by Mariellen Gilpin (WCTS May, 2017)
Our meeting had several dear elders when I was learning to be a Quaker. I remember Wilbur Luce, who was then the age I am now. He often spoke in worship, almost always about the natural world. I remember with special fondness the unseasonably warm February when we threw open the meetinghouse windows. Through the open windows, we heard an unfamiliar birdcall. Wilbur, seated in his favorite chair by the window, looked up. Then he stood to speak, head bowed in reverence.
He said, “That’s a vireo.” He sat down again, message complete, looking as if he were sitting in the presence of Eternity itself.
We loved Wilbur. It was a good fifteen years after Wilbur died when the meeting was going through a rough patch. Finally during a threshing session, we turned a corner. We knew we still had a lot of hard work ahead of us, but we also knew we were of one mind and one heart. I came home from that threshing session so happy and relieved and thankful.
I lay in bed that night giving thanks. I somehow knew our elders in the meeting, those who were dead, had prayed too for this milestone conversation. Overflowing with gratitude, I began thanking them all, calling up a clear memory-picture of each one and thanking them by name. I thought I was done, and rolled over to sleep.
Suddenly I had another clear memory-picture: Wilbur, sitting in his favorite chair by the window, looking like he was in the presence of Eternity again (still). I’d forgotten to include Wilbur in my thanking, and he was letting me know he was praying for us, too.
“Wilbur! I forgot to thank you, too, for your prayers!” I said. Then I slept.
Rachel Weller was the elder who explained how Quaker discernment worked: None of us could know the Truth with a capital T, but each of us had a little piece of truth. A committee of Quaker elders pooled their little pieces of truth, and together we had a larger approximation of truth than any one of us had individually. Her combination of wisdom and humility has been deeply imprinted on my consciousness.
One Sunday morning, I greeted her with a hug and asked how she was. She drew herself up to her full five feet tall and announced, “I’m clinging to the wreckage!” As a matter of fact, she lived another 20 years, during which she became Baha’i, and regularly came to worship in order to read aloud a Baha’i prayer during the silence.
Frankie Day’s eldering gift was hospitality. We were regularly invited to drop by for lunch after worship. We made the meal together, following her directions called to us as we worked somewhat chaotically in her very small, cluttered kitchen. I still remember her fresh apple salad with garlic mayonnaise—and I also remember her big old dining room table with a stepladder substituted for one table leg.
Her casual welcome gave me a different view of how to treat guests: none of this stuff about washing all the knickknacks before the guests arrived. Not when you came to Frankie and Mahlon’s for Sunday lunch. Mahlon Day’s booming bass when we sang around the piano was almost as much a treat as Mahlon offering us vanilla ice cream with Frankie’s homemade chocolate sauce.
Mahlon sat almost silent in business meetings, except for sometimes mumbling inaudibly into his beard. I made the social error once of sitting next to him, able to actually hear his acerbic commentary.
Another Friend, rather sanctimonious, was bemoaning that her teenagers refused to come to worship. “I don’t know how to get them to come,” she complained. Mahlon’s beard rumbled,
“Force!” And I had to pretend I hadn’t caught the joke. He seldom spoke in worship, but his moving memorial upon the death of his older brother still reverberates in my heart: “I never had to depend on my brother, but I always knew I could.”
All our elders had feet of clay, but Marian Freeman’s were rather more in evidence. She was the quintessential little old lady: old-lady hat, old-lady shoes, old-lady good wool suit. She sat in worship, hand over her mouth, moaning behind her hand if she didn’t like what someone shared in worship.
If she especially didn’t like what we said, she clicked the metal clasp on her purse open and shut, open and shut, click, click, clickety-click…. As a shy and self-effacing Quaker in my twenties, I was once asked to close worship.
Not a big deal, I thought: start the handshake, ask everyone to say their names, and then ask for announcements. I can handle that. Not so fast, Mariellen.
Marian not only moaned behind her hand but firmly interrupted to correct every other word I said. Whatever self-confidence I might have wilted entirely. It was long after her death before I again undertook to close worship. But Marian nurtured my ministry, often expressing her appreciation of my words spoken in worship. She seemed to like my thoughts, but didn’t cotton too much to any evidence of leadership—on the part of any Friend, not just me.
Gardiner Stillwell was a fervent and eloquent speaker in worship, far too Christian for some of the religiously wounded members of our meeting. He played the piano with great fervor:
“I am standing on a mountain beneath a cloudless sky;
I am drinking from a fountain that never shall run dry….”
He often gave me a ride home after worship. When his hearing had failed so much that he no longer enjoyed playing while we sang, he sometimes sat reading the score in his lap, so that he could hear the music in his head. Since he could only hear snippets of others’ ministry, on our drive home he often asked me to summarize what everyone had shared during worship. We commiserated with one another when one woman I’ll call “Kelly” regularly restated our ministries in secular language she could tolerate and compared our God-language invidiously with the good works of some secular organizations.
I especially remember once when he cupped his hand behind his good ear and said with some irony, “And Kelly—did she mention the United Nations this morning?”
“No,” I said with equal irony, while enunciating slowly and very clearly into his good ear, “She didn’t mention the United Nations, but she did mention Doctors Without Borders!”
Those dear elders: Wilbur, Rachel, Frankie, Mahlon, Marian, and Gardiner. They had their imperfections, but they were so centered in God that they centered me, too, sometimes with words, but mostly with their way of being.
Overflowing with gratitude, I began thanking them all, calling up a clear memory-picture of each one and thanking them by name.
Mariellen Gilpin is one of the editors of WCTS and a member of the Urbana-Champaign Meeting. The elders of her meeting raised her from a baby Quaker to whoever she turns out to be today.
What Canst Thou Say? 