E m e r g i n g Q u a k e r

Misuse of Religion

2012-01-03T18:35:00.000-08:00

I recently read an article for my "Interfaith Dialogue" class that was simultaneously interesting and disturbing. Written by anthropologist Ian Hogbin in 1947, it was called “Pagan Religion in a New Guinea Village.” Among other things, it showed how cynically people can exploit religious fears to seize and maintain power.

The New Guinea men studied by Hogbin wanted separation from—and hence power over— the women in the tribe: They wished to exclude the women from their “cult.” Why? This detail Hogbin never explores--he apparently never raised the question. However, he explained that the men created a story of enormous crocodile spirit monsters that the women and children had to keep away from. He also explained how the men were able to make this utter fabrication credible.

A woman came home one day and freely shared with her husband her discovery of a whirring sound created by twirling a twisted piece of wood on a string. He told her to keep her discovery a secret and passed the information to his male cohorts. They decided to say it was the voice of a spirit that the women must stay away from. Of course, to carry out this fraud, they had to kill the woman who brought them the knowledge. As Hogbin puts it:

The husband was first reluctant but at length gave consent when promised a substitute. He sent a message to her to bring his supper and as soon as soon as she stepped on the ladder of the house the men”—in Hogbin’s polite term—“despatched her”—ie, murdered her—“with their spears.” The men told the rest of the women that “she had been eaten by a fearsome spirit monster which had come into the area”—a monster whose presence was heralded by the bullroarers. This falsehood in place, the men could easily keep the women intimidated.

For reasons he doesn’t explain, Hogbin rather quaintly makes the following inexplicable statement:

The story may perhaps give the impression that the hoaxing of the women was uppermost in the men’s mind when carrying out their ritual. … I am convinced that, although this aspect of the matter cannot be ignored, it would be a mistake to pay too much attention to it.

At this point, Hogbin dropped the subject and moved on.

I think Hogbin erred not to pay much more attention to why the women were hoaxed, why that was acceptable, why religion could be openly built on a fraud that used fear to exclude women from power and why the men feared sharing their power with women. Why was murdering an innocent woman acceptable? This is the kind of behavior we openly condemn when it’s practiced by Nazis. I am glad Hogbin did not suppress it, and hence romanticize “primitive” religion, but I also wish he'd spent more time exploring the issue.

The question I have is: Why did these men want to exclude the women? Why is that, across cultures, men seem to want to keep women out?

Hobbit houses for Olney?

2011-12-23T15:29:00.000-08:00

Have I mentioned I love Olney Friends School?

Emma Churchman put a link on Facebook to this charming house a man built in Wales for about $4,700 (3,000 British pounds): http://gaia-health.com/gaia-blog/2011-12-21/man-builds-fairy-tale-home-for-his-family-for-only-3000/.

Isn't it lovely? And apparently green too. For some reason, it made me think of Olney.

I'm remembering all the land Olney has, its expertise in green building ... and perhaps a need for staff housing. Of course, too, there's always the question of where to put the student lounge. Wouldn't this be a wonderful, whimsical way to live? Or a good place to go to hang out with friends?

And it could offer Olney some extra publicity. Who wouldn't want to go to the Hobbit school? Now we just need to get the film class students to film the building going up ... Maybe we could even invite over the man who built the original ... What do you think?

Christmas thoughts from Maria von Wedemeyer

2011-12-21T08:44:00.000-08:00

Maria von Wedemeyer was theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's much younger fiancee--they became engaged shortly before he was imprisoned in April of 1943. She was a brilliant person in her own right and a good writer. In celebration of the Christmas season, here are some words of Maria's from a letter to Bonhoeffer in Tegel prison in 1943:

"Isn't there bound to be a rekindling of the desire for holy tranquility and universal peace? I couldn't help thinking so last night, while walking home through the dusk with my little tree. The snow glistened underfoot, and there were countless stars in the depths of the sky overhead. All that is Christmas originates in heaven and comes from there to us all, to you and me alike, and forms a stronger bond between us than we could ever forge by ourselves." Love Letters from Cell 92, p. 138.

Egg Nog and Quakerism

2011-12-18T07:12:00.000-08:00

Almost every Christmas for as long as I can remember, I've had (non-alcoholic) egg nog, usually from a carton bought at the grocery store.

This year, however, I had a brilliant idea: let’s make homemade egg nog.

I looked up a recipe for non-alcoholic egg nog on the web. The ingredients were simple: eggs, whole milk, sugar, nutmeg, salt, vanilla.

I gathered six large eggs from the refrigerator and broke them in bottom of a heavy saucepan, then separated two more eggs and added the yolk. Half a cup of sugar and half a teaspoon of salt followed. I whisked this all together, then added four cup of whole milk, slowly letting it stream from the measuring cup as a I whisked it in with the eggs.

The hardest part, in these days when it is no longer safe to use raw eggs, was stirring the nog non-stop for 45-60 minutes on low heat until it thickened. Roger and I read Fanny Burney's Cecilia to each other as we stirred. When that was done, we added a teaspoon of vanilla and half a teaspoon of nutmeg and stirred.

