by Douglas Steere
I had as a friend an old Quaker scholar in Sweden, Emelia Fogelklou Norlind, who died almost a decade ago. She was a gifted historian of spirituality of a very eclectic sort. She wrote the best book on St. Birgitta of Sweden, a book that has been translated into several languages, so that she obviously knew intimately the medieval stance of the Roman Catholic church and hence its structures. She saw the reformation of the Christian churches in England in the 16th and 17th centuries as a defeudalization of the church, and in the church polities of the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Baptists, and supremely in the Quakers, she saw this defeudalization of the clerical authoritarian structures and the rise of trust in lay people both being really implemented.
In George Fox’s willingness in the 1660s to turn over to monthly meetings of ordinary Quaker farmers and artisans and tradesmen, who quite probably had little formal schooling, the decisions on which the very future of the Quaker movement might depend, she found a faith both in their individual openness to divine guidance and in the assembled group being a special vehicle for this guidance. For her, this Quaker corporate decision-making process, which in Britain stood in this stream of defeudalization, was a spiritual mutation—a lurch forward that brought us into new territory. For the first time there were no clergy whatever to put their steadying hands on the ark!
Emilia Fogelklou Norlind had herself been melted down and tendered. She had had her own life reshaped by experiences kin to those that George Fox relates in his journal. She knew that these experiences were the source of Fox’s contagious religious life and message. But her study of church history had taught her that there had been a long procession of Roman Catholic saints and mystics, some of whom had even produced religious orders in the church, but who, for all of their inward transformation, had never tampered in any serious way with the church’s feudal authority pattern. In Fox she found a striking exception, a mystic who was both a special child of God and a child of his time but who was prepared to supply his revolutionary time with a radically fresh corporate vehicle to channel this inward experience.
For Emelia Fogelklou Norlind, Fox’s first bold mutation was entrusting the corporate waiting silence of the meeting for worship to ordinary men and women unassisted by trained clergy or the guidance of liturgy. Only someone of supreme daring who had had a living experience could have entrusted such people to this Inward Guide to gather and reshape them. Isaac Penington later expressed the idea in his line, “There is that near you that will guide you. O wait for it and be sure that ye keep to it.”
Fox’s second daring mutation was the corporate meeting for business, which gave further evidence of his faith in the working of the Guide in the calm and deliberate gathering of common people who were united and intent to find the right decision to enable them to cope with the problems they brought to it.
I hope that you will hold in your minds this frail web of the Quakers’ presuppositions for the functioning of their corporate method of arriving at decisions. There is the faith in a Guide. There is the faith in a continuous revelation that is always open for fresh disclosures. And there are the respect and affection for each other that assumes each one’s openness and each one’s concern for the right clue to the resolution of the problem, a resolution that may with patience carry the group to a sense of clearness. This sense of clearness about a given resolution of the problem may come not from any predictable voice but may shape itself among them and finally be articulated in a satisfying written minute by the clerk of the meeting.
The Quaker meeting for business opens with an unhurried period of waiting silence. If the meeting is properly carried through, there emerges something of this mood of not to my wishes and my designs and my surface preferences but openness to the deeper levels where the Guide’s bidding may have its way and where the problem may be resolved in quite a different way from whatever occurred to me.
At a Quaker meeting for business, the clerk usually has an agenda of matters that need to be settled and disposed of. Wise clerks have prepared with a good deal of care the proper order of this agenda. If early in the meeting some matter that is likely to receive swift approval is placed, a helpful rhythm of movement is created. Wise clerks have often found ways of thinning the agenda of quite trivial matters by referring them to meeting committees for scrutiny. Wise clerks also know that basic issues that require thorough threshing through should come early enough in the meeting, before the group is tired out, so that there may be an avoiding of what has been referred to as “decision by exhaustion,” which the democratic process in other contexts is often subject to. Often the issue has been previously sharpened and clarified by some committee or group who are specially concerned for it, and the clerk may call on their spokesperson for their formulation of the issues. More often the clerk himself or herself presents the problem to be faced. In doing this, genuine neutrality must be exercised, and the quality of the clerk is especially manifested by the capacity for keeping his or her own preliminary leanings on the issue truly out of the presentation. Someone said recently, “If the clerk is to point the mirror toward truth, he or she cannot try to be the source of light.”
