Holding the Light, Not the Darkness
In the previous two essays, I reflected upon the internal and external conflicts within Quakerism which I perceived during my experience on the 2014 Quaker Youth Pilgrimage. Ever the cynicist, I leapt at the chance to scrutinize every flaw and discrepancy I could find in the way people think, act, and communicate. In order to paint a more complete picture, however, I think I should force myself to talk about some of the ways in which the Pilgrimage was a success.
First, the basics: None of us died. Though almost all of the Northern Hemisphere Quakers got pretty sick at one point or another, we were very well-cared-for by our trusty leader and medical professional, Wendy. Circumstances forced us to spend more money than anticipated on food, lodgings, and transportation, but (with one notable exception I’ll explain in a moment) we never had to pay out-of-pocket for the necessities. We made friends, we had fun, and us Northerners learned a lot about what it means to be a Quaker in South America. We managed to make our way through Peru and Bolivia, accomplishing just about everything we could have hoped – not an easy task.
One of the most important challenges (and the most valuable rewards) of spending a lot of time and money to spend a month and a half in developing countries in another hemisphere is coming face-to-face, eye-to-eye, with a radically different perspective from one you’ve ever known, and learning from the experience without external conflict. The Pilgrimage wasn’t the dramatic transcension of cultural, theological, and geographic barriers I (admittedly, a bit naïvely) hoped it might be. But the fact that we, as teenagers, could expose some of our most deeply-rooted beliefs and traditions, understand the differences between them, and remain steadfast friends is an admirable accomplishment rarely achieved in any historical narrative I’ve ever read.
One of the moments on the Pilgrimage I felt most deeply enriched my understanding of the Latin American Quakers and their Latin American Quakerism was that aforementioned crisis in which we had to pool our personal funds. It was the day we embarked from La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, on a day-long bus journey to Cochabamba. Towards the end of the Pilgrimage, I could tell the leaders were running low on group funds and I hoped we wouldn’t need to spend another extra night in a hostel. As usual, we had to get up early to hop on the buses, and as usual, we were late. In the scramble from the shuttles which led us from the heart of the city to the outskirts, where we met the double-decker bus on which we would spend the rest of the day, we accidentally left all of the food and the cooking supplies behind. Everything, from the lunch specially-prepared by our hosts in La Paz to our travel-sized yogurts and water heater, was lost. We hadn’t even eaten breakfast.
By the time we stopped at the closest thing to a roadside convenience store I could imagine existing in Bolivia, our stomachs were howling. The exhaustion of a long and winding journey had begun to settle into our muscles and the bags under our eyes, and we were very much annoyed. Seemingly most frustrated were our leaders, who realized that the Pilgrimage did not have enough Bolivianos to cover two more meals for a group of two dozen teenagers. We had to pool our pocket change (a dilemma compounded by the fact that the Americans and Europeans had much more money to spend on alpaca-wool sweaters and Inca Kola than the South American Friends) and buy as many crackers, trail mix, and yogurt bottles as we could.
In the end, food filled our bellies, though it was accompanied by more than a few butterflies borne from the accumulating lump of travel weariness and culture shock which had been burying itself farther and farther down our throats. The leaders blamed the Pilgrims’ lack of concern, the Pilgrims blamed the leaders’ lack of responsibility, and the only relief to be found was in a few bites of plain saltines and peach-flavored yogurt.
I thought the issue had been resolved and thoroughly discarded into the water under the bridge, but during that evening’s Epilogue (a kind of closing reflection at the end of the day) one of the Bolivian Pilgrims burst into tears. She thanked Jesús for what she saw as a lesson granted by divine fortune. We had been selfish, thinking only of our own belongings when we got on the bus, she said. God punished us for our selfishness, but as a result we learned to care about the group as a whole, and became closer to one another by working together through this unexpected hardship.
This interpretation was particularly remarkable to me, first and foremost, because I hadn’t really bothered to interpret it at all. While I don’t think it was a lesson from God and I certainly wouldn’t give thanks to Jesús for making us forget our food, I realized that her spiritual framework led her to seek meaning even in the moments of her life which at first seem insignificant or troublesome. As an evangelical Christian, she knew that a divine intelligence rules her life, and as a result she was well-practiced in the art of learning from the past. As it turns out, this is one of my weakest skills.
Instead of simply feeling discomfort or (at times) a creeping contempt for her church’s views on morality, the afterlife, and same-sex marriage, I discovered not only a quality of her faith I find admirable but one I have actually found lacking in my own cynical “we’re-just-atoms-and-chemical-reactions-hopelessly-bound-in-the-shackles-of-Plato’s-cave” life philosophy. This is one of the strongest moments of interfaith communication on my Quaker Youth Pilgrimage, and I think it serves as a good example of the kind of enrichment which was hopefully experienced at least as much by the rest of the Pilgrims.
Indeed, I learned so much about the world, about Quakers, and about myself, all while having the adventure of a lifetime. It may have been hard, but as long as you keep holding yourself in the Light, difficult challenges often turn out to be the most enjoyable journeys of all.
This essay is the third in a series about the 2014 Quaker Youth Pilgrimage. It is a component of the Quaker Fellows program at Earlham College.