What it tasted like was liquid custard. Our recipe called for topping it with whipped heavy cream, so we did, but that could easily be dispensed with.

The result was delicious. This is not a drink for the lactose intolerant nor the vegan, of course. Another year, perhaps, I'll tell the story of getting raw milk and free range eggs from my Amish neighbors, but this year all the ingredients came from the grocery store. With dioxides concentrated at the top of the food chain, we don’t want to be drinking non-organic whole milk on a regular basis, but once a year is probably fine.

To be honest, I had never really liked egg nog. I would drink it annually because it was part of the ritual of the holidays, but I never felt any regrets when it disappeared with the Christmas tree. It had always tasted a little weird. I now realize it's because I have been, all my life (with a few exceptions), been drinking a factory nog.

The point of this certainly is to celebrate homemade egg nog.

But it’s also for me to wonder: Why have I accepted a vaguely unsatisfying substitute for so long? I never even questioned why a drink so celebrated never tasted very good. And that leads to a broader question, which seem trite question to ask, a little bit of homey moralizing (which, of course, I would never do!) but I don't think it is. We perhaps need to keep revisiting this question in order to stay mindful, to keep from becoming complacent: Where else do we settle for a poor substitute because we never think to question what we’re doing? Do we do this with our Quaker faith? Where? How can we change?

The Fifty-Minute Hour

2011-12-08T18:45:00.000-08:00

I recently bought a used paperback copy of The Fifty-Minute Hour, Robert Lindner's bestselling 1954 study of some of his most interesting psychoanalytic cases. The book caught my eye because my father, who died almost eight years ago, would talk about this book when I was a child. Seeing the title brought a vivid rush of memories.

We never owned the book, but I remember my father's great enthusiasm for it, although I was never sure if he'd actually read it. One of my father's great hallmarks, especially in his younger days, was his sense of wonder. He would open the conversation with: "Did you know, that when a psychiatrist charges you for an hour of therapy, you really only get 50 minutes?" He would then go on to explain that the psychiatrist needed time to clear his mind between sessions. This would lead to the Lindner book, and the essay that most fascinated him.

In that essay, his most famous, Lindner describes being confronted with a patient who is convinced he is traveling to other planets. As my father told the story, Lindner finally acknowledged the man was telling the truth because of the enormous level of detail he supplied. Once Lindner believed him, the man was cured. All he needed was to be believed; then he admitted his story was fabricated.

I bought the book to make visceral a memory: it was a way to hold my father. I also wanted to test my memory--did the book match up to my memory of my father's telling of it? Did his telling match up to the book? Two levels of memory were to be interrogated: mine and his.

I girded myself to dislike the book. After all, it was written in the 1950s and therefore sure to be the work of a sexist, racist and domineering white man. However, I was pleasantly surprised and had my own stereotypes challenged: Lindner comes across as a very humane individual, with a genuine liking of other people and a system of ethics rooted in deeper soil than the fashions of his decade.

For instance, he takes time out in the essay about the space traveler to blast lobotomies: "No, I could not ... consign him to the new kind of vegetable kingdom being created by so many of my well-intentioned but mistaken colleagues." (p. 189)He understood that many of his patients were more sinned against than sinning and didn't flinch from the horrors of poverty or orphanages.

However, he was a man of his time in his belief in the wonders of technology. His book reads sometimes like a Rod Serling narrative, perhaps the opening to the Twilight Zone: "Very likely the day is not too distant when the remarkable animal we call man will be … concerned solely with the command and care of appliances that do his work." (xiv) Perhaps this wonder and embrace of technology derives from the lives he witnessed: Most of his cases date from the 1940s, and involve people born shortly before the First World War. The harshness of the lives many led in a pre-New Deal world is immense and the book unwittingly testifies to an enormous social change over the course of a century.

I most enjoyed this read, which was an easy but yet informative. It also confirmed my memories--my memory of my father's memory of the space traveller was (almost--I won't spoil the book) correct.

As a Baltimoron, I was delighted that Lindner had his practice in Baltimore, in a building overlooking Mt. Vernon Place.

However, when I tried to find out more about him, I discovered that what's on the web is scanty, especially for a person who was both a best-selling author (he also wrote Rebel without a Cause) and a serious scholar. I could find very little. He died suddenly of a heart attack at age 41, two years after this book was published. I spoke about him to the Earlham School of Religion reference librarian, Jennie Kiffmeyer. She also poked around and could find very little--the 1940s, 50s and 60s, she said, represent a dip in Internet information as much of that era has not yet been well digitized. She was planning to look in the physical reader's guides. I imagine Lindner must have been profiled in big spreads somewhere: Perhaps the Baltimore Sun magazine or Esquire? It's a mystery and there's nothing like sleuthing.

I did find Internet discussions of the identity of the planet hopping man. One popular idea is that he is Cordwainer Smith (see http://www.ulmus.net/ace/csmith/behindjetcouch.html) , who published the sci-fi work Norstrilla.

So, to finish, every once in awhile we discover books that put us in touch with the past in more ways than one. Has this happened to you?

