Take a Bath Hippy

So I went to a nonviolence training put on by NPF yesterday. If you've ever been to a hippy gathering, you know there're a lot of "get to know you" activities. Over the course of the day, people learned I was a Quaker and I learned a few others were as well, or had been at one time in their lives. At the least, they were, at some point, looking for Quakers.

One of these people, grew up Catholic but over time was told plainly, but with encouragement, that she would not be able to use her gifts to the fullest in that tradition and should find a way to be a pastor in another tradition. So with pastoral guidance and a desire to serve as a minister of the Gospel she started looking for a place she might fit. At least this is roughly how she tells it. During this search, she encountered the idea of Quakers. She was intrigued and hopeful, so over the course of about a decade she found Friends, hung out with them for a bit (I don't know if she would say she "worshipped" with them), but it didn't last. Did I mention she was a woman? Did I mention she lived in Orange County? Did I mention this was during the late 20th century? She joined a Christian tradition that didn't attach leadership or the presence of the Holy Spirit to her genitalia, and it wasn't "us".

I'm sure there may be many other mitigating circumstances that led to her relationship with Friends being so brief. Maybe she was theologically unorthodox, or headstrong and overbearing. Maybe she was just looking for a place to impose her ecclesial vision without regard for the body she oversaw. Maybe she was intellectually shallow. Maybe she was an outsider with a very different background. Those might all be good reasons to not encourage someone through the steps of leadership but we presently seem to think a penis and testicles somehow help to overcome those problems.

I also met a mother and daughter who came from a long line of Friends. Her, the mother's, immediate family left when she suspected it was more important to be called Evangelical than Christian, or when that distinction was expressing itself in a glorious affirmation of all things Reagan. She had been happy enough to express her faith and some sense of worship through pursuing what we popularly call social justice concerns, though she sometimes missed being a part of a community that shared her sense of religious conviction or experience. The time came when she sought to return to Friends. Her daughter had enjoyed stories of Friends worship and social activism, the justness of their relations, the public clarity of their positions, the focus on waiting and listening for the Spirit. Blah, blah, blah. So in part because of a World Religions class assignment, mother and daughter went to the nearby Friends church and sat in silence. Not because that was how this body worshipped, but because they were shocked by the experience. They haven't been back. That Friends church is now a Calvary Chapel. Good joke.

Whatever, right? I mean this is just three people. Would we want to trade these three people, or any like them (hippies mostly), for what "we" do have?