The Meeting Place
At Briggflatts Meetinghouse, by Basil Bunting
Boasts time mocks cumber Rome. Wren
set up his own monument.
Others watch fells dwindle, think
the sun's fires sink.
Stones indeed sift to sand, oak
blends with saint's bones.
Yet for a little longer here
stone and oak shelter
silence while we ask nothing
but silence. Look how clouds dance
under the wind's wing, and leaves
delight in transience.
I recently attended a Quaker meeting (not Brigflatts) for the first time and wanted to record the very interesting experience I had there. Even at my most irreligious, as a young person, I had always held the Quakers in high but vague regard, as peace activists, as contemplatives, and as quite liturgically and theologically sober. Part of what fascinated me was the seeming consistency. I always saw those people taking daring risks for difficult causes. Though my experience was also far from what I might have expected.
I suppose that what tipped me over the edge was reading some of the work of Rufus Jones—The Double Search (1937), Some Exponents of Mystical Religion (1930), poking about in a bit more. Jones is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the American Friends Service Committee, and someone who famously traveled with a small group of Quakers into Nazi Germany only a month after Kristallnacht, seeking permission to assist the Jews there. Daring risks, difficult causes.
https://afsc.org/archive/our-day-german-gestapo-rufus-jones
There is so much more to say about Jones, but for me he was of primary interest as a bridge figure: Jones was a student of Josiah Royce—that first generation pragmatist or idealist, philosopher of loyalty, coiner of the “beloved community”—and he was a teacher of Howard Thurman, author of The Luminous Darkness (1965) and Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), both of whom in their own ways were important influences on Martin Luther King Jr, and both merit attention in their own right. I hope to write much more about both of these two later. In any case, I found Jones helpful and surprising in his references, I was shocked to find an epigraph from Fichte in The Double Search, and by Jones’s frequent long quotations of Robert Browning (he explains some of this in the book on Mysticism).
Of course I could add that some friends were raised in it, and others over the years had found their way to it, where it seemed to be the mirror of principles they had come to through punk or politics. But for some reason I never went to a meeting until reading Jones, though he is hardly sectarian and stands in a network of decidedly non-Quaker influence in both directions. I’m not sure why it felt first possible, then necessary, and then I was there. (with thanks to T and R and S and H for helping me find the door.)
I arrived on Sunday morning, exactly on time. I was asked in hush and hustle if I knew how everything worked, and I bluffed yes. This threw me into it. There was no chance to scan the room or get my bearings. I sat near the door.
The Quaker liturgy is called simply a meeting, in a room which could just as well host a panel or a union meeting, and I believe that most of the meeting houses are deliberately multi-purpose in just that way. But at the meeting, rather than resolutions, you sit and share stillness. This might be all, but then you can offer some ministry. This possibility of ministry is available to all, without ranks and the practice varies widely from meeting to meeting and from day to day. I had heard recently of a meeting somewhere else “everybody was talking and it felt like everyone had come to talk.” I had heard of another meeting, where people’s background was a bit more Buddhist, where it was a bit frustrating that no one spoke at all. No one doing anything wrong in either case. Just bears’ porridge problems.
We sat in silence for about a half hour, before the voices began. I am going to do my best to preserve the privacy which I feel is due to all involved, through fairly extreme acts of paraphrase. I will say that this was in England but no more. The first speaker addressed the attacks on asylum being made by the Labour government, and asked us to hold in mind those suffering war and displacement everywhere, problems of scapegoating. This was exactly what I might have expected to hear, bracingly political, animated by a clear sense of human dignity, without getting lost in abstraction. We sat a while longer. The second speaker mentioned the millions who have died or been injured in car crashes. We sat and I found that the two thoughts went together, it struck me that there is a problem of excessive focus on violent, sudden, or otherwise clearly blameworthy and avoidable forms of death. Do we focus on it too much? No one should have their life stolen, yet one could also say that no one will keep their life. Do we subtly lose perspective, acting as if our finitude and vulnerability to death were a matter of something stolen from us by others, to be won back? Do we lose track of the fact that the next million deaths in auto accidents don’t have to happen? One doesn’t have to be a utilitarian to see that that number could be cut in half. We don’t have to let it happen. I felt that I was in a swirl of responses, death meets us in the political, in the practical, in the existential. Who will help us out?
I sat with this a while longer and the third speaker began to speak on the topic of the evil of sex changes, about the disaster it was that all of these people’s bodies and lives were being totally destroyed, and that the whole society would regret having gone along with it. This person then sat down and began to cry. This was a sharp left turn for me emotionally and I now think it was for many others in the room. My impression, from across the room, was that this was a “detransitioner,” which is to say, someone who spoke from a place of some genuine experience in these matters and evidently a great deal of genuine pain. But I wonder why the experience of those few who turn back counts so much against the experience of the millions of us who persist in who we are.
