Being Changed

by Emily Provance
15th Street Meeting

I’d been at Fifteenth Street Meeting for a matter of months, and I wasn’t yet a member, but people kept telling me to go to things. I ought to go to Powell House, I ought to go to yearly meeting, I ought to go to this or that retreat. I ought to visit Morningside or Brooklyn or Flushing. This did not make sense to me. Why was everybody trying to get me to leave? Also, did they have any idea how daunting I found it, not to mention expensive, to travel like that? I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t understand what they were doing. I couldn’t figure out the trains and buses and carpools and registration systems and applications required.

I resisted this encouragement for nearly a year. And when I finally got to Powell House, and to yearly meeting, it was . . . fine. I still didn’t know anybody. I felt really awkward. I didn’t understand the point. I didn’t see what got everybody else so excited. There was palpable energy among the people gathered, something more significant and more confusing than simple vacation vibes.

Quakers are slow to articulate communal belief, partly because we emphasize non-creedalism. But we do have beliefs, theology even, and I know this because I’ve learned it from our behaviors, which tend to include a lot of gathering. We do it weekly at meetings for worship; we do it repeatedly, in larger groups, throughout the year. When new people are asking questions about Quakerism, we tell them to go away to some gathering. When we want to encourage a teen or young adult, we send them away—to a gathering.

We must expect something profound to happen. Questions will be answered. Friends will grow and feel encouraged. God will move among us in a way that’s different from solitude. What I’ve discovered, over the years, is that presence with a variety of people, especially in the context of deep listening to the Holy Spirit, broadens my perspective and teaches me about our condition. The communal search for Truth uncovers pieces that I don’t carry within myself.

Learning, though, isn’t quite where the experience ends. It’s really more about transformation. God does not only reveal what we might do; God reveals who we might become, as individuals and as a community.

The experience of spiritual transformation does not feel safe. It is choosing to step into a new condition that we can’t yet see. It happens most powerfully in communities that are committed to love and a mutual search for Truth . . . and if the people gathered don’t all think and act the same. This is why early Friends emphasized travel and intervisitation and large gatherings. It’s because, if we really believe that the group can experience the fulness of God more nearly than any of us can independently, then we have new things to discover each time we mix. New combinations of listeners lead to new revelations of Truth.

In the past few months, the most I’ve learned about God was in a Pentecostal Bible study in a storefront church. The people there were all blue-collar. Some were living in shelters. Some were just out of prison. Most had personal experience with addiction. Their theology differed from mine significantly, and some of their beliefs are ones I’ve long rejected. But I saw God’s heart shining through them. I learned things about hospitality, about faith, and about the belovedness of God’s children that I did not know before, and I was changed. I believe that’s the point of gathering.