By Jim Schacht

This is written on the eve of the Election, which will be over when you get this. I have been steeling myself, seeking a firm foundation to help me withstand buffeting of life’s winds.

I am aware that historically Quakers have been most impactful as bridge builders and peacemakers when we have had our feet planted in different places and found common ground with diverse groups. Fell worked with the incarcerated when her husband was a judge who incarcerated people. Woolman dealt with slaveholding Quakers on abolition, and both Indians and settlers. Quakers have gotten messy and made mistakes in both prison reform and Indian relations. Mott knew President Grant and her sister was kicked out of the Quakers for marrying a non-Quaker and supporting fighting the Civil War. Many of the women at Seneca Falls were married and were challenged by Frederick Douglass to address racial issues as well as sexual issues, and there were major fallings out over whether women or blacks should get the vote first.

That history challenges how I live because I see Quakers today, and myself, as trying to build bridges and make peace with a foundation only on one side. We are told that as Allies of minorities and the disenfranchised that it is disrespectful to question or disagree because they know what that need better than we do and we don’t want to offend. We have little sympathy or connections to MAGA Christians, Russia or any of the many authoritarian governments, climate change deniers or anti-abortion groups. We now seem to seek to be a pillar, not a bridge. We have taken sides in the cultural wars and have consequently appear to have forfeited our role as peacemakers.

So I ask myself whether I want to be a pillar or a bridge, and conclude that there is no way I have the energy or love to see that of God in Putin or those like him, and have no interest in the political or spiritual purity. I am a builder of small bridges and a peacemaker of small disputes. I have concluded that where I do understand or identify with someone or something un-Quaker I need to share it with Meeting to stretch people. I take pride in the Quaker tradition of having feet in different camps and to live with questions and disagreements. I am seeing that our internal conflicts and questioning actually helps us prepare for dealing with external conflicts.