Playing nicely with the protestants
A witch’s perspective.
I am NOT a member of my local Unitarian Universalist church; I am an “occasional attendee”.
I am also an occasional attendee at my local quaker meeting.
I tried out the local United Church of Christ U.C.C. church community (jokingly referred to as “Unitarian Universalist Considering Christ”), because that was the Congregationalist church of my father and my grandfather.
The U.U.and the U.C.C. churches sit diagonally across from each other in downtown Montpelier. The nearest Quaker meeting house is about twenty minutes away from me in Plainfield, Vermont.
For most of my adult life, “hanging with The U.U.s” meant associating with God's Thoughtful People. In a recent sermon in Kingston, New York, the U.U. minister referred to the old joke about U.U.s preferring a discussion about heaven to actually going to heaven itself. Forty six years ago, it was a U.U. minister in Maryland that officiated at my interracial marriage to a white recovered Catholic. “You are looking for the closest thing to no clergy at all!” he joked (and he was right). The U.U.s of Western Massachusetts were the ones that helped me shape the moral character of my 2 children (now ages 42 and 37) through summer camp experiences at Rowe Camp and Conference Center. It was at a U.U. women's retreat in Wisconsin that I was touched by Spirit, and found myself deepening my exploration of paganism. It was in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois that my U.U. women's community devoured the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven" adult religious education program. Over the next 2 years., a dozen married women with one divorced woman in our group became thirteen divorced women (including the minister's wife).
Some spiritual awakenings are just like that.
In essence, my mid-life experience of spiritual exploration was deeply influenced by U.U. communities and values. But it was also a spiritual community that I realized had great difficulty sinking into heart connected spaces and places. After getting really pissed off at a quote from esteemed U.U. minister Forest Church (who announced that The Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans and neopanism “was a step too far on liberalism”), I found myself leaning into nourishing my spiritual base with the quietly meditative spaces of Quaker meeting houses.
Total Truth? In retrospect, that was a shift from “God's frozen people” to “God's quietly mean-spirited people”.
For over 20 years, the beauty of Quaker meeting houses in Western Massachusetts and in Vermont have fed my spirit well.
The people inside those meeting houses? Not so much.
Ever the cultural adventurer (let's face it–how many Black U.Us or Quakers OR Congregationalists do you know, Reader?), I contemplated deeply why I have been drawn through this particular spiritual journey into various Protestant denominations.
As mentioned, the first spiritual pull comes from my family legacy. Congregationalists are the spiritual community of my father and my grandfather. Plymouth Congregationalist church in Washington DC was their religious home. The Congregationists never divided into separate white and black denominations, as the Baptists and the Methodists did. But there weren't many Black Congregationalists. I remember being astonished at a Congregationalist summer camp photo of my dad. He looked about 11 years old and was the only Black person in the photo.
John Brown the abolitionist wanted to be a Congregationalist minister. When I walked into U.C.C. churches, I knew all the hymns, from my very loose “Christmas and Easter Christian” upbringing.
But “being washed in the blood of the lamb” in those hymns, and the (liberal Protestant only happened once a month) “eating the flesh and drinking of blood of Your Savior” was too much of a stretch for me.
I couldn't ever get into that transubstantiation thing; And found the entire idea of eating anybody's flesh or drinking anybody's blood, pretty gross.
I have deeply appreciated the thoughtfulness of the Unitarian Universalist communities; but I recognize that New England has somehow bound the bodies of these communities through a much shaming and blaming Puritan legacy. I recognize that it will be a while before those congregations are able to unfreeze.
Moving on, to the Quaker meeting houses, I had to really dig deep into Quaker history to understand where that streak I described as “mean-spirited" was coming from. My heartfelt shares were commented on by other people (that is generally considered a “ no no”, in Quaker circles.
The way I dressed was criticized in someone else's share in a meeting space.
Then I had an experience so bizarre that to this day I don't think most people believe this actually happened. A white male followed me out of a meeting house, and harassed me.
I had left early; this was during the pandemic and the ratio of people to air filter to masks in the space did not work for me. Since I had driven one hour for this particular meeting house, I decided that I would stay no longer than twenty minutes.
