If Quakers Were Witches

by Sara Jolena Wolcott

My grandmother loved moss. 

We would go on long walks together (well, I thought they were long, as an 9 year old), and look at the lichen on trees together with great delight. Upon a magnificent vista, a special clearing, or a Great Old Tree, she would raise both her hands to the natural world with delight, praise, and, I would now say, acknowledgement of the power and Presence before her. Upon hearing a bird in the forest, she her eyes would twinkle at me before she tilted her head, then whistle its song back to it. She knew all the birds songs. (Or at least I always thought she did). She was a great whistler: she had even been a whistler in a band when she was in college (I didn’t even know that was a thing). 

She always joked that it was University that had turned her into a Quaker: she understood the power of education.  She had entered UC Berkeley, the first person from her family to attend such a prestigious school, ready to study Mandarin so she could become a Christian missionary to China. Then she took a class on biblical history, learned that the Bible was not entirely true, and had a major crisis of faith. Somewhere in there she met my grandfather, himself a budding conscientious objector, and happily became a Quaker. At some point, she and her young family moved to Los Gatos hills, where she taught second grade and lived next to Hidden Villa Farm and the great Josephine and Frank Duvenick. Together, along with several other strong women and their immensely capable husbands, they founded Palo Alto Friends Meeting and, subsequently, College Park Quarterly Meeting – and played a role in what would become Ben Lomond Quaker Center. 

I have far, far more memories of our time in nature together than at Quaker Meeting.  Thirty years later I can almost still smell the freshness of the soap she used to wash her hands after her many hours tending tulips and other blooms  in her garden, which was always beautiful. It was she who first named my gifts for somatic healing (it turned out that all of her granddaughters had this gift). And she who, when the doctors said my grandfather had just six months to live, refused their prognosis.  She turned to “alternative” healing therapies – from food to brain gym to magnets to changing narratives to massages to stress reduction to – well I don’t really know for sure, but there were a lot of things, and whatever she did it worked, because he lived for at least 25 years longer than he was “supposed” to.  

She had all these kinds of gifts: with healing, with food, with plants, with teaching, with music, with sensing patterns and building community and befriending strangers and cultivating powerful visions of the future.

I don’t think she would have ever used the term “witchy” or “animist” to describe herself. She was raised to become a missionary, afterall, certainly would have labelled herself a Christian, could easily quote the psalms, and appreciated hymns. In her world, “Christian” did not ever equate “witchy” or anything remotely “pagan.” 

It’s a dichotomy she inherited: not, I think, one that is inherent in the truth of a tradition that seeks to nurture the Inward Light.  I sometimes wonder what she would think about me offering these workshops and initiatives on, “If Quakers were Witches….”   

Would she have recognized herself in the people who gathered together at Ben Lomond Quaker Center in 2024 when we offered our first workshop on this theme?I hope she would have stayed long enough to sit in the redwood circle with us, around the fire, under the full moon, in silence. How powerful that night was. For me, one of the most powerful parts of the workshop was how potent were our Meetings for Worship.  “Covered meeting” doesn’t quite describe it, because it was upswelling, come from within and moving out, not just from above. It was more like the silence was pregnant.  Pregnant with what? Dare I say Love? 

My grandmother also never discussed indigenous peoples. Or rather, only in a vague way: indigenous peoples were “wise”, and I had the sense of her admiration of them for their closeness to nature, but they were also far away. Maybe as far away as China.

For me, two generations later, I can’t imagine loving this beautiful, generous  land without asking questions about who was here before I was; about the original caretakers of this land – who they were, what they did, why they are not here now, and where are they now?  It would take me a long time (in retrospect) to learn how to answer those questions, but the more I do the more I am able to sink into the earth-human connection that is my birthright as a daughter of Earth.  I have put much of my own professional energy into tracing the histories of climate change into the Doctrine of Discovery, and working on what it means to both understand and untangle from those histories. I don’t know if I have any right to be part of the bigger conversations about “rematriation” without doing that work.  As my friends at Land Justice Futures (where I am the only Quaker on their theological council) say, you can’t get to the cool stuff about Mother Law without also engaging in #complicitnomore.

Can any earth-loving spiritual/religious practice do its work without also engaging in some form of decolonization? Not if it wants to go deep. Not if it wants to engage with the Peace that is in these lands and waters and which is possible to find within and between all beings.

And as we get closer to Spirit, I find that many, many people, including Quakers, are feeling the calls and nudges of Earth.  This movement is not about Quakerism. 

But Quakers are amongst those being, well, Quaked. Brought to the possibility of greater life and even, perhaps, Peace. It is possible. I have experienced this possibility directly, myself, at the recent Rematriation Symposium, held by women of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.  There is a Peace that is here in this place. 

I actually think many of us settler folks tend to miss it.

I include many of my witchy and animist friends and co-creators of rituals in that statement. I’ve been on a decolonial road for many years, and am only just beginning to feel this deeper Presence. 

But I recognize it. I recognize it because I come from a tradition that sat and sometimes still sits under trees. 

Because my grandmother knew that singing me birdsongs was as important as hymns. 

Because she saw and named my gifts and we laughed together. 

And its really not about what names we put on the Mystery anyways. 

And yet here we are.  

At the beginning of the 2024 If Quakers Were Witches… workshop at Ben Lomond, I sat between my two elders: Elaine Emily, who is well known for her eldering, and Hayley Hathaway, who was a student of mine, is younger than I am, and is, as many of you who have seen her work at QEW know, quite a talented elder herself.  They both said that that workshop was the first such workshop. There would be others. The next one, they agreed, would be on the East Coast. 

I was surprised. 

But they were right.  

It will be at Woolman Hill, in the Berkshire mountains, amongst the eastern woodlands, in early May. Right around Beltane, for those of you who remember what such things are. 

It will be shortly after the first 100 days of Shock and Awe.

A time when many birds will be singing. 

Peering into what is possible this May, I can almost hear my Grandmother, Margaret Crogan Wolcott, whistling back to them. 

You, and your grandmothers, and your grandmother’s grandmothers, are welcome. 

Even if you don’t know if you or your children will be able to have grandchildren. Still, we will gather, for Life keeps calling us forth: a people to be gathered.