... Quaker Quest

One of the deep strengths of Quaker Quest (QQ) is that it takes the idea of Quakerism as a deeply personal religion and puts it into practice.

One of the central ideas that helped bring Quakerism into being was the idea that each of us has access to the divine light (or, may make communion with God) and that God may speak and act through any of us. This applies to Quakers, folks who are just interested in learning about Quakerism, and everybody else.

Quaker Quest puts this into practice by asking seekers to listen to several different Quakers and to share from their own experience and their own sense of the divine.

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Quaker Quest group, which just started recently, decided to plan a day for Quakers to learn about QQ and explore the possibility of running a QQ program at their meeting. The plan originally called for several wonderful and highly respected Quakers to give speeches which, altogether, would take up most of the morning. The question came up, what would it be like to be in the audience listening to these speeches for a few hours? It has been said that God works in mysterious ways. I believe that the divine also sometimes works in ways that are rather mundane and plain. For many people, listening to a priest give a speech for a couple of hours is rather boring, and they get antsy, stop paying attention, get up and leave if there's a chance, maybe forget almost everything that was said. The same thing can happen if it's a few "important" Quakers giving speeches for a couple hours.

At our Quaker Quest (QQ) planning group meeting, we felt it would be wise to give people a chance to actively participate in the session. I think that the fact that the audience might become bored was what brought the idea up, but to me it also served as a reminder that each of the participants has the ability to share something deep and powerfully beneficial to our group, and that making sure they are included at all steps along the way is important. I believe this is true not only at QQ seekers' sessions and at our Friends meetings, but at QQ info sessions for Quakers.

Sometimes god works in profoundly un-spectacular ways.