Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, June 7, 2026
Alicia McBride is Senior Director for Quaker Leadership at the Friends Committee for National Legislation, and a member of Sandy Springs Friends Meeting
Last weekend I was in Richmond, Indiana at the memorial service for Mary Garman. Mary was my “bonus mom” (a phrase I use to avoid the negative associations of “mother-in-law”). She was also a mentor, teacher, and cheerleader in my journey to recognize my work as a form of ministry.
Among the stories told at her memorial, one kept returning to me as I prepared this message about integrity. For a period of time, before the Supreme Court upheld marriage equality, Mary stopped officiating weddings.
This was a matter of personal integrity. Some people had access to the legal and social protections of marriage, while others didn’t. So, for a time, she stopped participating in that system.
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Integrity is one of those concepts that comes up a lot among Quakers. Often we refer to it as one of our testimonies.
This morning I want to consider this testimony more deeply –what it means to have integrity as a Friend, and what integrity means for our Quaker meetings, organizations, and institutions.
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I want to begin by offering a metaphor, to clarify what I mean by integrity.
This metaphor draws on a model developed by Dr. Darya Funches, which I first encountered in a workshop led by Niyonu Spann.
Imagine a water lily. There’s a flower floating on the surface of the pond, the thing you can see most easily. Depending on how clear the pond is, you might be able to see the stem that holds up the flower. And down at the bottom of the pond, there are roots – growing in the sediment, and supporting both the stem and the flower.
Here comes the metaphor.
The flower is what others can see. It’s what we do, the actions we take, how we show up in the world.
The stem is what we say about who we are: our mission statements and “about us” pages.
Roots: Core assumptions, core beliefs, what we are grounded in.
All three of these parts of the water lily need to be aligned for the flower to bloom. The roots support the stem, which holds up and nourishes the flower. Out of our secure grounding, our words and actions align to testify to our beliefs.
When all these pieces fit together, we have integrity.
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Let’s talk about the roots.
In the original model, the roots are described as values, core beliefs, or our worldview. Those are indeed things that people can root themselves in.
But, as Friends, our roots are deeper and wilder. We are rooted in what we experience when we center down and listen to God.
In the Pendle Hill pamphlet, The Testimony of Integrity in the Religious Society of Friends, Wilmer Cooper draws a clear distinction between values and testimony. He writes, “Values are projected ideals or goals which are rationally determined, whereas Quaker testimonies are derived from religious faith and experience fashioned out of a life of prayer, devotion, and worship, joined with spiritual discernment and commitment.”
More succinctly, in his consideration of Quaker testimonies, Paul Buckley writes, “Values are things we decide on. Testimonies are products of the Inward Light.”
We have integrity when our words and actions are rooted in that experience of the Inward Light and when we are faithful to it. We testify, in all sorts of ways, when we have integrity.
To come back to Mary Garman – what we can see is her action, not to perform marriages. In declining requests, she shared her discomfort with a system that discriminated against same-gender couples. What was going on in the roots – I never had the chance to talk to her about it. Knowing Mary, God (or “Gahd” as she would say in her Chicago accent) was involved somehow.
In the book of Matthew, chapter 7, Jesus uses architectural rather than botanical language, but he’s getting at a similar idea of the importance of action stemming from God’s teachings. He compares a listener who acts on his words to a wise man who builds his house on a rock. Despite rain and wind, the house stays up because its foundation is strong. Those who hear Jesus’s teaching and do not act, on the other hand, are like a foolish man who builds on sand. When those same storms come, the house falls down – losing its structural integrity. (7:24-27)
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Integrity is what happens when we hear God’s word and put it into practice – thought, word, deed. The house holds up. The flower blooms.
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Simple, right?
Reminds me of one of my favorite descriptions of Quaker worship –Michael Birkel, in his book Silence and Witness: “[Quaker worship] is like flying a jet; you take off, you go somewhere, you land; you quiet yourself, you encounter God, you refresh and perhaps redirect your life.”
This is what we aspire to as Friends- to be directed by that inward teacher, to live a life consistent with the promptings of that still small voice.
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This is not a solo project.
We need all the help we can get from those around us to discern, to seek clearness, and to test what right action, with integrity to the prompting of the Inner Light, means. As Paul Buckley notes, “the voice of the inward light may be infallible, but our ears are not.”
There is also an important role to recognize that infallibility with humility and grace, for ourselves and others. We are human, we are impatient, we make mistakes. We might think we know where we’re going, where God is directing us to go, but sometimes – often – we might get off track.
When my son Howard was small, his solution to every challenge was to run head first at it. Sometimes that was a literal solution (he once knocked Mary, his beloved Granna, over while trying to give her a hug); sometimes he just needed to have an answer immediately and would not let something go until he did. This was often not the best way to solve problems.
Quakers call this tendency “outrunning our guide” – when our words and actions get ahead of God’s direction. Maybe this looks like our water lily flower starting to drift away from its roots. We need to be able to notice that drift, accept that it’s happening, and come back to the center. As St. Benedict wrote in his rule, “Always, we begin again.”
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When I talked about Mary’s actions around marriage, I had to speculate about the roots. It might be obvious, but we don’t know what’s happening under the ground, literally or spiritually.