After the issue has been clearly laid before the meeting, anyone who feels drawn to share some comment on the issue or its resolution is free to do so, and the clerk of the meeting recognizes members in the order of their having indicated their concern to speak. A well-disciplined business meeting permits a space between members’ speaking when the contents of what has been said can be considered. A wise clerk will make sure that the hesitant or completely silent Friends are called on for their views. To have participated, or even to have been called on to share when one has been silent, makes for an involvement in the issue and its outcome that is significant.
The business meeting is presided over by a clerk who has been chosen by the meeting for a term of office. His or her role is a delicate one and rather different from that of a chairperson who, with Robert’s Rules of Order at his or her mental fingertips, handles motions and amendments from the floor, calls for divisions, counts votes, and announces the results.
The Quaker clerk is ideally chosen from among the most seasoned Friends in the meeting. He or she is a good listener, has a clear mind that can handle issues, has the gift of preparing a written minute that can succinctly sum up the sense of the meeting, and is one who has faith in the presuppositions that were mentioned earlier: faith in the presence of a Guide; faith in the deep revelatory genius Of such a meeting to arrive at a decision that may break new ground and yet may in fresh ways be in keeping with Friends’ deepest testimonies; and faith in each of those present being potentially the vehicle Of the fresh resolving insight. With all of this, a good clerk is a person who refuses to be hurried and can weary out dissension with a patience born of the confidence that there is a way through, although the group may have to return again and again to the issue before clearness comes and a proper decision is reached.
The clerk’s role is a delicate one. Its delicacy shows itself in the way he or she listens not alone to what this person or this group of persons (if the group is initially divided on some issue) is saying, but to what they are meaning to say. I have written in another place of a Finn who once suggested to me that in every conversation between two persons there are at least six persons present: “What person says are two; what each person means to say are two more; and what each person understands the other to say are two more!” A good clerk is an attentive listener, and he or she is seeking in the messages that are spoken to find a way of resolving the problem. Sometimes it will be a common note that has begun to emerge in the speaking in the meeting. Sometimes it will be a fresh formulation that after it has been considered and in small ways amended will bring the meeting to clarity. The clerk may formulate a minute and ask, “Is this what Friends, in the light of all that has been said here tonight, would feel comfortable with?” Someone might reply, would be happier if the qualifying phrase in this minute could be omitted.” Or another may say, ‘ ‘I am not easy with our clerk’s minute. Still others may express essential agreement.
No votes are taken in a proper Quaker meeting for business. It is the clerk’s task within the plexus of this corporate exercise either to find a resolution with which the assembled Friends can largely agree or to follow the Quaker rule, “When in doubt, wait.” In the latter case the minute might read: *’Friends could not reach clarity on a resolution of the issue of this meeting, and it was agreed to postpone the matter until the following monthly meeting. ”
The book of discipline of London Yearly Meeting wisely counsels the clerk: “We cherish the tradition which excludes voting from our meetings, and trust that the clerks and Friends generally will observe the spirit of it, not permitting themselves to be influenced in their judgment either by mere numbers or by persistence.” (sec. 353) The advice then goes on to counsel patience and a refusal to be hurried: “The clerks should be content to wait upon God with the meeting as long as may be necessary for the emergence of a decision which clearly commends itself to the heart and mind of the meeting as the right one.”
The Quaker business meeting is not a process that will commend itself to the driven ones who demand a swift decision. There is a Finnish proverb that says, “The God of Finland is never in a hurry.” Neither are Friends who have been seasoned in this approach to reaching decisions. There is a story of a man who had been conducting a study of the longevity of members of different religious denominations. He told his friend about visiting a Quaker cemetery and of having been appalled at finding by the birth and death dates on the small headstones that these Quakers seemed to live longer than those of any other denomination he had come upon. His friend replies that he should not have been surprised at that if he knew anything about Quakers, for it always took them longer than anyone else to make up their minds about anything!
