“Twelve years ago, when I first started engaging in a public ministry around abuse,” Windy Cooler recalls, “I thought that good policy was the answer.” She came to realize, however, that trying to get meetings to adopt policies to address domestic and sexual violence against children and adults led to power struggles that “were not the way that Quakers make decisions.”
“God is not a technocrat,” she reflects. “God is not a policy maker. God is a force in our relationships. God is love. God is not violent, and attempting to overpower other people the way I did in those early years was itself a form of violence.”
So she and her colleagues took a different approach—listening to the witness offered by survivors of abuse, and compiling their anonymous voices in a report released late last year.
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Transcript:
For me, continuing revelation is fundamental to what Quakers are, to what Quakers hope to be. It is a theological concept that God is alive in each of us and through our relationships, God is making and remaking the world every day. And God is not a technocrat. God is not a policy maker. God is a force in our relationships. God is love.
My name is Windy Cooler. I use she/her pronouns. I live in Greenbelt, Maryland, and I am a member of Sandy Spring Friends meeting in Baltimore. Yearly meeting. 12 years ago, and I first started really engaging in a public ministry around abuse, thought that good policy was the answer. And it was challenging 12 years ago to even have a child safety policy in a meeting. It was even more of a challenge to have policies that address things like domestic and sexual violence against adults, much less elder abuse and other forms of violence. It came to pass that many meetings had policies that met my wildest fantasies of what a good policy would look like. And I did not see those work.
We had become interested in power, really. Using our social influence to overpower our other people in our religious communities and force them into following a policy that we believe would make us all safe. This is not the way that Quakers make decisions traditionally, and I saw the failure. God is not violent and attempting to overpower other people the way that I did in those early years was itself a form of violence, I believe now. And it resulted in the ongoing violence of people that we love in our communities. I and others who had been really active in anti-abuse work in the Quaker world thought what we need is a listening project where survivors voices are brought forward in a way that is consensual, that is a labor with them, so that the rest of our community can also labor with a presence of violence in our lives.
The common testimony is the culmination of the listening project that has been life and power And was the culmination of the last 12 years of my life’s work. This is a tool that makes it safe for survivors to not just feel heard, but be heard in their communities. By having this testimony that is not connected to a person that we know we have a relationship with, we can disconnect our defensive responses from what’s actually being said and we can find that voice of God inside of us. I imagine myself sitting in worship with these voices, actually, and that each of these pieces of a story are messages that are arising from the silence.
Our query: Do we live in that life and power that does away with the occasion of abuse?
The first thing I noticed in hearing the query, I was surprised that I felt terrified. I wondered, am I going to do this right? Do I have the right answers? I saw in this query a piece of Quaker culture that is problematic. We have ways of doing things here. When you don’t do things in a Quakerly way, there are hurtful consequences.
It’s so many layers to it. We can’t be the perpetrators? We are the ones on the margins? My wish is for truth to be a practice. Can we share the truth about our experiences? Can we leave the spaces of abuse?
Two black friends stood up at meeting for business and shared experiences of violence at the hands of friends. The stories were sharing pain and because the source of that pain was our shared Quaker space and because people didn’t want to hear it, I thought, can this be true?
Then older people in the room began to stand up. I had never seen this before. It was an elder. In practice they began to yell, “Friend, sit down! Friend, this isn’t true! Friend, how dare you?” The clerk called us into silence again. My memory is fuzzy, but I think someone said, “we need to deal with this, but not now.” When I look back on this, I think this was violence, spiritual violence. In worship, to not open your heart is spiritual violence. I’m ashamed and I carry that with me now differently.
Here is something, in Quakerism, people don’t hesitate to elder me or Benjamin Lay or those confronting the status quo, but there is a deep hesitation to hold those abusively holding up the status quo accountable. Those stories of my childhood and these stories are connected. They’re about learning not to speak, not being heard, how white supremacy works. Like, when you are abused as a child, you can’t speak up about it. There is something about not speaking in Quaker circles. That not speaking perpetuates its promulgation. I was carefully taught to not speak a truth.
My abuser had daughters, their mother told me when my daughters were young, at the sound of my abuser’s voice, they would start screaming.
We children were the horrified witnesses. I remember sitting on the stairs weeping, and my mom asked me what was wrong, and I told her, and the next thing I remember she was laughing with the mom of the boy who did this. I asked her why she didn’t do anything as an adult. She said, “I thought you could take care of yourself.” That is what she learned from her mom for so long. I felt ashamed like it was my fault. And the message about taking care of myself. I felt like I let it happen. The phenomenon of that type of neglect when women were building their careers is not to excuse my mom, but to understand the context in which I was living. I feel ashamed. And why do I feel ashamed?
At some point I felt safe enough with a weighty friend in my meeting to share my stories about abuse at my Quaker workplace. They told me, I’m really sorry to hear that, but your abusers raised a lot of money for our community. The money was more important than me or the abuse.
I know I can be abusive at home. I feel justified at the time, but I know I will lose my spouse if I continue.
When I think of abuse, I think it is the worst sin, especially in the hypocrisy of a church that says it’s about peace.
My meeting said that it would make everyone uncomfortable if I stayed in the same space with my abuser. It was better for me to leave.
I wonder why I stayed a Quaker. It is because when I engage with faith and practice, I regularly experience communion with the Divine.
One of the things I’ve learned from participating in this project is that total safety can’t be the goal, but love actually can be. I am both a perpetrator of violence and a survivor of violence. To really love each other would mean accepting this about ourselves. It would mean making spaces in our communities to tell these stories as witness and testimony to what being a life is like. That would be loving. And I think that as we understood each other better, we actually would be safer from violence, that we would be creating a nonviolent atmosphere where violence has existed by welcoming these stories, and that we would together create a culture of nonviolence that doesn’t exist right now.
Discussion Question:
- How have/will you begin conversation around abuse in your meeting?
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