The Queries Project

The use of QUERIES in the Quaker Tradition is something that immediately sparked an interest in me. They seemed a wise way to hold an idea, feeling, or passion in perspective – a gem laid into a secure setting for visual delight.

I had been harrowed with the idea of “questions” being vital to our soul since my senior year in high school. It was then that my youth leader shared pieces of her journal with me to encourage me to write. She spoke about her wrestling with Thomas Merton’s notion that questions are far more important than answers. That has never left me. It sits in the setting of my soul as a gem of great importance and wealth. Questions and queries are vital in our lives.

A query is nothing more than a question that we sustain in us as we sit in silence and stillness; allowing it to ring true and resonate or come to naught for lack of resonance. A query is something we sit with to allow its presence to impact us.

There are times in life when we sit and think about something. There are times when we allow others to interact with us about something as well. A query is a question asked with the intent to settle into us and begin a new work. It is a tool for spiritual direction and formation.

I remember reading a Parker Palmer article years ago in Weavings Journal and it was about a Clearness Committee – a Quaker tool in approaching discernment in our lives. Practice will vary among societies of the Friends, but the aim is to allow a group of Friends to gather to help you ascertain direction and formation surrounding an issue in your life. The group you assemble is tasked with asking probing questions – questions you will not answer but hold within you to help you on the journey of discovery that lay ahead.

As I began to allow the use of queries to enter my life, my silences, and my ponderings, I became convinced of the early harrowing of my soul. Merton was right, questions are more vital than answers. They create space in us to view, and feel and hear – in new ways.

I began to think of the power of questions in relation to social issues. If a well-carved question could impact me within – changing the way I thought, felt, heard, saw and tasted my life and its direction and formation – couldn’t it do the same for a group of people, a team, a family, a society? Couldn’t a well-crafted question wake us up to some deeper truths about who we are and where we are?

This planted a vision in me for presenting images that could call us into the stillness and silence of the inner life and ask us some provocative questions. Questions that could lead us to grope and yearn for wholeness and completeness. Thus, was born the Queries Project.

I would find an image that could call us into the silence and stillness of our inner life and then offer us a well-carved, well-crafted question – QUERY – that could begin a process of discernment within. It became obvious that an empty chair would be the tool. It is the place of sitting for the beginning of the journey of the QUERY in the QUAKER Meeting - a portal to the interior life and the great "ME" or "I". It is an ICON of SILENCE and STILLNESS and THE WAY IN. I then discovered that there could be a thousand and one places that the chair could appear to help us question and discern where stands our heart regarding the issues present with the chair.

I could place it on a pile of trash and garbage and offer a query to ponder. At a climate rally, or a march and offer a query to ponder. Outside of a courtroom, in a prison, along a burned-out forest. I think you get the idea. Let me share with you now, a few of the images from the beginning of the project I am calling The Queries Project.

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Guns or Youth

We call them QUERIES in the Quaker Meetinghouse. Questions we hold as we sit in our stillness and silence of WAITING WORSHIP. Listening for SPIRIT-WHISPERS from the ONE.

How sit ye with this one?

LET US SEE WHAT LOVE WILL DO.

Monday, May 29, 2023

What Calls You Out?

When you go to that place and that time to encounter your truest self, what is there at your side and how are you called out to see yourself? Readings? Candles? Malas / Rosaries? Stillness? Silence?

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Tending The Oceans

What we watch, we tend. In our sitting and holding of our interior self we are also able to hold the outside world. In similar fashion. As we tend the soul, let us so tend the oceans.

Friday, September 9, 2022

Where Would You Hold QUERIES

In what chair and in what location would you sit to hold the silence and the stillness? What QUERY would you hold in your YOU as you sat? Would it be about a social concern? Would it be a moment of solemn awe for the wonder of the universe? Would it be in protest against a wrong? Would it be in expectant anticipation of a movement of SPIRT on the surface of the deep?

Monday, June 15, 2020

Racial Justice

The presence of racism and prejudice are so very subtle and often elusive. We don't always even recognize in retrospect that they were present in a situation.

How have we seen color divide people?

Are we ready to let go of a need to justify and defend ourselves in order to acknowledge the

painful experiences of Friends of Color?

Friday, June 5, 2020

Systemic Racism

"Hamilton and Carmichael describe institutional racism as “less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts.”

- How to be Less Stupid About Race, by, Crystal M. Fleming

“How can I join with others and come to believe that we can work in community to interrupt white supremacy and practice a culture based on partnership rather than on domination?”

– Quaker Query on Racism and Diversity

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Artful Creativity

How do we allow the Light to escape us in form? What tools of creativity and artfulness do we employ to assist the Spirit to take shape - for others? Where do we have outlets of creativity and soulfulness established in our lives and how frequently do we settle into those spaces?

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