There are times when at a serious junction in the deliberation the clerk or some member of the meeting may call for a time of silence. At other times I have seen a business meeting settle into silence of itself. When the clerk calls it back to the issue, at times there has been a change of climate. Coming back for a major decision after a month’s interval of waiting may also assist clarity. I said before that the clerk’s role is a delicate one, but it is a role that is critically important to the successful operation of the process.
If the clerk’s role in a Quaker business meeting is both delicate and essential, the mood and conduct of the members of the meeting is equally so. The temper, the trust in one another, and the openness in which they discuss the issue are critical factors in the meeting’s ability to move toward clearness in a pending decision. In the section of the London Yearly Meeting discipline previously quoted, this matter is put most effectively:
As it is our hope that in our meetings the will of God shall prevail rather than the desires of men, we do not set great store by rhetoric or clever argument. The mere gaining of debating points is found to be unhelpful and alien…. Instead of rising hastily to reply to another, it is better to give them time for what has been said to make its own appeal, and to take its right place in the mind of the meeting.
We ought ever to be ready to give unhurried, weighty, and truly sympathetic consideration to proposals brought forward from whatever part of the meeting, believing that what is said rises from the depths of a Friend’s experience, and is sincerely offered for the guidance of the meeting…. We should neither be hindered from making experiments by fear of undue caution, nor prompted by novel suggestions to ill-considered courses.
Another highly important issue in arriving at a decision and one that calls for a good deal of inner discipline and seasoning on the part of the members is the matter of what constitutes unanimity. If it were necessary for every member in the meeting to feel equally happy about the decision reached, we should be presuming to be settling matters in an angelic colony and not among flesh and blood members of a local Quaker meeting! From my point of view as a member of a meeting, the kind of unanimity that is referred to is a realization on my part that the matter has been carefully and patiently considered. I have had a chance at different stages of the process of arriving at this decision to make my point of view known to the group, to have it seriously considered and weighed. Even if the decision finally goes against what I initially proposed, I know that my contribution has helped to sift the issue, perhaps to temper it, and I may well have, as the matter has patiently taken its course, come to see it somewhat differently from the point at which I began. I might go so far as to agree with a French writer, deVigny, who said, “l am not always of my own opinion. ” I have also come to realize that the group as a whole finds the resolution that seems best to them. When this point comes, if I am a seasoned Friend, I no longer oppose it. I give it my Nihil Obstat, and I emerge from the meeting not as a member of a bitter minority who feels outflanked and rejected, but rather as one who has been through the process of the decision and is willing to abide by it even though my own accent would not have put it in this form.
Without this kind of participative humility, the Quaker business meeting process is seriously hampered. I have seen a clerk in my own meeting tenderly defer to one member who felt strongly opposed to an action that the group was ready to accept, and after a matter of a few months’ time this person was no longer unwilling for it to proceed.
The practice of this participative humility is a form of corporate therapy that often profoundly affects those who exercise it. Quakers who have experienced this kind of unanimity and have gone on growing within the decision can often look appreciatively at great and difficult political decisions in which those whose surface desire was rejected nevertheless have accepted the equity of the authority making the decision and have helped to make possible its being carried through. The Ohland Islands that had long been under Swedish sovereignty are a procession of islands across the Gulf of Bothnia almost like stepping stones from Sweden to Finland. After the First World War an international commission awarded these islands to Finland, and Sweden, which was by far the stronger power, accepted the decision. In the same way some years later Norway, who had an ancient and very well-founded historical claim to the vast territory of Greenland, accepted the World Court’s final decision that awarded the custody of Greenland to Denmark.
