Stories from Hudson’s Quaker Meeting House
by Tristan Geary
illustrations by Erik Long
The third block of Union Street was a mosaic of sound. Children were playing, shrieking; in the distance the Amtrak horn blared; the bell in the steeple of the First Presbyterian Church struck eleven. But inside the Quaker meeting house all was still, except for the creaking of wooden pews and the buzzing of a bee against the window pane.
Every Sunday morning at 10:30, Quakers, meditators, and the spiritually-curious gather together at 343 Union Street for the Hudson Friends Meeting. Some come seeking God, some come seeking silence. Some want to connect with a higher power on their own terms, outside of the traditional church. Some have been in Hudson for decades, some have just moved here. They are young, they are old. They sit in the humble, one-room house, built in 1832, facing each other, saying nothing, but seeking the same thing: a direct experience of the divine.
In 1970 Jan Hanvik dodged his draft for the Vietnam War and fled Minneapolis to Mexico. He was a hippy back then and remains charmingly so, with clues to his hippiedom in his beaded bracelets and one of his favorite life philosophies: “It all works out.”
He asked his parents for help in getting out of the war, but they deferred to the government. He went to a psychiatrist, and pleaded with him to do an evaluation that showed he was unfit, but the doctor found nothing. He went to the Catholic church for help. Hanvik recalled the response of his priest: “why do you only come to us when you’re scared?”
So Hanvik hitchhiked to Mexico. He ended up in Monterrey, taken in by a community that understood his plight. “They loved me and didn’t want me to go and kill people,” said Hanvik. He didn’t know it at the time, but Hanvik was sprouting Quaker tendencies amidst a backdrop of war.
Hanvik is a dancer, and in 1990 received a Fulbright scholarship to teach dance in El Salvador. It was the tail end of the Salvadoran Civil War, when paramilitary death squads still roamed the streets and dead bodies turned up nightly along roadways. Hanvik recalled teaching a modern dance class to a room-full of students. They faced Hanvik, with their backs to the window. Hanvik faced them, leading them through modern dance steps. Over the shoulders of his students, through the window, Hanvik saw enormous plumes of fire erupt in the distance. Keeping the peace, Hanvik adjusted the choreography he was leading to include no 180 degree turns.
In El Salvador, Hanvik saw how the people on two sides of a war are not so different after all, when he learned from locals that the Salvadorian soldiers were the exact same people as the guerilla fighters; they were from the same towns, went to the same schools, but happened to be recruited to opposing sides through force or coercion.
It’s this principled neutrality that Hanvik felt was lacking from his Catholic upbringing. “I remember as a ten year old going to church and the priest would say: ‘the Protestants gained 103,906 converts in Africa last month and the Catholics only gained 92,304, so if you give more money then we can beat the Lutherans,’” said Hanvik.
It was also in El Salvador that Hanvik stumbled across a book, Witness to War: An American Doctor in El Salvador. “It’s so vivid, like I read it yesterday,” he said. In the book, Dr. Charles Clements, a former US Air Force pilot turned Quaker doctor, travels to El Salvador to treat wounded guerilla soldiers and civilians. It was this book that made Hanvik realize that the destination of his spiritual path was Quakerism.
The Quaker doctrine urges worshippers to treat people with complete openness, to maintain a posture of neutrality, and to commit to non-proselytizing worship. Quakers believe there is a godliness in everyone that can communicate directly with a higher power. Some call this higher power God, for others it’s Jesus Christ. For others still, this higher power — both within and above — is simply called the Light, or the Spirit. Whatever form it takes, the spirit within everyone is what Quakers are trying to commune with. In El Salvador, Hanvik put his new found Quakerism to the test.
Hanvik was staying on the property of a high ranking general from the US-government backed Salvadoran army. At the time, Hanvik was working with the Pan American Musical Exchange, and had accumulated many CDs. In the evenings, Hanvik and the general would listen to them. The general sat with his eyes closed, swaying and humming to the music. “I was a gay modern dancer from Minnesota, in the living room of a Salvadoran general,” said Hanvik, a hippy, a modern dancer, a peacenik, an artist, sharing a moment of music with someone in charge of killing people. “If you stay open you can have these experiences,” said Hanvik.
For Hanvik, one of the main lessons he has learned from Quakerism is that the kneejerk tendency to take sides is poison to spiritual wellbeing. Hanvik has even resolved to leave the Democratic Party for this reason. “Everything in the system makes you feel as if you’re on one end of a spectrum — I don’t feel on the end of any spectrum,” said Hanvik. “You don’t have to win, you don’t have to fight.”
Hanvik bought a house in Claverack in 1991 with the money he received from the Fulbright, and has been coming to the Hudson Friends Meeting ever since. He married his husband Mark DeGarmo there in 2002.
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The Hudson Friends Meeting does not project an ecstatic, sermonizing kind of worship. Rather, it’s a silent, inward meditation. Nobody leads the services, and anyone can walk in. The pews are arranged in a square, and worshippers sit facing the center as if conjuring their own image of a God in the round.
On a recent Sunday, some worshippers sat fidgeting. One worshipper was fighting sleep, catching himself as his head nodded past his center of mass. Some were trying to focus, to break through into a second layer of deeper, prolonged stillness. Then, a noise began to emerge from the distance.
