5/92
MY PERSONAL,
SPIRITUAL JOURNEY AND
THE DURHAM, NC FRIENDS MEETING
by Anne Corpening Welsh
One Sunday in the fall of 1955, in my junior year at Duke University, two friends and fellow students, Bill Jeffries and JoAnne Lee, invited me to go with them to meeting for worship at the Durham Friends Meeting on Alexander Avenue, between East and West Campus. Though I knew nothing about Quakerism, I was sufficiently curious to accept their invitation. Bill was enrolled in Duke Divinity School preparing for the Methodist ministry. Even so, he identified with Quaker values and must have felt that I might find a place among Friends for my restless soul.
At that time, Durham Friends were meeting in a little frame hut which had served as a construction site office elsewhere on the campus. The building project for the current Meeting House on the property was already underway.
When I entered the plain, narrow building for the first time, I saw a few people with heads bowed, sitting on folding chairs in a half circle around a pot-bellied stove. Some literature was on a side table and there were a couple of posters on the wall, nothing one could call ecclesiastical art or icon.
The meeting room's appearance was the first surprise. The second was seeing Dr. Donald Adams, my much-admired psychology professor, sitting meditatively in the little group. He could not have easily seen me enter the Meeting House but when he spoke, it was as if he spoke for me.
"There is a God beyond the God of our theology and creeds. It is this Ultimate Reality we seek and it is this that we would worship," he said quietly.
I knew that my soul had found a home.
After about an hour, the meeting ended with the shaking of hands by everyone. I felt an immense relief that I was not required to say any words, in creeds and hymns, that I could not honestly affirm.
The Meeting spoke to my condition, which was that of a deeply troubled, closet agnostic. During my sophomore year, I had begun to experience some spiritual contradictions which grew into a personal dilemma: I realized that I could no longer affirm a belief in the God that I had grown up with in the Methodist church, yet I had become a leader in the Methodist Student Fellowship (MSF) at the university. I was even the vice-president of the statewide MSM, the Methodist Student Movement.
With new perspectives on religion and civilization, I had taken to examining the God I had known and worshipped for years and found cracks in His edifice. The disintegration of my old faith happened gradually but it was progressive, and felt like a terminal disease. I saw no way to put back together the broken God of my childhood and make Him--and me--whole again.
Yet I was in that position of responsibility in Methodist student activities! As a Freshman I had joined the local MSF, quickly becoming involved in its activities. Then Rev. Arthur Brandenburg came to Duke as the Methodist student chaplain and advisor. Talented and committed, Art revitalized and strengthened MSF. An inspiring and challenging mentor, Art encouraged us to take our faith seriously and to put it into action in our lives. I found myself even more involved, such as in planning joint activities with students from nearby N.C. Central University, an all-black institution, and trying in vain to convince the Duke administration to invite black ministers to preach at Chapel services. When I became active in the state MSM, I travelled regularly to meetings and gatherings, and eventually spearheaded a regional MSM conference in the fall of my junior year.
Yet inside, I felt increasingly like a traitor and a hypocrite. When I confessed once to Art that I had been dishonest regarding my beliefs, his warm and quick response, "Well, Anne, join the human race!" relieved me somewhat, but still the doubts and bad feelings persisted.
At the invitation of another fellow classmate, I went to Chautauqua, N.Y. to work as a waitress during the summer of 1955. Even though I had a wonderful time there, I felt spiritually dead as far as Christianity was concerned. By coincidence, an MSM advisor from Virginia, Rev. Gerry Speidel, whom I admired and respected, was vacationing at Chautauqua with his family that summer.
One afternoon Gerry and I sat in the coolness of the great Chautauqua Amphitheater and I was able to share with him my spiritual anguish and questioning. He knew me as a leader in our state Methodist organization. Like Art, he assured me that I was not alone, that others in the church had had problems with theology.
"But Gerry, I find that I cannot honestly say the Apostle's Creed anymore," I protested.
"Just say as much of it as you can," he counseled, "and keep quiet during the rest."
That summer at Chautauqua, I discovered Martin Buber and the Ethical Culture Society. More momentous for my life, I also met the man I was to marry, Norman Morrison. A senior at The College of Wooster and already preparing for the Presbyterian ministry, Norman was a staunch pacifist and was interested in world peace and international relations. Later on, as our relationship developed, I learned that he was also interested in Quakerism and often attended the little Friends worship group or Meeting which met in the Library basement at Wooster. Norman believed strongly in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and told me, just days after we had met, that he felt its hand in our coming together. He had a vision (not yet shared by me) of the union of our lives.
Returning to Duke, I became less and less active in the state MSM and stopped attending Sunday worship services in the Duke Chapel. Despite Gerry's suggestion about the Creed, there was just too much else required of me to honestly participate in Chapel services.
