in England and was often jailed for his dissenting opinions. Nonetheless, he found followers there, in the Low Countries, and even in North America. Today there are approximately 400,000 Friends, as they are called as well as Quakers, in 87 countries.

​Some Quaker Meetings are led by a paid minister. But many so-called “unprogrammed” Meetings are lay-led. Decisions are taken collectively by “the sense of the Meeting,” and worshippers are free to remain quiet in a religious service or stand and offer a thought as the Spirit moves them. Also, Quakers are very concerned with social justice and have long had an effective lobbying presence in Washington, D.C. They are anti-war, anti-racism, and strongly in favor of helping the poor and needy as in the case of my mother and her family over a century ago. Quakerism may not be everyone’s taste in religion. I myself prefer the “smells and bells” of Anglicanism. But one has to marvel at this small persevering sect that in its simplicity strives to incorporate the values espoused by Jesus in the daily life of its congregants.

19th-century engraving of George Fox (1624-1691), based on a painting of unknown date