Читать книгу Westward. Encounters with Swiss American Women онлайн

14 страница из 82

Howard met his Swiss girlfriend, but he did not come – as she had expected – with a car. They traveled by train to Philadelphia where Howard lived with his parents – in an old part of the city where African Americans who had come up from the South during the war had settled.

“Everything was suddenly so different. Howard’s mother came from one of the first Quaker families of America. Now I was with people who were religious, but not in the way I had experienced in the Swiss Reformed Church. They were not religious in a church going sense. Yet the ways of the Quakers were somehow familiar to me. I understood them in their ‘meetings for worship’ in which they assembled for silent prayer and experienced these assemblies devoid of ceremonies as divine worship. All this impressed me, and especially the fact that many Quakers think and feel very differently – for me this was deeply religious, a religion without complicated dogmas. Yet I never became a Quaker myself.” About herself she says, “Never in my life did I pursue obstinately any firm goal. Everything always moved, flowed. I only had to say yes or no.