Melting Pot or Multicultural Potluck?

By Mark Helpsmeet:

Many Quakers today are refugees from other religions. For a lot of us, silent worship gives us space, freedom from the annoying and oppressive voices which used to preach at us. Silence can be a safe place to heal, but it has it’s dangers too. This "safe" silence can become a weight upon our tongues, a need to scrutinize each word and phrase because someone may find their wound in our words. That kind of scrutiny may keep them safe, but it can also crush all the joy, energy and spontaneity out of our expression.

I’m enthusiastic about multicultural education. It seems such a rich alternative to the melting pot, where all color and differences are reduced to the least common denominator. The melting pot results in safe, predictable blandness. If we are not conscious and careful, the same thing may happen to our Quaker worship.

As the Friendly FolkDancers tour, we usually end our final dance standing in silent worship. On one tour, I closed that worship by saying "Amen". Afterwards, one of the tour members asked that I not use that word because, she said, it was like 3,000 years of patriarchy being shoved down her throat. As a group, we discussed what we could say, but found that almost any word might be objected to by someone. She suggested closing with a handshake, in the traditional Quaker manner, avoiding the danger inherent in words.

I recognize that many people carry deep wounds and that we should not cling thoughtlessly to words or behaviors which may be perceived as wounding. Still, shortly following that tour experience, I realized that we had been moving toward a bland, "melting pot" solution to her discomfort. I also realized that we could perhaps have chosen a "multicultural" alternative. For instance, we could each have closed the worship in our own personal idiom, be that "amen", "namaste", "shalom", a handshake, or a great big "yahoo"!

I was also struck by the ease with which we could forget to practice what we were preaching. There we were, trying to teach international peace by getting people to try on the dances of diverse countries, yet finding enemies in the diverse ways each of us has to express the Spirit!

I leave you with this query. Is your meeting for worship a melting pot, or is it a multicultural pot luck?