Real diversity

In my work as a Quaker pastor, I see many different kinds of people.

This weekend, I spent Saturday morning working beside a guy who is making some repairs to our historic meetinghouse. He is highly skilled at what he does, and he volunteers one weekend every month on projects which most of us would have no idea how to accomplish. He’s one of the hardest-working guys I know. Most of my so-called “help” on these projects involves fetching things, holding things, cleaning up and mostly staying out of his way while he does the work of 5 or 6 ordinary people.

A lot of Quaker meetings might not appreciate him, because he loves hunting. He has a hunter’s watchful eyes and he notices absolutely everything. He loves the outdoors and he’s happiest whenever he can spend time just being with nature. He can name every tree, almost every kind of wildlife, and tell you where to find things in every season. He brings home 6 or 7 deer every fall, and whatever he and his family can’t fit in their freezer, he donates to the local food pantry.

He’s a lot more politically conservative than most of the people you’d find in an unprogrammed Quaker meeting, but he’s thoughtful and he cares a lot more about character in people than about political affiliation. He’s unflinchingly honest, utterly reliable, and keeps his word about everything – while he wouldn’t put it in the same words as George Fox, Truth is at the heart of his spirituality.

This weekend, he brought his 7-year-old grandson with him to our monthly work day. It was a gift to watch the two of them together. He glowed with love and pride as he showed his grandson how to do simple tasks, and you could see the hope shining in his face that his grandson would learn the skills he has.

On Sunday morning I usually save the hour before meeting for worship begins to visit with people who arrive early. This Sunday, I talked for nearly an hour with one of our oldest greeters. He’s in his mid 80’s, and his great love in life is gospel music. He follows gospel groups the way other people follow sports teams – he knows their names, their hits, their life stories and concert tours.

This Sunday he brought in a laptop which his daughter handed down to me. He confessed that he didn’t know how to run it. He said he’d heard about the Internet, and wondered if any of his gospel music groups might be on it. We turned his laptop on, connected it to the meeting WiFi, and headed for YouTube.

As you might expect, it only took a few seconds before we found dozens of videos. As soon as one song finished, he’d name another that he wished he could see. After 4 or 5 gospel groups had showed up, there were tears of joy rolling down his cheeks. He said he’d heard there was some “really bad stuff” on the Internet, and that people have to be careful, but he said that being able to watch and hear his beloved music was “a miracle” to him.

I talked for a few minutes before meeting with another member, a retired police officer who just lost his daughter-in-law this week. In broken words, he said that “it wasn’t supposed to be this way” – that she shouldn’t have died so young.

I talked with our clerk of Ministry and Counsel, a wonderful guy from Brazil who is still homesick for his native country after 20 years of living in the U.S. A deeply spiritual person with a beautiful voice, he often enriches our worship with his singing and guitar.

The elder who sat with me on the facing bench is a middle-aged woman who left school at age 16 to work as a florist. April is her busiest time of the year and she was pretty tired last Sunday. For our meeting’s Easter breakfast, she brought a 5-gallon bucket full of flowers, and in 15 minutes she effortlessly whipped up a dozen gorgeous table decorations, which we later used for our Flowering Cross during Easter worship. One of her other gifts is that she offers the most beautiful and sensitive prayers of anyone in the entire meeting. I always feel privileged to listen when she prays.

What’s my point? Quakers talk a good game about diversity, but in the real world we often come up short. Just like everyone else, we like to be comfortable, and one easy path to comfort is to hang out with people who look and think just the way we do. Most Quaker meetings wind up with a remarkably homogenous makeup. Whether it’s a liberal unprogrammed meeting, an evangelical meeting, a university-centered meeting, or a rural meeting, there tends to be relatively little real diversity within the group.

Most meetings would be better off with a wider range of experiences and life journeys, and nearly all meetings would be better off ditching the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways we make people feel like outsiders when they “don’t fit” our meeting’s profile. Real diversity – the kind that welcomes people as they are, and eagerly listens to their stories and welcomes their gifts – is one of the most wonderful things we can offer.

Besides the usual Quaker assortment of teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers and counselors, the meeting I’m fortunate to serve includes:

• an environmental attorney
• the daughter of a famous NASCAR driver, who runs our local food pantry
• a woman who ran a successful hot air balloon business
• a blind programmer who worked for NASA
• a family who are all professional rodeo riders
• a transgendered wood carver
• a retired restaurant owner who also attends Pentecostal services
• a Mexican immigrant who runs a successful landscape business
• a young sawmill owner and his wife

We are blessed to have so many different people! Even though we seldom agree about politics, solutions to social problems, and many other things, we have discovered a unity which comes from a much deeper place.

“. . .though the way seem to thee divers, yet judge not the way, lest thou judge the Lord, and knowest not that several ways (seeming to reason) hath God to bring his people out by, yet all are but one in the end. . .Deep is the mystery of Godliness. . .”

–  George Fox, Epistle, 1653