My first thought was, “where am I? what kind of room have I stepped into here?” Obviously in England and anywhere else there are a fair number of spaces in which that point of view predominates, and in which people like me are suspect and despised. I thought I might leave, and one or two people did. It struck me however that I had better not assume this person speaks for the room, and in any case that it might be interesting to work out my reaction within the space of prayer, something which in any case I might want to do as soon as I got away.
It seemed in any case very likely that the person who had spoken didn’t speak for the group, no more than I would speak for the group if I were to say something now. Only the regulars would know that I wasn’t one.
My next thought was sadly of a few nasty things I might say, in response to the specifics, which I will spare us all. That wasn’t right either. In fact it began to make me sick.
I was lucky then to catch a small spiritual updraft, which allowed me to put away for the moment both anger and avoidance, to stay in the room.
There was at this point a fourth speaker, who said something to the effect that God’s love is for everybody and that we should all keep it in mind. You know what? I agree. I felt that this person was certainly responding to the extremely harsh message we had just heard and attempting to restore the basically welcoming environment that the room had been up to that moment. But also that as a response it was rather euphemistic, especially when compared with the three who had gone before.
We sat a while longer and I stood to speak. I had not planned to. What I said was roughly as follows:
Friends, I want to address the issue of sex changes and of regret, speaking frankly as a person who did change my sex and who doesn’t regret it, and as a person who lives in other respects a human life full of regret. I might prefer to say sin. I want to say first of all that I don’t wish to minimize this issue of trans regret, but to set it in a context alongside other forms of regret. I think that most of us in this room might regret lost love, the death of someone unreconciled to us, a person whose life we could not save, a person we seemed destined to be. We might regret a moment where we failed to stand up for someone, or to speak to a great evil in the world, or to find our way to the action. In the gospels, Christ’s apostles often do not recognize or understand him in deep ways, even as they walk for years in his actual presence. Yet Peter denies him. How? He was right there. Even on the road to Emmaus the resurrected Christ is not initially recognized. Is that lost time then? When we saw only half the picture?
For me these other much more serious forms of regret raise the question of our supposed entitlement to a life without it. That is, to a life without regret, one in which had it not been for that one mistake or that one area of pain, we would have hit the mark.
I see a rather different gift in our lives, one which can’t so easily be lost or sold away, that is the possibility of a life in which our many regrets come to be transformed. I am speaking of a life in which we cease to hang the entire fabric of sin on one hook, scapegoating our freedom misused just here, or our unfreedom which cinched just there.
There is indeed a great deal of pain in trans life, and mixed feelings, which I have often given voice to. I would like to inhabit a world in which I do not betray myself or anyone else by giving voice to. I would say that there is just as much of this pain in those who, like me, persist in this path, as there is in the small number who have turned from it. I wish too for a world in which these matters can be given adequate reflection, but I believe that in most cases the precondition of that reflection is a situation of freedom and respect, and a baseline sense that a trans body is not an especially broken body, and a trans life is not an especially broken life. Every body is broken, and so too is every life. Certainly mine is. But I wish us some perspective.
Then we sat for a while. There were announcements. I spoke with a few of the regulars. We understood each other reasonably well. We had tea and cookies and went home. I went to play music with some friends that were in town for the week recording an album. Life is sweet. I felt that I had actually had a taste of the real thing that day, more than I might have done if all had been smooth. The point is not at all in what one says, nor even that we were enabled to negotiate a pretty difficult conflict within a shared space both of meditation and deliberation, but rather I found precious that moment in which it was possible to choose against anger, and to choose against walking away. What can one hope for but to recognize the next such chance? I don’t say so as an invitation to hassle me. But I’m very grateful for the encounter.
With all respect to the denomination, I have to say I did not feel particularly drawn to become a Quaker. Too anarchistic for me. But I did come back, to a different meeting the following week, about which I am happy to have so much less to say and at which I said nothing but a few words in German when asked my name and where I was from. That is getting easier. I hope that in these times we can begin to show up everywhere, and that we can bring our vulnerability, our speculation (hope), and our spines.
Perhaps a week later, I learned a lovely formula from Rev Lucy Winkett, which connected all of it. She described the essence of forgiveness, ἄφεσις, as “giving up all hope of a better past.” It’s very hard for some of us to do that. Perhaps we can help each other out.
For now goodnight.
I miss so many of you and hope you will write,
Jackie