After another community member broke the silence to share a poem, I felt the quaking in my body; a familiar experience that helps me get clear on when, how, and if I should share. I stood up, faced away from the center of the room “Sia style” (remember, these were covid times) and sang this verse of a chant:
“ You've got to humble
Yourself in the eyes of your mother
You got to let yourself go and
Humble
Yourself in the Eyes
Of your mother
You've got to ask her what she knows
and
We will lift each other up
Higher and higher
We
We'll lift each other up”
Then I left the meeting house.
This man followed me out to my car, and actually flagged me down, as I was backing out of my parking spot.. He motioned for me to roll down my window, and began to harangue me (too close, with his unmasked face) on proper etiquette and conduct in a Quaker meeting.
Perhaps he held an assumption that I had never been to a Quaker meeting before?
Probably, because he had not seen me at his meeting house?
He was very angry. Quietly angry; quiet, MEAN-SPIRITED Quaker angry. As I listened in amazement to his words, I realized this man was projecting all sorts of strange ideas onto me. None of them had anything to do with the reality of what I had shared before I left what, nor with my actions.
SCARY.
But that is one of the things I found about the Quakers that isn't usually discussed; the amount of strange and marginal behaviors that have been tolerated along their chronologic timeline.
Their founder, George Fox, brought forward the spiritually expansive idea that “religion is not external because God is directly accessible without a mediator” (Wikipedia). And yet many of his actions and behaviors would have clear DSM 5 diagnosis behind them today. They were even considered mad (not mystical) by some of his colleagues and peers in the 17th century!
Quakerism is punctuated by more unusual actions…
There was Lydia Warwell (who protested mandatory attendance at the Puritan church in the Massachusetts Bay Colony by arriving naked–https://www.genealogymagazine.com/quaker-sought-redress-by-undressing/).
There was James Nylar who was convinced that he was the second coming of Christ (https://quaker.org/2025/03/31/toward-the-heavenly-call/).
There was 21st century Norman Morrison (who set himself on fire as a Vietnam war protester in front of the pentagon. What does not always get mentioned in describing his heroic martyrdom, is that he brought his 3-year-old daughter with him; it certainly looks like he changed his mind at the last minute on taking her with him
And, let's not forget Richard Nixon. I remember the protest buttons that read, “He's a FAKER/ he's no Quaker”
Nixon, Morrison, and discovering that there was a second suicide in the same year as Morrison (a fourteen year old**). All white Quaker males; helped me recognize how much repression of emotional life was a part of birthright Quaker tradition.
My personally nourishing spiritual base is eclectic neopaganism. I live in very white, relatively emotionally isolating New England community. It is an ongoing challenge for me to balance my need for spiritual connection with other human beings through song, prayer and quiet meditation with the multitude of microaggressions that I continue to experience in such extremely white spaces.
They are white and very gray- haired church spaces. The very concept of gathering through religious community is waning among younger Americans.
I'll end this journey through my own personal spiritual adventures with a story from a Quaker meeting house adventure in Massachusetts, back in 2013.
As I arrived on a lovely fall Sunday morning, I encountered a circle of about 25 youth outside of the meeting house. They were singing. As I got close, I heard the words that they were singing and my heart leapt with joy:
“ We are rising up
like a phoenix from the fire
Brothers and sisters
spread your wings and fly higher…”
It was a popular chant that I had been hearing around my late night pagan fire circles. I had never heard it in the context of anything related to Quakers. These were Quaker youth on a weekend retreat from across 6 new england states.
When it was time for the service to begin, they came into the meeting house together and flowed into the space. Some were sitting on the floor; some were rubbing each other's shoulders. Others were caressing one another's hair.
They were touching each other!
That was something I had not seen Quaker adults do, in any of the meeting houses that I had attended.
It was a lovely, spiritually restoring experience for me.
It left me believing that there is hope, through our children.The very tradition that raises Quaker youth with an ability to listen inwardly for messages from Spirit has many of them coming over to pagan traditions as young adults!
It leaves me believing that– whatever may be happening in formal religious institutions and congregations– the kids are all right.
** I can't find any verification of this factoid on a 2025 Google search engine.