The Haddonfield Friends meetinghouse is a brick building in a quiet, shady residential neighborhood, with a very pleasant cemetery across the road, featuring lovely old trees and small, inconspicuous gravestones. The church operates a private school for grades pre-kindergarten through eighth grade; private schools run by Quakers are very popular in this area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They have terrific reputations for academic excellence, and are usually quite expensive.
There are about twenty or so cars in the parking lot when I arrive. I notice that quite a few have bumper stickers (which is noticeable only because bumper stickers seem to have gone out of fashion in the last decade or so). These are Obama 08 stickers, and there are a couple that read “Thou shalt not kill” and “End the war.” Those certainly seem like good Quaker sentiments.
I walk into the main building. It reminds me of a big open barn floor, but with pews set up on four sides, so that everyone is sort of facing an small open inner area. The pews are not symmetrical, though – some sides of the arrangement are longer than others. There are a few plain, uncurtained windows in the room, and they are open on this warm, pleasant day. The color scheme, if you could call it that, is white and grey; the walls are white, and a good deal of grey wood is visible.
There is a balcony running along two sides of the room; I think you might be able to seat 350 people in here, although it’s a little difficult to estimate.
The pews are interesting largely because they seem to be quite old, somewhat worn, and are the first pews I’ve ever seen with substantial amounts of graffiti! The graffiti remind me that generations of school children have been sitting in these pews; it’s the kind of grade school stuff that kids scratch into wooden seats and desks whenever they are made to sit for hours. I can’t decipher all of it, but most of it seems to be things like “Mickey ’67.”
That reminds me of an interesting fact about Quaker schools, one that may explain why they are so popular with the parents who can afford them. A colleague at work sent her son to a Quaker school in Philadelphia, and she told me that all the children, even the kindergartners, are expected to sit silently in a weekly meeting – for 45 minutes! I asked her how they managed to get kindergartners to sit silently for so long, and she told me that they have a great system. Each kindergarten student is assigned a third-grade buddy who has already learned how to sit still in meeting, and the buddy is responsible for teaching the younger child how to behave. Five-year-olds adore having eight-year-old buddies, and usually want to please them, so they adapt quite well.
I have arrived at 10:00 for the start of the meeting, and for the first half hour we sit in silence. People arrive quietly and find seats, and by 10:30 there are about fifty people in the room. As I sit, I am becoming conscious of noises I normally don’t pay attention to: insects whirring and chirping in the trees outside, the soft hissing of traffic on side streets, a plane overhead now and again. I find this enormously relaxing.
But I’m not as relaxed as one of the congregants. A woman has brought a chaise lounge into the building, and is lying down on it next to one of the front pews. Perhaps she is ill; at any rate, this looks like an absolutely fabulous way to attend a meeting. I would introduce lounges into lots of other venues, if I could.
At 10:30 a woman stands and reads a refrain of the hymn “Love Lifted Me.” A few minutes later, someone else recites the famous Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Another few minutes of silence, and then a man stands up and tells us a little about a friend who died recently, someone he had known for more than thirty years. After that, at about five-minute intervals people stand up and talk about death. Someone mentions that we are in this room today because Jesus Christ died. Several people say that death gives us more appreciation for the lives of our friends and family who are still living.
A woman with a slight accent stands to say that everyone is either a journey person or a destination person, concentrating on one thing or the other. You gain something by concentrating on the journey or on the destination, but you also miss something either way.
Someone else notes that everyone in her life who has died is still with her to some degree, especially as she gets older. The distinction between life and death doesn’t seem all that strong or fearsome as the years go by.
Then we all stand up and shake hands. I’m not sure what the signal was for this, but obviously someone started it and everyone else joined in. A man tells us that announcements are posted on an easel in another room, and asks if there are any visitors today.
There are three visitors besides me. We stand and people smile at us. We sit down again, and one of the visitors, a young man in his twenties I think, tells everyone that he will be working at a local bike shop over the summer, so please stop by. The man with the recently deceased friend thanks everyone for being with him today, he says that he felt his heart racing “in that Quaker way,” and knew that God wanted him to share his sorrow with us.
There will be a business/worship meeting after this, in the room next door, I think. It seems as though everyone is invited to join the business meeting, but that doesn’t seem appropriate for me. I do remember something about how Quakers consider every meeting a worship meeting, which is why they won’t call it a plain business meeting.
So I walk out of the building and drive back home. That was pleasant.
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