Childism

2011-12-06T06:35:00.001-08:00

I found a review of an upcoming book at http://www.cavershamproductions.com/article-resources/index.php after reading about the death of the author, Elisabeth Young Bruehl, in the New York Times. Bruehl's book, Childism, has not yet been released. In it she argues for understanding children as a distinct group. Here is a part of the review:

Thanks to half a century of work by feminist intellectuals, sexism can be understood as an ideology and a prejudice. All kinds of discrimination and violence against women are united in our minds by the concept. But when we read in the newspaper that a child in New Jersey has died from neglect, or that a child in Florida’s protective services has disappeared without a trace; when we learn that children seeking political asylum in our country have been held in solitary confinement, or that molestation of children has been covered up in yet another diocese of the Catholic Church, we do not say “there is prejudice against children at work in each of these instances.”

In 1989, the United Nations issued a Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by more governments than any other UN Convention. The Convention does bring together in one document descriptions of many of the forms of child maltreatment we read about daily in the newspaper, but it does not make us think of children—all the world’s children—as a group. It is about “the Child,” an abstraction.

And there is no indication in the Convention that there is a form of prejudice against a group—children—at work in all the forms of maltreatment. We might call it “childism,” on analogy with “sexism,” which was coined in 1965 on analogy with “racism.”

Childism is a hard form of prejudice to recognize and conceptualize because children are the one group that, many assume, is naturally subordinate. Until they reach a stipulated age, children are the responsibility chiefly of their parents or guardians—those who have custody. But what does custody permit? What distinguishes it from ownership? One of the essential ingredients of childism is a claim by offending adults to the effect that “these children are ours to do with exactly as we see fit,” or “children are here to serve, to honor, and obey adults.” These claims make a subordination doctrine out of natural dependency, out of the fact that children are born relatively helpless and need to be taken care of until they can take care of themselves. It seems normal to insist, “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother” without any reciprocal “Honor Thy Children.”

As the opposite of growth promoting altruism, childism takes many forms. In the half a century old field called “Child Abuse and Neglect” (CAN) four main types of child maltreatment have been identified and described: physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse. These categories are now used for all statistics gathering in the field, but they do not strike me as very illuminating. They do not reflect how frequently the four types are combined in a given case, for example. And they do not prompt inquiry about the subordination purposes served by maltreating—as a classification of wars by the types of weapons used would not prompt inquiry into the purposes served by war.

Listening to my adult patients in psychoanalysis who were maltreated as children, I have heard basically three stories: they tell me that they were not wanted, that they were controlled and manipulated, or that they were not allowed to be who they felt they were. So I have come to think in terms of childism that intends (1) to eliminate or destroy children; (2) to make them play roles no child should play; or (3) to dominate them totally, narcissistically erasing their identities. These three broad categories capture the forms of childism from the child’s and the adult survivor’s point of view. Survivors make it very clear that the worst part of their experience—the most difficult to heal from, the least forgivable—was that no one protected them from it. They often make it clear, as well, that they have internalized the prejudice and direct it toward themselves.

The equality testimony serves Quakers well in how they/we treat children, though abuse, of course, occurs in all groups. The immigrant group I was associated with as a child, before my Quakers days, also valued its youth. The ethnic narrative was one of sacrifice and struggle so that the children could have better lives. I have also met other family groups, perhaps entrenched here for many generations, who have felt threatened at the idea of the children doing better than the parents, so I am grateful for what I had.

Two figures I have been immersed in during the past year referred often to their childhoods: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the rest of his brothers and sisters accomplished as much as they did because of the strongly child-centered, though still patriarchal, family they came from. Dorothy Day wrote repeatedly of her upbringing. She was clearly the scapegoat in her family, suffering what we today might consider abuse, although it was normative for her times. However, she managed to find love and support in her family. Under the power of religious conviction and the Holy Spirit, she was able to use her childhood formation to help others. I recently saw an Indian "Bollywood" movie Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, centered on the idea that family unity is the basis of all that is important in the world. In this over-the-top musical, a wealthy family is ripped in two when the eldest son defies his father to marry the woman he loves. The loss of a parent's blessing and a home without "the warmth" of elders is a terrible blow to the young couple, while the loss of their son leaves a deep hole in the life of the parents. Here family love is idealized and raised to the highest pinnacle. Family, tradition and religion weave together to form the fabric of the life worth living. The movie, while in no way realistic, has caused me to ponder how we as Quakers can forge stronger ties with our children in our individualistic culture.

Bonhoeffer Struggles

2011-12-05T16:24:00.000-08:00

I attended the Bonhoeffer conference at Union Theological Seminary in
NYC in mid-November, which was a celebration of the near-completion of the
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works translation. I had a fine time. I was
delighted to be at Union, which I had never visited before. (I am told
that all the college campus scenes for the TV show Law & Order are shot at Union.) A bit of drama ensued as Occupy Wall Street was shut down while I was there, a blow to the 46 Union Theological students who had been participating and an upsetting event to the school in general.

