Kathy's Intern Speech

Though I was raised Quaker and consider myself Quaker, I grew up in a household swirling with different religious influences. When my mom was 21 years old, she got up one Sunday and walked out of her Irish Catholic church, fed up with her priest’s remarks that a woman’s place was in the home. She wanted to get an education--she wanted to be a scientist. I picture her throwing open the massive doors, sunlight pouring into the church, as she walked out holding textbooks and maybe a slide rule. My father, a Polish Jew, was raised in Poland, to a family terrorized by the Holocaust, to parents who had just barely made it. As a child I dragged these bloody stories of survival out of my hesitant dad, detail after detail. My grandparents never mentioned the Holocaust, and my dad probably wouldn’t have either if it weren’t for my incessant questioning. My grandparents were glad to be alive, they were glad they had grandchildren, they were glad we were warm, they were probably glad I was chubby. And they were done with religion, except for the instances when they thought it could protect them rather than make them more vulnerable. My Jewish grandparents had my Jewish father baptized, and they had the paperwork to prove it. What is normally a ritual of washing away original sin was, for my father, a ritual meant to protect him from the future sins of others. I needed all these stories desperately. They fed my imagination. They helped me situate myself in a complicated world. And they left me with examples of ways to relate to religion that ran the gamut.

When I was five, my mom started taking my sister and me to Quaker meeting. I learned to sit still, I learned to be quiet. I learned to listen, to myself and to God. I made friends, I grew up in a community full of love. No matter how good or bad a job I was doing of growing up gracefully, I knew I could always go to meeting on Sunday and I’d leave remembering there was a whole network of people who knew more about me than I thought, who knew even a little more than I wished they did. And I got to see that kind of love working on other people, too. I saw the meeting come together to support people who needed help—whether that help was a bed, money, or three shoulders to cry on when a marriage failed. I think it was that kind of intimate community that kept me away from attending a new meeting in college. Joining a new one seemed so scary—I’d have to make myself vulnerable, I’d have to be accountable to a faithful community, and I was barely managing to be accountable to myself.

Working at FCNL means I am part of a community like that. One of the first pieces of advice I got at FCNL was from Jim Cason, shortly before I went on a trip to Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s annual sessions. I asked Jim how to have a successful visit there, and he said “They are a worshipping community—worship with them.”

FCNL is a worshipping community. When one thinks of a lobbying organization, one doesn’t normally imagine a bastion of love and respect, but that’s what we have here. FCNL is setting a high bar for all of us program assistants. I hope wherever I go next, I can carry the spirit of respect and hope that is so pervasive at FCNL.