Monthly Archives: August 2025

Showing Up for One Another

Leave a reply

Part of the reason I keep coming back to Quaker meeting is that I never know what I am going to get. There are some things that are certain. I know that there will be a defined starting time. I know that we will sit together in silence for about an hour. What I don’t know is that if anyone will speak or what they will say. In a Quaker context, I also don’t know what I, or our community is going to be called upon to give. Depending upon your point of view this could either be a bug or a feature. For me, it’s definitely a feature.

This stands in stark contrast to my Catholic upbringing where I could walk into church and know the recipe:  First Reading, Second Reading, the Gospel, the Homily, Profession of Faith, Lords Prayer, Communion, Final Blessing. Go in Peace! I know this nourishes many and can be perfectly satisfying but it was too predictable for me. I don’t want to know the spoilers. I want to feel like I am helping craft the plot.

Quaker meeting began for me as a physical place—the understated Brooklyn Friends Meeting House; floor to ceiling windows, lots of light streaming in, benches that face one another and therefore we face each other. The idea is that you sit and listen in silence. I am not the kind of person who excels at sitting still for very long; a few minutes seem like an eternity. This restlessness did not help my academic performance in primary or secondary school, which could be described as mediocre at best but did improve with the autonomy of college. Fast forward to the late 90s and among Quakers, I have learned that I can sit still for a whole hour and even revel in it.

Fast forward to 2020: COVID came. The Meetinghouse was closed. I tried going to a Zoom meeting at 11am with many other Friends from Brooklyn and beyond but it felt a bit too much like the all-staff town hall meetings. Screen after screen of faces, many of them peaceful, everyone connected in their homes. It felt too much like work until I learned about a smaller Zoom at 9am. I could get back from my run, go to Meeting, and be done by 10— all before anyone else in my house was even awake. So the lovely facing benches were replaced with a single screen of anywhere from 8 to 14 faces on any given Sunday. But this meeting was different. We always ended about 15 minutes early and then everyone would check in—how are you doing? What’s going on in your world?

Folks weren’t shy. We would share good things: the sense of solidarity we felt when we went out to bang on pots and pans to thank essential workers, a sourdough culture that was flourishing, progress on picking a neglected hobby back up. But we were just as likely to share things that we were struggling with—a kid at home who wasn’t thriving in zoom school, missing relatives who we feared to visit lest we leave them with a case of COVID, or that we really weren’t doing that well at all.

Though the pandemic has come and gone this group continues to meet at 9am every Sunday on Zoom and I always leave inspired. This past Sunday I learned that St. Theresa favored small acts over radical martyrdom. Another friend shared that feelings of anxiety and dread are rarely prophetic. Another friend talked about how caregiving benefits both the receiver of the care and the giver.

These messages remind me of themes from Sharon Salzberg’s Real Life. Salzberg is an American Buddhist Educator. She connects Buddhism to modern psychology. The book is full of practical insights—and a theme that runs though it is the idea of interconnectedness. How do we show up for others who are going through difficult things? Respond to pain with presence. This is what our 9am meeting does.

There is no one minister to go calling on a person who needs help. We coordinate with one another. Some days you’re the one checking in on someone; some days you’re the one being checked in on.

One of the anecdotes Salzberg relays is of a child who was suffering and considered praying. The kid said “I need a God with skin.” The idea is that we can be the Gods with skin. Will you see the humanity in another person, and meet it? So while the messages you might hear are unpredictable what’s certain is that we show up for one another. That’s more than a set of beliefs—it’s a practice we undertake together.

Where can a person go when he doesn’t know where to go? 

Leave a reply

Jenny Erpenbeck asks this question of her readers in Go, Went Gone, on a full blank page, repeated again, on another blank page. 

Go, Went, Gone bookcoverGo, Went, Gone is a short novel published in 2015 in Germany, and released in the US in 2017. In it, Erpenbeck tells the story of a group of African refugees protesting at Oranienplatz in Berlin. Richard, a retired, widowed professor, instead of just passing by, starts a conversation with the men in this group. That conversation leads to visits. He learns their names, and befriends Osarobo, Rashid, Ithema, and Karon as they navigate Germany’s cool, seemingly arbitrary and improvised migration system. 

Go, Went, Gone served as a mirror of sorts for me as I do intermittent volunteer work with the New Sanctuary Coalition, (NSC) an NYC based group that ensures that people are present for migrants while they work their way through the US legal system in the hope of continuing their lives here. 

While the lobby of the Ted Weiss Federal building has all of the heavy marble majesty of an early 21st century federal office building, a quick elevator ride leaves visitors in a white antiseptic corridor where schedules for judges with lists of names printed on orange paper line the walls. 

Migrants wait in a room with low ceilings, fluorescent lighting, and immovable chairs. That day, I helped Andi, a minor, update his change of address paperwork, an essential bureaucratic requirement. I waited and watched a judge grant him a court date far in the future so that he could have legal counsel. We had sharpies on hand so that he could write the phone number of a relative on his arm in case his phone was confiscated.  Later that same day, just outside the courthouse, ICE agents placed him in detention. 

The book’s protagonist, Richard, did much more than show up at a court hearing for the migrants he befriended. He visits them in their temporary housing. He learns their stories, about their countries and how they became separated from their families. 

In one scene, Richard takes Itehema to see a lawyer who traces modern German migration law back to Tacitus of Rome. 

“It is accounted to a sin to turn any man away from your door. The host welcomes his guest with the best meal that his means allow. When he is finished entertaining him, the host undertakes a fresh role: he accompanies the guest to the nearest house where further hospitality can be had. It makes no difference that they come uninvited; they are welcome just as warmly. No distinction is ever made between acquaintance and stranger.” 

Erpenbeck challenges us: “[M]ust living in peace – so fervently wished for throughout human history  result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead, so aggressively that it almost looks like a war?”

Go, Went, Gone, is a fictionalized retelling of how the actions of an individual transform and lift up the lives of others. New Sanctuary Volunteers do that work today in New York City. 

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Martin Luther King, Jr. 

We cannot be silent in this moment. We can show up. Here’s how: 

https://www.newsanctuarynsc.org/get-involved

Get a copy of the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/go-went-gone-jenny-erpenbeck/12418234