The Bonhoeffer talks were very interesting, ranging from Bonhoeffer's
reception in different countries to issues with translation and
theology. I learned that Fortress will be releasing a volume of
Bonhoeffer poems and a volume of his sermons in the next few years.

I was also interested to hear several times that the initial reception
to Bonhoeffer in Germany in the 1950s was mixed because he was seen as a traitor to
Germany by some. That certainly made my mind reel. How could that be?
Hitler was a horror. But then I realized that the Germans take law
and order seriously (although the rule of law certainly suffered under
Nazism) and that having one's country overrun by invading armies,
even in the interests of toppling of a genocidal madman,
is still a terrible experience. Yet I struggle. As a Quaker and a pacifist, I
struggle with Bonhoeffer's decision to get involved in an
assassination plot, though I certainly understand his anguished sense of responsibility to do something to combat the evil. On the other hand, as a part of the human race, I struggle with any defense of Hitler. I do struggle to find that of God in Hitler. As one speaker said, however, "It's easy for Americans to love Bonhoeffer." That I agree with.

As an aside, I listened for how the Germans at conference pronounced Bonhoeffer, suspecting it would not be our "Bon-hoff-ER." It was not--the Germans have a more melodious pronunciation that sounded to me more like "Bon [with a slight long-E to the Bon] -HEFF-a."

Beautiful Barnesville

2011-10-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

We woke up this morning to white mists all around the house, with an especially beautiful one hanging over the lake like a fluffy cloud. After the run of glorious, unseasonably warm October days, the temperature has cooled. The leaves on the trees outside of our living windows are turning golden and orange. In the field, once a meadow, just beyond the edge of our lawn, students dug more than 1,600 pounds of potatoes yesterday, demonstrating why the potato became a staple. We have in our kitchen a bag of potatoes from the school. Later today, I will make potato soup. I already have bread baking in the bread machine. This is as domestic as I get. :)

I love the quiet here, and the view of "our" barn, which is painted red with a green roof. Later today, we will walk over to the Olney playing fields to watch Will and Nick play in the faculty/student hockey game. Have I told everyone in the world yet they are the co-captains of the team?

Sophie is living at the Creativity House on the Guilford campus and seems to be enjoying that.

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to give a paper on Jane Austen at the Indiana College English Association conference. Since I have started at Earlham School of Religion, I have wondered how I could fit my Jane Austen obsession into my seminary education--giving the paper was a demonstration of the two worlds merging. The conference was wonderful, and I was in my element being there, to put it mildly!

Over the past ten days, I've had the chance to attend a talk by Sarah Niemoller, the widow of Martin Niemoller, the man imprisoned by the Nazis. Martin Niemoller is famous not just for standing up to the Nazis, but for saying "First they came for the socialists and I said nothing because I was not a socialist ... then they came for the Jews and I said nothing, because I was not a Jew, then then came for me and there was no one left to speak for me." Sarah, age 88, was a wonderful speaker, and her life seems to have spanned epochs.

And after several weeks of travel to and fro, it is such a pleasure to have some breathing room back in Barnesville.

A Portraiture of Quakerism: Novels

2011-10-12T15:03:00.001-07:00

I have been busy with "other things," but am now glad to get back to A Portraiture of Quakerism.

Thomas Clarkson wrote a A Portraiture of Quakerism in 1806, based on the intimacy he developed with Quakers while working for abolition of the slave trade. Clarkson used the first part of his book to explain the Quakers' strange prohibitions on hunting for sport, gambling and the arts. In doing so, he was trying to "normalize" Quakers to help build a case for abolition. Since they were the most fervent supporters of ending slavery, they had to be presented as a sympathetic group to the larger English public.

Clarkson discusses the various art forms 18th century Quakers prohibited or discouraged, including music and theatre. In one chapter he discusses novel reading. According to Clarkson, Quakers didn't object to novel reading on the basis that novels were fictitious. Quakers understood Aesop used fables (fictions) to teach wisdom and that Jesus spoke in parables (fictions). All the same, in the late 17th century, George Fox discouraged the reading of "romances." Quakers frowned on novels as the offspring of romances--in each case, the subject matter was often "worthless" and "pernicious," according to Clarkson. Quakers, in theory, allowed the reading of good (ie, "moral") novels, but so few existed and people read novels so indiscriminately, that Quakers discouraged the practice.

Clarkson noted particular concerns: Novels offered young people the illusion of having knowledge than they didn't really possess, and women (!) frequently read them. In a burst of sexism, he wrote that it was more "disgusting" for a woman than a man to appear more knowledgeable than she was. In addition, novel reading would unfit a woman for domestic tasks. Further, novels inspired people to act from "feelings," which could "pervert" morality, leading to actions based on sentiment, not moral truth. Worse, novels might inspire people to think for themselves (!), "believing their own knowledge to be supreme," and leading to "scepticism." Finally, and worst of all, because novel reading could be so alluring, it pulled individuals away from other, weightier reading, such as in science, law or religion, leaving people with no way to evaluate novels' flighty fancies.

