What Stays With You

by Richard Day

In this post, Richard Day reflects on growing up in the fellowship, his brief time in the Work, and his experiences since then. His story includes a brief description of abuse. We’re grateful for the courage of every former worker willing to share their vulnerability with us.

My grandmother met the first workers (including William Irvine and the others) who came from Ireland to London on their first mission trip in 1903. She went into the Work that same year as there really wasn’t a church to join yet, or fellowship to speak of. So, young people went into the Work. Before her, her great-grandparents were breaking away from Catholicism and Presbyterianism, looking for something truer. My father joined meetings after he met the gospel. By the time I was old enough to understand anything, faith wasn't something our family had chosen so much as something we had always been. It was the water we swam in.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area surrounded by workers coming and going through the house. At fourteen I was one of the privileged boys invited to preps at Gilroy, then Orick. I didn't think of it as something special. I thought of it as just my life.

I professed at ten, and it felt real. I remember sleeping in the back of my dad's old truck at Gilroy, looking up at the Milky Way, feeling something honest and quiet settle over me. The north star felt like a promise. That feeling is part of why I live in Alaska now. Some things stay.

What I didn't know then, and wouldn't understand for another forty years, was that I was also running from something. My uncle had abused me and his own sons too. Every other weekend my cousins and I would spend time together, and I watched daily beatings. There was always popcorn in the bathtub at their place. I still can't stand the smell of it. I've never slept well. I didn't understand any of this as abuse until I was sixty-nine years old.

I went into the Work at twenty-one. By year two in Arizona, I was so hollowed out I found myself driving five miles an hour with a line of cars stretching behind me. I could speak for five minutes at a meeting and never knew what would come out. I stood in the back praying for something, anything, and somehow something would come. Eventually I knew I couldn't maintain it. Ralph McDonald drove me to the airport and put me on a plane to my parents. I felt sick the whole way.

I want to say something about being put on a pedestal, because it shaped everything. If you were obedient, well-spoken, good-looking, and outgoing, you were being quietly steered toward becoming an overseer without anyone ever saying so. After I spoke for the first time, Gladys Weir spoke after me, weeping about fresh sacrifice. I understand now that's what it was. You were being fed into something larger than yourself.

In 2023 everything broke open. I went to three overseers separately and asked each of them: what are we going to do about these people [who had hurt others], including those I’d been in the Work with? All three dropped their heads. There was no compassion. I knew then that nothing was going to be done, and by early 2024 my wife and I took our names off the list.

I'm sixty-nine years old. I understand now that I was groomed from the time I was a boy, through preps, through the privilege of being chosen, through being placed on a pedestal before I knew what a pedestal was for. The call I felt to the Work was real. I believe that. But it was also shaped and directed in ways I couldn't see.

I carry a rock from my mother's favorite beach. I've had it since I was twenty-seven. When I see people who were in the Work with me, there's a connection I don't have words for exactly, something like a jewel. I believe that when we die, we carry those people with us. Not the institution. The people. The real ones. For example, there’s a former coworker that I wasn’t close with when I was in the Work. I wasn't kind to him or his family. But we've reconnected, and now he's in my pocket too. That's what reconciliation is.

The problems in the Work are obvious to me now. What I didn't expect was how free I would feel. I am held by community in a way I never was inside those walls. It has been a lifelong process with a lot of pain in it. But I am glad to be free from the bondage of it. I mean that simply, without anger. I am glad to be free.