Even after I was led to Durham Meeting that fall, it was four years before I became a member of the Society of Friends. Nevertheless, to me, that first day at meeting really felt like my birthday into the family of Friends. During the years that followed, the Quaker way of worship, personal pacifism, concern for world peace and racial justice, and equality between the sexes resonated with my deepest inward urgings and beliefs. The reverence and vitality of silent worship brought me into the presence of a living God, One who was much more than all my definitions and concepts. It was a time of exciting spiritual and personal growth for me.
Finally, even though I felt like a beginner in the faith, I thought I was ready to become a Quaker. Pacifism still seemed an unreachable ideal for me, a confession I openly made when, in 1959, Norman and I were being considered for membership in the Pittsburgh, PA Friends Meeting. But I was welcomed into membership, as a seeker and sojourner on the way.
I think it was that first day at Durham Meeting that I met Susan and David Smith, founders and guiding lights of the Meeting. After meeting was over, Susan announced an upcoming state meeting of the United World Federalists--the first time I had heard of UWF.
In the months to follow I was to learn more from the Smiths about UWF and the Smiths' way of living in the world. Susan became the president of that state organization and was instrumental in bringing Norman Cousins to speak at Duke. I joined UWF and through it became acquainted with Sam Levering, a Quaker orchardist and peace activist from Virginia. Later, I arranged for Sam to speak on peace and the UWF to our Methodist fellowship at Duke. I met Cousins again in 1956 when I covered his lecture series at Chautauqua for The Chautauquan Daily.
Retired from their medical professions, the Smiths were energetic and devoted workers in the cause of peace, race relations, and world federalism. They were the prime movers not only in the founding of the Durham Meeting but in the building of the new Meeting House. With a style that blended serious social concerns with an unaffected deep South charm, they dedicated their later years to Quaker causes. Their gracious and quietly elegant home in Hope Valley hosted many gatherings of interest to Friends and others of similar outlook.
Other stalwarts of the Durham Meeting during the time of my sojourn, 1955-57, were Frances Jeffers, a research assistant in the Duke Center for the Study of Aging, Fred McKinney, a graduate assistant in Sociology, Ed and Sally Flaccus (Ed taught in the Botany Department) and Peter and Martha Klopfer. The Klopfers were active in the Meeting from the time Peter joined the Zoology Department, establishing the outstanding project with primates. Peter and Martha donated land adjoining their own property between Durham and Chapel Hill for the site for the Carolina Friends School, working closely with the Smiths on the establishment of that institution.
Around the edges of the Meeting "core group" then were such colorful persons as Wadi Salah from Egypt, who was studying parapsychology with Dr. J.B. Rhine, and Dr. Paul Richard, an Eastern philosopher and mystic.
The presence of the Flaccus children and others at meeting presented a need for a religious education program. With the help of literature from Friends General Conference in Philadelphia (and probably drawing on my Methodist experience more than I'd admit), I worked with the children during 1956-57. This may have been part of the beginning of an organized First Day School for the meeting's children.
During my senior year I discovered a younger Duke student, Shade Marie Rushing, from Texas, who was (deja vu!) a young Methodist restless and struggling over her faith. She was interested in exploring the Society of Friends and before long was regularly attending meeting. One day after meeting, Shadie said with great feeling, "The thing I value about Quakers is that they really listen." After my graduation in June 1957, "Shadie" took over the responsibilities for First Day School.
Up until the time I graduated, I was often a guest in the Smiths' home and became very close to them, regarding them as mentors and almost like family. When Norman and I were married on September 7, 1957 under the care of the Meeting, we were the first couple to wed in the new Meeting House. Susan and David offered their home for the wedding reception, since we were married away from our homes--I was from Granite Falls, N.C., and Norman's home was in Chautauqua. Their daughter Rosalind, who lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, allowed me to use her beautiful wedding gown.
At the time we were married, it would have been inconceivable to think that our marriage would only last a short time. Just eight years later, on November 2nd, 1965, Norman was led to sacrifice his life through self-immolation at the Pentagon, an ultimate act of protest against the horror of the growing war in Vietnam. At the time, we were both members of Stony Run Meeting in Baltimore, where Norman was Executive Secretary. An active Quaker-pacifist, Norman had already opposed the war openly, in many ways, including war tax resistance. But his private agony over the war and its claim on innocent children and civilians in Vietnam went even deeper than I knew. His witness radically changed the course of my life and the lives of our three children. Ben, Tina, and Emily, as well as deeply affecting our close friends and countless others. I believe that it also affected, at least indirectly, the ultimate course of the war.
Even though the rough and irregular trail of my life has taken me far away from Durham Meeting, whenever I have returned, even though infrequently, it has always felt a lot like home.