As an aside, Jane Austen seemed to be aware of all these winds blowing in the early 19th century (remember, Clarkson's book was published in 1806) and addresses them in her novels, critiquing flights of "feeling" or "sensibility" in Sense and Sensibility, defending novel reading inNorthanger Abbey and being careful to supply at least an overt conventional moral message in all her books. We know too that she read "weightier" literature as well as novels.

Acknowledging that we are viewing Quakers through the prism of an Anglican outsider, several points to consider emerge:

--Early Quakers did not perceive novels as intrinsically or inherently evil: Quakers objected to their content, not their form. We can happily write all the fiction we want, as long as it edifying and truthful! How can we do more of this? Quakers have a fairly thin record as writers of important literature: where are our Flannery O'Connors and Graham Green's ... our Dosteovsky's? We do so well with non-fiction and introspection--the Journal of John Woolmanand Kelly's A Testament of Devotion jump to mind as two books that have far transcended the Quaker world and become classics--that it seems we should be able to do better than such domesticating fictions as Friendly Persuasion.

--During the 18th century, many Quakers became doctors and scientists (in large part because other careers were closed to them). For instance, Jane Austen's probable acquaintance, the Quaker Luke Howard, was the first to name to clouds as we know them today--cumulus, cirrus, nimbus, etc. However, for all their interest in Enlightenment empiricism, Quakers had apparently not yet embraced individualism, as can be seen by their denigration of novels as inspiring people to believe "their own knowledge to be supreme." What a far cry from today, when the individualism that clearly does lead to "scepticism" is applauded and encouraged. Do we as a Society need to question individualism more?

-- I find a tension between what might be called "communitarian values" (not believing one's own knowledge to be supreme) and pursuit of knowledge. Eighteenth century Quakers were apparently anything but anti-intellectual. Their fear was not of knowledge--they encouraged their members to tackle weighty subjects--but of a shallow, superficial veneer of information that substituted for mature thought. Did or do too many Friends possess simply a popular culture smattering of knowledge? What the eighteenth century Quakers valued was not the creation of a priestly/intellectual caste with a monopoly on knowledge, but a Society in which everyone was deeply educated--not to believe whatever they wanted, but to help inform the group. How do we weigh the truth that anyone can "prophesy" against the truth that some people have cultivated more wisdom than others?

"Everything for everyone?"

2011-09-13T07:23:00.000-07:00

I am concerned with the way polemic and inaccurate statements are bandied about as uncontested "fact" and my growing conviction is that we need to keep challenging the fuzzy thinking. In the Jesus Creed post quoted from below (I like Jesus Creed because all sorts of people "gather" there and thus the diversity of opinion is broad) Scot McKnight, Jesus Creed blog owner, has been talking about the changing philosophy of education funding since the 1960s, in which higher education was seen a public good.

From Jesus Creed at http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/09/12/ucal-education/#comments

In order [in California] to assure access for all, tuition charges were banned—only “fees” for some costs other than education were allowed. Most funding was to come from taxpayers. The premise was that higher education was a public good for the state, which was nursing its own future entrepreneurs and taxpayers. As Mr Kerr put it, the universities were “bait to be dangled in front of industry, with drawing power greater than low taxes or cheap labour”.

That consensus has been upended. In 1990 the state paid 78% of the cost of educating each student. That ratio dropped to 47% last year, and will fall even more during the current academic year, after the latest round of budget cuts, overseen by Jerry Brown, the current governor and son of Pat Brown.

From a frequent blog responder:

California tried to provide everything for everyone, and they went broke. Thus, things ended up worse (and yes, worse for the same people they were trying to help) than had they simply been responsible in the first place. It’s odd that people continue to not get this after so many examples. Ultimately, when the same thing happens on a national scale, the truly poor will be the ones most hurt. Our desire to provide everything will ultimately lead to the most vulnerable (some like to call them “the least of these”) ending up worse than before. This is why people claim (rightly, in my view) that endless amounts of ‘helping people’ results in those people being worse off than before.

My response:

California never tried to provide “everything for everyone.” That’s simply not an accurate statement. I lived in California years ago and was not allowed to loll around collecting a welfare check. I worked hard to make a living. However, in the past, responsible people have believed that investing in the civic sector by providing “for the larger good” was an honorable, responsible and worthy task to be engaged in by sober, mature citizens. My heart broke when I read that people cheered at the latest Presidential debate the idea of letting a person without health insurance die in the emergency room. My heart breaks to be part of a society in which we are not a commonwealth anymore but a a group of individuals each out for himself or herself. My question is–under the guise of the unchallenged (by some) assumption that we “can’t afford things” anymore, which flies in the face of massively improved productivity in the US over the past 20 years– or that the least bit of sharing in the culture for the common good somehow equates to “socialism”–are we becoming evil? Is the Christian ethic of the Good Samaritan being subordinated to the lust for money?

My response was perhaps overly impassioned but I am concerned about, for instance, people cheering the idea of letting an uninsured individual die in an emergency room. Sometimes I feel I went to sleep in my beloved United States and woke up in a nightmare land. What can we do?

