Went to Meeting yesterday as planned and it was actually good this time. Any children playing in the corner kept from making themselves heard, and there was only one spoken message so the bullshit didn’t get much of a chance to pile up in the middle of the floor. Plus it was a beautiful day for biking, sunny and breezy and hot but not too and barely humid at all. Going this time made it worth the wait.
For all its silence the Meeting was very well-attended, maybe even a hundred people there, and the parking lot was close to full. Going to unlock my bike afterwards a quick survey turned up no less than seven full-size SUVs in the lot. While this made only about one in eight or nine there an SUV, which as an overall average is damn low for Austin, I’m still pretty disgusted. Mistakenly or not, I hold Quakers to a higher standard of lifestyle, non-flash and enviro-consciousness, than the rest of the populace. Driving a gas-guzzler to a worship service where chances are good someone’s going to offer ministry about simplicity, stewardship of resources, and living close to the earth seems to me to be missing the point entirely.
And no, those SUVs couldn't have all belonged to visitors/newbies; I’ve seen members driving some of them over the months. The head of the Stewardship Committee, charged with managing the meeting’s resources wisely, rolled up one day in a Sequoia or something similarly oversize. This is just plain wrong, far as I’m concerned.
Meanwhile there were only three bikes at the rack, one of them mine. The most I’ve ever counted at one time is five. I looked at the parking lot and was overcome with dismay when I considered that the message that Worship and Ministry had chosen to hand out on slips of paper before Meeting earlier was the famous-among-Quakers quote from George Fox c. 1656:
Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them: then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.
This particular phrase gets a lot of play among Austin Friends. But I guess some Friends don’t consider that the part about being patterns and examples applies to their choice of vehicles for the few hours of the week when it’s most important their appearances visibly mesh with their stated beliefs.
Look, Friends: OK, come into Meeting after having forgotten to turn off your cell phone. Fine, everybody’s done it at least once. If you must, text for five minutes while sitting in the front row during worship (as someone did a couple of years back). Whatever. Spill your damn coffee on the rug and make a huge embarrassed fuss wiping it up; we can’t stop you bringing it in because, as one reasonably-seasoned Friend once put it, “there’s never been a Quaker Taliban.” All I ask is that the seven of you in yesterday’s SUV-beasts give at least a little thought to treating the testimonies I hold dearest with more respect just this once a week.
I’ve been keeping silent on this for a good long time now and don’t plan to any longer. Problem is I don’t know who to take it to. It’s not something you want to speak on during Meeting itself, or rather I don’t; while we have had the occasional message denouncing the Meeting’s collective behavior, they’ve struck me as either too emotional or too rehearsed to be truly Spirit-led. Venting on SUVs would put me on more or less the same level as Mr. PETA from a little while ago.
Neither am I likely to slip a notice in the newsletter or on the website. That’d be low, not to mention a betrayal of the trust the Communications Committee places in me. So which of the myriad FMA committees are going to be the lucky recipients of this particular bile? Worship and Ministry proved reasonably receptive to my concern about Mr. PETA, but that was unquestionably a quality-of-worship issue. To my mind SUVs in the parking lot are too but I don’t expect most to see it that way.
I do know I need to speak up. It’s my Meeting, estranged though I’ve become from it. I do know that every time I see the bike-rack less than half-full it perturbs me considering the hard work I, and Alan and Belle and even Hanna, put into installing it. And when I see that a number of Friends have chosen to convey themselves to Meeting in an SUV instead it feels like a slap in the face. The sad fact is that no matter what standards I may wish to hold them to, Quakers are as full of shit as anyone else. Every now and then someone’s got to call them on it, and it looks like it’s me this time.
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