A welling of voices grew closer, clearer, and louder. “Have mercy on us,” they chanted, offered as a response to the procession leader’s interstitial preaching. It was as if the voices were an auditory hallucination of one’s own mind, beaming out of the God-shaped entity conjured in the center, manifested through extended meditation. Some inside the meeting house looked around the room to check that they weren’t the only ones hearing things.
The procession of worshippers approached the meeting house until they were directly outside. The mournful chants of “have mercy on us” filled the small room. The Quakers responded with their worship, silence. A few of the wandering worshippers peeked their heads through the open meeting house window, no doubt surprised that worship could look so different, be so silent.
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In 1995, Gary Lewis, the clerk of the Hudson Friends Meeting, had a Christian mystical experience while surfing the early internet.
Lewis had worked through many denominations of Christianity, but was after something more contemplative, something more personal. He turned to the internet for answers, and, while at work, stole away to query the search engine of his work terminal. “Direct experience of God” was what he typed. “All these Quaker sites came up,” said Lewis. What followed was exactly what he searched for, a direct experience with something divine. “That was a powerful experience that I would describe as mystical,” said Lewis, who had reached out to God, and had received an answer through the pixels.
He’s had other mystical experiences since. One was triggered late at night, while he was in his office reading Frederich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, particularly a poem contained within the book titled Zarathustra’s Roundelay, wherein Nietzsche describes the nature of joy as the deepest force in the world, with its ability to communicate with the eternal. When Lewis read it, his vision filled with a scene of a starry night, similar to Van Gogh’s famous painting.
“I had an experience I described at the time as my soul literally touching the souls of Nietzsche and Vincient Van Gogh,” said Lewis. The experience led him to write an accompanying poem to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s Roundelay, titled An Existential Prayer.
Mysticism is central to Quakerism; otherworldly encounters resulting from direct communication with God are often breakthrough moments for new and seasoned Quakers. Indeed, the spiritual beginnings of Quakerism originate with the mystical experiences of George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement. In 1643, after growing frustrated with the hypocritical behaviour of fellow Christians, he spent a sleepless night praying. Eventually, he heard the words: “Thou seest how young people go together into vanity, and old people into the earth; and thou must forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, and be as a stranger unto all.” Fox understood the words as a direct message from God.
In 1647, while in a pit of spiritual despair, Fox had a second mystical experience. Another message came through: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.” This direct experience of God, as so thoroughly experienced by people like Lewis, is central to Quaker belief. There are no high priests, clergy, or anointed members to dispense blessings upon a congregation. For Quakers, everyone has equal and direct access to the Spirit, which can result in encounters both rapturous and quiet. “The authority is with you, because it is your direct interpretation of the divine,” said Lewis. “If you experience the spirit, you tend to live a life that is peaceful, simple, that has integrity and truth.” Lewis moved to Columbia County in 2013, and has been coming to the Hudson Friends Meeting since 2018.
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Growing up in Cape Cod, Olan Quattro had a friend who would attend Quaker camp each summer. Quattro was often invited, but never ended up going. Instead, her first Quaker experience was at the Quaker-style funeral of that friend, who died at 16 years old.
Since then, Quattro started seeking local meetings in her hometown of Cape Cod, whether they were organized in meeting houses, or held in neighbors living rooms. She joined (and eventually became the clerk of) the New England Young Friends — teenage Quakers based in Boston who would bus around the northeast for multi-day silent retreats. “I remember limbs all over each other,” said Quattro, recalling a busful of teenage Quakers. “You would go, and every time you would just fall in love with everybody.” Then they’d return to Boston, and continue their Quaker mission, whether it be volunteering at homeless shelters, or protesting against the then emerging Gulf War.
Quattro has experience at Quaker meetings all over the country, and noted Hudson’s meeting as a particularly meditative one, even though worshippers are welcome to speak during the meeting if they feel moved to. “You have to be alert, but quiet. You’re very awake, but totally fine sitting still,” she said.
Hudson was founded by New England Quakers in 1785, many of whom were whalers. Quattro, herself a New England-hailing Quaker (who even worked on whale-watching ships growing ), moved to Hudson in 2022. The continuation of the whaling Quaker tradition in Hudson, even in the smallest of modern ways, is not lost on Quattro.
The Hudson Friends Meeting welcomes people who arrived via very different roads: through witnessing war, advocating for peace, through grief, through mystical encounters, through art, and through questions that other churches could not answer. However differently God presents itself to the worshippers, they’re unified by their eschewing of a culture that urges us to treat each other like political abstractions, and choose instead, as the Quaker maxim goes, to “hold [each other] in the light.”
A first-timer to the Hudson Friends Meeting might enter into this silence and wait for something to happen — for someone to say something, for something to begin. But the philosophy of a Friends Meeting is that something is already happening, and has already begun, if only we look inward and tune into the presence of the Spirit communicating with our Inner Light, a mentality summed up succinctly in a Quaker joke: A Quaker brings his friend to worship one Sunday. The friend, shifting awkwardly about in the silence, elbows his friend. “When does the service begin?” he asks. His friend leans over to him and whispers, “when the worship ends.”
Illustrations by Erik Long — eriklongillustrator.com