Saying no to blood sports: A Portraiture of Quakerism III

2011-09-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the section of Thomas Clarkson's 1806 A Portraiture of Quakerism most congenial to modern sensibilities discusses the Quaker prohibition on blood sports and cruelty to animals. This prohibition is not, Clarkson points out, against hunting game for food--it is a prohibition against hunting for sport. It is not censuring or forbidding having animals as stock for food, labor or wool--it censures causing such animals unnecessary sufferings.

Clarkson splits this section into three parts, leading with rational and empatheric reasons to avoid harming animals, then discussing Old Testament and New Testament objections to cruelty.

Rational reasons are as follows:

It has been matter of astonishment to some, how men, who have the powers of reason, can waste their time in galloping after dogs, in a wild and tumultuous manner, to the detriment often of their neighbours, and to the hazard of their own lives; or how men, who are capable of high intellectual enjoyments, can derive pleasure, so as to join in shouts of triumph, on account of the death of an harmless animal; or how men, who have organic feelings, and who know that other living creatures have the same, can make an amusement of that, which puts brute-animals to pain.

In keeping with his campaign to "normalize" Quakers, Clarkson aligns their anti-cruelty sentiments with those of the mainstream poet and abolitionist Thomas Cowper, a favorite of both Quakers (both Olney, Maryland and Olney Friends Schools are named in honor of Cowper's home town of Olney in England) and Anglicans (Jane Austen, for example, was a great fan of Cowper).

Cowper, too, railed against animal cruelty in his long poem The Task:

Detested sport
That owes its pleasures to another's pain,
That feeds upon the sobs and dying shrieks
Of harmless nature, dumb, but yet endued
With eloquence

Clarkson then goes on to find a prohibition against animal cruelty in the Old Testament:

The Jews obliged all their converts to religion ... to observe what they called the seventh commandment of Noah, or that "they should not eat the member of any beast that was taken from it, while it was alive." This law therefore of blood, whatever other objects it might have in view, enjoined that, while men were engaged in the distresing task of taking away the life of an animal, they should respect its feelings, by abstaining from torture, or all unnecessary pain.

The New Testament, according to the Quakers, further enlightens humans in mercy and lovingkindness, leading to gentle treatment of animals.

But in proportion as he is restored to the divine image, or becomes as Adam was before he fell, or in proportion as he exchanges earthly for spiritual views, he sees all things through a clearer medium. ... Beholding animals in this sublime light, he will appreciate their strength, their capacities, and their feelings; and he will never use them but for the purposes intended by providence. It is then that the creation will delight him. It is then that he will find a growing love to the animated objects of it. And this knowledge of their natures, and this love of them, will oblige him to treat them with tenderness and respect. ... Hence they uniformly look upon animals, not as brute-machines, to be used at discretion, but as the creatures of God, of whose existence the use and intention ought always to be considered ...

Two notes--as he does throughout, Clarkson shows his understanding of Quaker culture by invoking George Fox, this time, Fox's outrage at hunting and hawking and other activities which cause animals to suffer. It's interesting that Quaker deployment of Fox as authority has not much changed in two centuries. Further, Clarkson plugs into a wider current of late -eighteenth century "sensibility" that was probably the first sustained modern view of animals as having a right not to be tormented. Of course, throughout history, individuals have objected to torturing animals, but the Enlightenment saw a rise of interest in a movement against animal suffering.

Finally, Clarkson understands Quaker theology as one rejecting mindless dominion and aligned to what we would today call "creation care."

Certainly, in a culture that could justify cruelty to slaves as "dumb brutes," compassion towards animals was of piece with compassion towards slaves. If it was wrong to beat beasts of burden unmercifully, so it was wrong to do the same to human "beasts of burden." As today, we see the linkage between how we treat the least in nature and how we treat the least of humankind.

I find little to argue with in the eighteenth-century Quaker ban on blood sports and animal cruelty: If only it were more embraced today. What is of more interest to me are blind spots. Many of those who hunted, for example, probably never thought about the terror and pain they were causing an animal, which leads me to wonder what cruelties we're blind to today? Can you think of any?

In between Quaker Portraitures: Pointon and Lindbeck

2011-09-06T05:21:00.000-07:00

The article cited below by Marcia Pointon provides a late twentieth-century interpretation of the sometimes tortured eighteenth- century Quaker relationship to material goods. If Clarkson, in Portraiture, offered an idealized view of Quakers, his odd bedfellows in the fight against slavery, with an eye towards "normalizing" Friends to upper-class Britons, Pointon examines some of the difficulties eighteenth-century Quakers had in navigating the world of consumption. In doing so, she emphasizes how "this-worldly" Quakers were in their understanding of the power of material goods:

Marcia Pointon, 'Quakerism and Material Culture', Art History, September
1997, pp. 397-431 (HT: BPD)

As for George Lindbeck, one of the books I recently read for an ESR seminary class in Constructive Theology was Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine, a modern classic. In this book, Lindbeck argues that the notion of religion most common in the West since the nineteenth-century is "emotional expressivism," the idea that we each, as individuals, have "our own" individual, interior experience of the Divine. After we have that experience, which in this mode of undertanding, is considered universal, we "translate" it into the language and culture (sign-system) of a religious faith. Thus, if we're born in to a European-American family in Ohio, we would likely translate a mystical encounter with God into the language of Christianity; if born in Iran, we would likely translate the same experience into the language if Islam. In a nutshell, religion works from the inside out and flows from the individual to the community.