Speaking of seasoned Friends. it is almost impossible to exaggerate the assistance that Friends in a business meeting can often give to the clerk in helping at critical junctures by rephrasing an issue, by suggesting alternatives not yet considered, by suggesting that perhaps we have reached a point where we could unite on a part of the issue, or in proposing that we have gone as far with a matter as we can perhaps go until another meeting Of the group. We had one precious Friend, Bacon Evans, who felt it to be his task to assist the clerk by encouraging Friends to brevity in their comments. After a Friend had made a half-hour speech on temperance in a yearly meeting in Philadelphia, Bacon Evans rose and suggested that “if some Friends could use more temperance in their speaking, others would not have to practice total abstinence!” Occasionally some Friend may rise in vocal prayer in the midst of a difficult impasse in a meeting for business as old. bearded Barrow Cadbury once did at the Friends World Conference at Oxford in 1952 with his, “Oh Lord, help us. We’re in a fix.”
The question may be raised about the occupational diseases of such a Quaker form of decision-making quite apart from its slowness and its requirements on the tension-span of those present. An obvious one is the matter of whether some Friends’ voices carry more weight than others in a Quaker business meeting and whether such an influential voice may not seriously qualify the effective right of less known Friends to differ with the weighty ones. I once heard of an old Quaker who had, late in his life, converted to the Episcopal church. On being asked why, at this stage of life, he should make such a change, he replied that he wanted, before he died, to belong to a church where the bishops were visible.
I think that I could testify after 50 years of experience as a convinced Friend that there are deeply respected members of the Society whose evidence of wisdom and spiritual and practical insight and whose tested concern for the affairs of the Society over the years have earned this right to be listened to with care. But whenever they overuse this right and begin to think of themselves as “invisible bishops,” there is no group in which one can feel a swifter reaction in the other direction. There was a period when the emissaries of London Yearly Meeting may have felt a little of this “weighty Friend” status toward Norwegian Friends. An Indiana Friend who had traveled in the ministry in Norway was returning to America, and on the way home he rose to speak in a London meeting ah011t his Norwegian experience. “Everywhere I went in Norway,” he observed “I found Norwegian Friends looking to London for their light.” He continued, t (I pointed them to a higher source.” Happily we have enough weight-watchers in the Society of Friends to be a fairly effective antidote to this particular affliction. The wisest of these venerated Friends know inwardly the meaning of the 17th century Robert Herrick’s lines, “Suffer thy legs but not thy tongue to walk. God the most wise is sparing with his talk.”
While occupational diseases are being discussed, it may be right to mention that the Society of Friends has more than one species of C.O. There is in addition to those who reject military service the occasional Friend who is a Chronic Objector. This raises the issue of how the clerk deals with the chronic objector. I know of no easy solution. It is well to have in mind that this person, too, may on this occasion give some important slant to the issue that is before the group as well as to remember again that each person is worthy of respect. It may be well to remember that the Roman Catholic church in its canonization procedure even procures a devil’s advocate! When it is clear to the clerk, however, that the issue has been thoroughly discussed and that all but the C.O. are satisfied with the decision arrived at, a seasoned clerk is likely to express respect by asking whether the clerk may now record the C.O.’S objection in the minutes and proceed to accept the arrived-at decision.
A further query might be made of whether Friends may not have their minds so firmly made up in advance of the meeting for business that the exercise of reaching a decision may, instead of being a seeking for God’s will on the matter, actually little more than a rubber stamping of a predictable resolution of the issue on a generally shared surface agreement. Would they not be especially tempted in this direction if it disposes of the problem in a way that will not disturb their convenience or involve them in any form of painful change?
This is a very searching query. It points not only to an occupational disease of this Quaker form of reaching a decision but to the universal human frailty to resist change if it becomes evident that this change will be more personally painful and costly than they Choose to be involved in. It must be confessed that Quakers in this respect are not immune from running for cover. But a time of silence in a meeting for business, just as in private personal prayer, has a way upon occasions of cutting like a blowtorch through even this heavy, steely encrustation and setting the captive guidance free to draw persons beyond their own immediate self-interest and into a decision they never under any circumstances intended to make!
Now I have opened the subject of the Quaker decision-making process and hinted at a few obstacles, but on the whole I have given a very positively-slanted picture of what may, at least, take place. The rest is in your hands to affirm, correct, refute, or supplement.