In our own lives we may feel the alignment that signifies right action– that sense of spiritual snapping into place. We don’t always have that same insight for other people.
There’s a challenge in that but also a beauty. Each of us shares our encounter with the divine refracted through the lens of our own identity, experience, and unique perspective. Our roots grow in the same soil, but our blossoms are different. It’s like the bush in Hawaii a coworker told me about, which produces many colors of flowers, all from the same plant.
When we come together and share how we experience the divine, seek clearness together on how we are led, our perspective widens. We encounter God in new ways. Our hearing sharpens.
Yet because we can’t see what’s happening underground, there can be a tendency to focus on what we can see – the flower, the fruits of our actions. We can mistake what we do with what it means to be a Friend, and to focus on the purity of our actions at the expense of a focus on the faithfulness of our leadings.
This is not just a modern issue. I know that my Quaker meeting wrote people out of the community for fighting in the Civil War, or for marrying outside of the Quaker faith. (For a fictional take, the novel Flowers from the Storm, by Laura Kinsale, is, among other things, a fascinating story about God and human love at one of these high-judgement times in Quaker history.)
Today, someone might talk about how they’re a “bad Quaker” because they don’t compost, or because they order from Amazon, or because they avoid talking to the annoying person next door, or because they pay taxes even knowing that money supports U.S. war and imperialism.
And maybe that is true – maybe this person has a leading against these things and is not acting faithfully. Maybe they are not seeking to practice integrity and bring their words and actions into alignment with what they hear from God.
Or, maybe, they are trying. They are doing their best with what they have, in the situation they find themself in. They are listening with their fallible ears, and discerning how they are led to live a life that testifies to their particular divine calling. And maybe that call is more than a set of rules that we expect people to follow to be a “good Quaker.”
One more quote from Paul Buckley’s reflection on the testimonies: “Ultimately there is only one testimony, to faithfully follow the word of Spirit breathed within our hearts. What may be named as separate testimonies are merely different flowerings from the same root.” We testify to our integrity, ultimately, in the ways our lives testify to the world.
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So far I’ve been talking about personal integrity and how each of us might demonstrate our experience of the Divine. And I’ve noted that those personal leadings happen in community. Now I want to come back to the idea of integrity – not just in community, but as community.
Another example, from FCNL:
Aftermath of 9/11, foundations were concerned that they would be accused of financing terrorism. They began requiring grant recipients to certify that their board members were not part of a terrorist organization. FCNL’s Executive Committee discerned that FCNL would not comply, even if it meant losing foundation support. Instead, they decided they would send a letter along with their grant requests, explaining why they were not complying as a matter of conscience.
As with Mary’s decision not to perform weddings, here we can notice the layers of action, explanation, and leading. We can also imagine the judgement from someone who, on the one hand, wonders why FCNL is engaging with this compromised system in the first place; or on the other, is jeopardizing money that could do good work.
As with personal integrity, corporate integrity requires cultivating our spiritual roots. We need to consider: Where – in our meetings, organizations, schools – are the spaces where foundational, deep listening and worship happen? How are we building relationships, trust, and common understandings? How do we help people distinguish personal opinions from the pull of the divine in discerning that next right step?
Once we know how we are led, collectively, we also need to have the courage to say it, and to act from that knowledge – in an environment that may be less than ideal.
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Matthew 10:16 Jesus sends out his disciples into the world “like sheep among wolves.” “Therefore,” he tells them, “be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.”
This is our work as Friends too. To understand the world, to interact with it, but not to be co-opted by it. It’s part of why I became a Friends – to expand my faith beyond what happened in one hour, in one building, one day of the week.
In some ways, Jesus is describing an impossibility. Snakes are predators. Doves are prey. How are we meant to be both?
That is the challenge of being a Quaker in the world – and, even more so, the challenge of being a Quaker organization trying to function in a complex web of laws, norms, expectations, and conventional wisdom. Our meetings own property, pay taxes, hire employees. Our schools face financial pressures and receive endless advice on how to “compete.” Our organizations, like FCNL, interact with and work within political systems that are often unjust. The world is a messy place to be.
It can be easy to be swayed by the assumptions and norms around us, to feel we have to just go along. To be shrewd, but not innocent. How do we navigate without becoming unmoored from our roots, having them migrate from rock to sand? How do we keep alignment and witness to God’s message with integrity?
Our organizations and institutions need the touchstones of worship, discernment, and spiritual grounding to be able to recognize when conventional wisdom or cultural norms might diverge from the roots of God’s message to that community.
Sometimes, the organization might go along with the norms. Having influence on the world means we can’t opt out entirely, or die on every hill. But it’s important that those choices too are discerned, that we don’t just fall into a direction. All our choices speak about who we are and how we are aligned with the promptings of the Spirit. Every time we do this challenging work, of acting from a grounded place, of grappling together to discern the next faithful step we can take with integrity, we build our spiritual capacity to do it again.
In her book Against Purity, Living Ethically in Compromised Times, the anthropologist and philosopher Alexis Shotwell asks us to consider how, “under conditions of oppression and exploitation, [we might] enact practices of freedom that can shape worlds we currently cannot imagine.”
When we faithfully listen to and follow the promptings of Spirit with integrity, we can be part of shaping that world.
My wish for you is that your roots grow deep and your actions shine brightly.