Lindbeck, whose initial agenda in writing the book was to devise ways to foster ecumenical dialogue, turns "emotional expressivism" inside out. Religion, he says, is a "cultural linguistic" system, first and foremost, in other words, a grammar. Rather than functioning secondarily as a communal expression of shared interior experiences, the culture and language of our religious heritage determines the kind of interior religious experiences we as individuals have. We go from the outside (culture) to the inside (mystical experience). And, if our "interior" religious experiences are structured by our language and culture (the religious rituals, stories, songs etc. that we learn), then the "mystical" encounters with the ineffable that a Buddhist has are fundamentally different from those of a Christian.

Understanding religions as cultural linguistic systems or "languages" is useful for interfaith or ecumenical dialogue because it respects, rather than erases, differences between faiths (nobody would ever, for example, posit that French and German are the "same") and it eradicates the need to establish one religion as "superior" to another (French and German are simply two different languages and one doesn't have to devise a hierarchy to show that one is better than the other).

Lindbeck thus argues that since there is no single transcultural experience of the spiritual there is no need to posit a transcultural, overarching experience of religion: “One can no more be religious in general than one can speak language in general,” he writes. Religion is located in particularity. This leads to the now familiar move from doctrine to stories--religion is not a set of propositions but a community of people who share a language and heritage for understanding the divine.

Lindbeck's theory is obviously problematic for Quakerism, as this is a faith group that highly values individual mystical experience. At that same time, the Society of Friends is a highly communal--and even orally-dependent--group. The question becomes, how does Quakerism align with and challenge Lindbeck?

A Portraiture of Quakerism II: Prohibitions

2011-09-04T06:40:00.000-07:00

In volume one of A Portraiture of Quakerism, abolitionist Thomas Clarkson systematically works through the various activities, common to his English upper class, that are prohibited by the Quakers, and endeavors to explain the rational basis for these prohibitions. In this post, so it stays reasonably short, I will look only at one. His goal is to make Quakerism, which no doubt appeared at times a bizarre, fundamentalist (ie, arbitrary and irrational) and forbidding cult intelligible to people of a certain class and education. While framing his story as describing the “quaint Other,” Clarkson’s agenda, I imagine, is to render Quakerism more respectable and rational, in order, thus, to render abolitionism more respectable and rational. Notably, Portraiture appeared in 1806, a year before legislation was passed banning the slave trade (though not slavery) in the British Empire. It is true too, that over the course of 150 years, Quakerism had in fact shifted from its radical and apocalyptic beginnings (early Quakers did not think the End Times were coming soon—they thought, with the execution of Charles I that the End Times HAD ARRIVED, a concept known as Realized Eschatology)—to a group that, influenced deeply by Enlightenment thought, and the reality that the New Jerusalem had not yet descended, had become more rational. Whether this embrace of rationalism was a step forward or backwards is, of course, still debated among contemporary Quakers

To a modern Quaker reader, the prohibitions Clarkson has so far described--against gambling/lotteries/games of chance, music, dancing, theater, novels and blood sports—break into two categories: prohibitions that (in a softer way) are still strongly accepted and prohibitions that are rejected. Modern Quakers would probably accept and support the prohibitions against gambling/lotteries/games of chance and blood sports and reject the prohibitions on music, dance, theatre and novels.

The Quaker prohibition against gambling which Clarkson justifies at length we would sum up as recognition of its addictive nature—the Quakers, rationally, want to avoid a pastime that can lead to ruin. Other comments he makes as reasons to avoid gambling, lotteries and card playing—the last, which we know from Jane Austen, was a common pastime—include their tendency to be a waste of time, their tendency to habituate people to the concept of effortless gain and their tendency to excite passions.

Clarkson emphasizes rationality when he writes: “For when they [Quakers} consider man, as a reasonable being, they are of opinion, that his occupations should be rational. …. “ and “The Quakers are not so superstitious as to imagine that there can be any evil in cards, considered abstractedly as cards, or in some of the other amusements, that have been mentioned.” But cards take away from more fruitful occupations.

A chief objection, then and now, to gaming Clarkson writes is the following: “For by gaming a man learns to pursue his own interest solely and explicitly, and to rejoice at the loss of others, as his own gain, grieve at their gain, as his own loss, thus entirely reversing the order established by providence for social creatures.”

Reading this section in light of Jane Austen, I’m reminded of Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, whom we find at the beginning of the novel so engrossed in a game of lotteries at Mrs. Phillip’s that she hardly notices Wickham. This characterizes her as immature and childlike, impulsively fixated on the moment to the exclusion of all else, but also, in light of Clarkson’s words on gambling and gaming, as in an environment that excites her passions and primes her for “quick win” risk-taking—in her case, being the first married of the Bennett sisters. She does rejoice at her gain of a husband ahead of her sisters and Austen does lead us to understand Lydia’s “elevation” as a grotesque reversal of the social order, all the more galling for Lydia’s cluelessness about the sacrifices that saved her.

