SELECT A PROGRAM

(3/2008) - In the spring of 1953, I was an impatient young man awaiting the tardy arrival of my girl friend outside the old girl’s dorm, now the central administration building. She possessed an admirable if infuriating commitment to committee meetings. It was late evening and I thought myself quite alone in the shadows. I expressed a string of muffled expletives and heard behind me the even and gentle voice of English teacher, Martha Crowley: “Oh my, Friend, thee has quite a temper. Will thee learn a little patience?” That was all the sting there was to it. In another school, I might have been suspended for several days. Earlier in my life, as I was shooting at crows along a ridge overlooking our Quaker farm, I was summoned by Margaret Anne Soule, my grandmother’s cousin: “Arthur Willis, does thee know that crows are God’s creatures? Does thy conscience know?”

A fellow classmate said to me recently, “If someone addressed me as thee, … well, … after the shock wore off, I would say that someone regarded me as a friend.” Indeed, this goes to the core of the Religious Society of Friends. In addressing another in the second person singular, one assumes a personal and caring attitude behind which is the conviction that everyone is sacred and carries a divine light within. In the many gatherings of Oakwood alumnae across classes and generations, as they meet and share what it was about Oakwood that touched them so deeply, I would suggest one of the attitudes that persists in Quaker schools is that each person is regarded as unique and is to be treated in his or her personal context. The plain language may be gone, but the attitude of addressing the personal and the sacral in each other continues.

I am not a linguist, but I will speculate that it is far easier to make impersonal someone who is perceived as merely a “You” and not a “Thee.” Perhaps during the early English and Dutch commercial revolutions, it served business practice to turn people into commodities in the pragmatics of trade. There would be no ambiguity in addressing the “you” as one with whom one temporarily partners up. If English is the present lingua franca of the commercial world, it is concerning that the second person singular and plural are both “you” in this Teutonic tongue.

Another attitude that has shaped Quaker behavior, as Alfred North Whitehead has admiringly observed in several of his works, is the utterance “I have a concern.” Like “thee,” this goes to the heart of the matter without confrontation, but calls for wakefulness in all the parties involved. I would suggest that for many of us our experience at Oakwood was more often informed by a message of concern, rather than by the admonition: “Now hear this!” Our learning took place in association and accrual, rather than through dictum and didactics.

Early Friends spoke directly to the center of a human being and cut through any and all mannerisms to the actual condition of both individual and collective situations. I believe Oakwood Friends School retains the essentials of these attitudes, even as the old behaviors have vanished. Many of us thrived in such a place.

reprinted from Oak Leaves summer '07