Today, I’m thinking about the incredible amount of vulnerability required in Quaker business process. It’s vulnerable in that we each have to be willing to show up, do our best work of listening, hold out our piece or angle on the truth with the fiercest, most solid conviction we know how, and let it go, trusting one another and the Spirit to sift and sort and aim us toward the best direction we collectively know how to find.

It’s also vulnerable to authoritarian intrusion, and this is what has, sadly, occurred of late in Northwest Yearly Meeting, the group of Friends I have belonged to since birth.

Because our polity and decision-making is based on the process of consensus, we must trust one another to bring everything to the table and truly listen to the Spirit, rather than making backroom deals or pushing one’s own agenda to the exclusion of listening together. The ideal Quaker process works in such a way that, although we each share our own conviction and sense of leading, we listen for the Spirit’s guidance. We let go of our own understanding, our own need to be right, our own fears, and we submit to the will of the Spirit: the one who enlivens the scriptures and who we will recognize by the embodiment of Love.

Instead, of late, our yearly meeting became divided and untrusting. People chose “sides,” did not trust others, and worked through political strategy rather than through a sense of leading to get “our” people on boards and in positions of leadership, rather than “their” people.

In the culmination of this dysfunctional behavior, the “leadership” laid down an ultimatum: the yearly meeting “restructures” (read: kicks out the four meetings who have minuted LGBTQ welcoming and affirming stances), or everyone at the representatives meeting last month had to come to consensus around another option. The rationale was that, since the four meetings were acting in ways contrary to our Faith & Practice, they can and should be removed from the body. (The irony, of course, is that the authoritarian action taken by the Administrative Committee to force this decision is so far outside of Faith & Practice’s policy as to be laughable.)

I don’t want this post to be about that split so much as about vulnerability, however.

I recognize now, more than ever, the extreme vulnerability of the polity we espouse as Friends, and it is incredibly painful that people could come in and use the good faith and trust of others in the yearly meeting to push through their own agenda. It is so difficult, now, to even imagine trusting others, and in some ways I would like to just give up trusting people altogether. It would be much easier to just become cynical, and to attempt to use political means to manipulate my way in the future.

Much more difficult, however, is remaining vulnerable and open, trusting and hoping, and remaining open to the radical and intense freedom and joy of coming together as a group of Friends to discern together, fully and wholly, unreservedly, bringing our whole selves.

I say it is more difficult, but to me, it is also the only Way worth living. I do not want to become cold and shriveled, protecting and controlling. Instead, I choose life, I choose joy, I choose trust and vulnerability: I choose Love.

It may not be the way of most power and prestige. It may be a difficult Way. But it is the Way of Christ for any who choose to follow it.

It is a Way that includes boundaries: while I choose to be radically open and vulnerable in settings of Quaker worship through business, I choose to set a firm boundary regarding an abusive and authoritarian structure that no longer resembles anything close to the Law of Love. While I can love the people who did this, and desire what’s best for them as they continue their journey, I set a strong boundary with a firm, No. This is unhealthy behavior and I will not participate in it; I will not tolerate it. I will remove myself from this unhealthy relationship. I will go to the margins, where others have been sent, and I will find Christ there, amongst those cast out by the “church” based on a dead reading of words on a page, rather than a willingness to courageously engage in a dynamic reading led by the Living Word. I will live out love. There is no other Way I would wish to go.

This is the path of strength through vulnerability, and I think I have never understood the verse, “my power is made perfect in weakness” (II Cor 12:9) before this and other similar experiences bestowed upon me by NWYM. It’s a path of courage, of taking heart, of opening and opening again to the Light, filled with grace and truth. It’s a willingness to trust myself and the Light of Christ I know and connect with inside, connecting with that Light in others, and being guided by it.

May the Spirit guide your path, as you choose the strength of vulnerability today and always.

May the breath of the Spirit enliven you, wake up the Society of Friends, and draw us toward a new intensity and conviction of justice through love in these difficult times.