The Quaker testimonies reflect new Cincinnati Friends Meeting member Kathleen Smythe’s time in East Africa as a teacher, graduate student, and researcher. “The gift that experience gave me that I find here is hospitality in the largest sense. The open, quiet space of the sanctuary and the welcoming nature of members feel like the expression of community I found in Africa. For me, integrity is seeking to align beliefs and actions. A community, like Cincinnati Friends, that puts that front and center is gold. Everything I do is trying to make sense of what it means to live in a time when we need large-scale (climate) action and no one is taking it.”
Though a new member, Kathleen is no stranger to Quakerism. The simple, inviting sign for Cincinnati Friends on Montgomery Road first caught her attention “soon after I moved here twenty-seven years ago. Old friends of mine attended Community Friends and we attended the Unitarian Church in Clifton when the kids were growing up,” the Xavier University history professor recently related during an interview. “Being intrigued with Quakers as a peace church was always in the back of my head. We even took our son on a visit to Earlham College."
“It was zeitgeist,” she said. “I first showed up about six years ago and seriously started coming to Cincinnati Friends five years ago. I reached out to Jim Newby after a couple of messages to debrief. He was wonderful and helpful at key moments.”
The institutional church has been part of Kathleen’s life as long as she can remember. “My maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister. I grew up churched and, once you have experienced community and watched your parents find their way in an imperfect institution, you hunger for that affiliation. Cincinnati Friends is a great place to commit myself.”
Kathleen put off membership until she had the time to truly belong. “I already feel nurtured by the Quaker heritage, history, practices, and testimonies,” she said. “The multiple voices that you hear on any given Sunday are a window into a person’s spiritual search, but also their own world view. That's incredibly rich and rare.”
According to Kathleen, “I love being in a space where it feels like the great need of our world is being met in some small way.” She appreciates our recent growth spurt, younger attenders, and new voices sharing ministry in worship. “It is healing for all of us. There are so few multi-generational spaces and spaces to [express] the depths of your being where others will hold that for you."
“The weekly invitation to sit still with others,” Kathleen said, “and listen feels like a quite powerful combination. I love the windows and the sense of inside/outside at once. I know just the tip of the iceberg, yet get a sense that the people here are really committed as a community and in individual ways. It’s important to manifest a focus on others and those outside your community."
Kathleen’s residencies in Africa introduced a countercultural sense of time that she employs, not always successfully, in silent worship. “In Africa,” Kathleen shared, “hospitality is this sense of curiosity and that it was a gift to have a stranger in their midst rather than to focus on fear or difference. I would go to interview somebody and they would offer a meal that became a five-hour experience. There is a very different sense of time when you let go of expectations. So, if worship runs long, I don’t squirm in my seat and worry that I am missing something. I try to remain open to what is happening and the spaciousness of resources and energy. Obviously, at times, I fail miserably. As a goal, however, it feels wholly right.”
Kathleen adopted her grandfather’s belief that attending church regularly was important. As a child, when she asked her spiritual role model if he believed in God and he said he wasn’t sure, she was crushed. So, she asked her mother. “My mom said she wasn’t either. It was quite a moment and I am not sure I ever recovered.”
Despite the disappointment, Kathleen’s perspective has evolved. “My parents and I believe church is one of the places where good people can come together and do good things, so we continue to be church-goers.” As a college student she enjoyed the Sunday rhythm of worship, choir, and youth group, “which folded into the close-knit coed house where I lived. I’ve always tried to make sense of the world. When I heard Jim Newby say the purpose of life is spiritual growth, I realized I’d been trying to figure that out my whole life.”
For Kathleen, that commitment to community is integral, from her spirituality to her personal and professional lives. “As a teacher and somebody who takes mentoring people younger than me seriously, I think the best thing we can model is seeking and living the testimonies. To show what it looks like to strive spiritually and not get too distracted by cultural messages.”
She sees “so much overlap in Quaker spirituality, nature spirituality, and finding that of God in all things.” In 2020, Kathleen published “Whole Earth Living: Reconnecting Earth, History, Body and Mind,” a sustainability framework based on human interdependencies on Earth’s ecosystems. She has been active in Xavier University on-campus sustainability efforts since 2007.
Beyond worship, this new member is “not hoping for anything specific, but certainly the natural place I fit is with the native plant initiative.” She’s following a decade-old calling to the ministry of spiritual direction with the Midwest Province of the Jesuits “and would love to serve in that role if there’s the need.” With a full teaching load, Kathleen is also pursuing a Masters of Arts in Theopoetics and Writing at Earlham School of Religion.
Kathleen’s philosophy is to “grow and change, but within that is an openness and hospitality. My parents are aging, my kids are launching, a niece is in town. I want to be able to have this space to meet all of those people, friends, and new friends, with this open, hospitable spirit.”