I think today about the state lotteries and casinos, and personally, can't help but agree with the early Quakers on the corrupting influence of this. I too think that the idea "I too could be rich tomorrow," no matter how remote, encourages people to support regressive tax laws that make it harder to build a juster society. I tend to believe that there is something insidious and destructive in the valorization of the pursuit of quick riches, especially when it is only for the very, very few and the rest are left in poverty ... but the question arises: in prohibiting gambling, lotteries and games of chance, are the Quakers merely attending to the outward shell and not the inner soul? Or, as George Lindbeck suggests in the Nature of Doctrine, does the outward (social) form of the faith largely determine the inward experience? Where do you fall on lotteries?

A Portraiture of Quakerism, I

2011-08-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

The Quakers, as every body knows, differ more than even many foreigners do, from their own countrymen. They adopt a singular mode of language. Their domestic customs are peculiar. They have renounced religious ceremonies, which all other Christians, in some form or other, have retained. They are distinguished from all the other islanders by their dress. These differences are great and striking. And I thought therefore that those, who were curious in the development of character, might be gratified in knowing the principles, which produced such numerous exceptions from the general practices of the world.

Thus writes Thomas Clarkson, an eighteenth century abolitionist who, with William Wilberforce, worked closely with Quakers on the movement to end the English slave trade. His interest in the Quakers led him to author a three-volume book about the Society of Friends. Volume 1 was published in 1806, a year before the 1807 Slave Trade Act outlawed the slave trade (but not slavery) in the British Empire.

Clarkson explains his motivations as follows:

From the year 1787, when I began to devote my labours to the abolition of the slave trade, I was thrown frequently into the company of the people, called Quakers, these people had been then long unanimous upon this subject. Indeed they had placed it among the articles of their religious discipline. Their houses were of course open to me in all parts of the kingdom. Hence I came to a knowledge of their living manners, which no other person, who was not a Quaker, could have easily obtained.

As soon as I became possessed of this knowledge, or at least of so much of it, as to feel that it was considerable, I conceived a desire of writing their moral history. I believed I should be able to exhibit to the rest of the world many excellent customs, of which they were ignorant, but which it might be useful to them to know. I believed too, that I should be affording to the Quakers themselves, some lessons of utility, by letting them see, as it were in a glass, the reflection of their own images. I felt also a great desire, amidst these considerations, to do them justice; for ignorance and prejudice had invented many expressions concerning them, to the detriment of their character, which their conduct never gave me reason to suppose, during all my intercourse with them, to be true.

Nor was I without the belief, that such a history might afford entertainment to many.

Clarkson’s work, like Robert Southey’s Letters from England, written at almost the same time, offers a critique of English society as seen through the eyes of outsiders. Clarkson will also critique the Quakers from the point of view of a sympathetic outsider to their group.

I look forward to continuing reading this work, which can be found on-line. It will be interesting to learn more about how English Friends lived in the 18th century, not only to compare them to the “normal” English of that period, but also to compare them to Quakers in our time.

Several thoughts pop immediately to mind. First, much of my interest in Clarkson and Quakers of this period derives both from being a Quaker and from my interest in Jane Austen. Austen brushed up against Quakers during her life, and she was a great fan of Clarkson. We know she read his History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. As a Clarkson admirer and as a subscriber to circulating libraries, as well as a voracious reader, she almost certainly read A Portraiture of Quakerism.

Second, although Quaker numbers were to dwindle to dangerously low levels by the middle of the nineteenth century, at this time, Quakers seem to have been robust. Even if they were already dwindling in numbers, they were active. For example, 300 Quakers petitioned Parliament to abolish the slave trade in 1783. Though separating themselves from the rest of society, their strong objection to slavery forced them into alliances with people like Wilberforce and Clarkson, who were not barred from becoming members of Parliament as Quakers were.

A glance at the table of contents of Portraiture shows Quakers to have been, not surprisingly, “more different” from the general society than they are today: much of the first volume focuses on what Quakers prohibited: gaming, gambling, lotteries, music, drama and novels, to name a few.

A recurring question in contemporary Quakerism in this: Should we be more of a "peculiar" people? Some Quakers do adopt plain dress and use "thee" and "thou." I have no objection to these kinds of separations and believe they can provide a frame for an alternative worldview. Mostly, however, I believe that deepening our discernment as a faith group so that we can coalesce around being lights in the world from a faith, rather than a political, perspective, is our chief task.

Needed: a society dedicated to the care of others and the pursuit of wisdom

2011-08-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

Cary Tennis, the advice columnist at Salon, wrote this as part of an answer to a question by a person feeling overworked and stressed and yet dedicated to a job. Cary's response rang true to me. What do you think?

"We do not live in a good society. That's another thing.

This is not a society dedicated to the care of others and the pursuit of wisdom. Wouldn't that be an amazing society? But that's not the one we have.

You live in a world that tricks you into believing that if you do what it says you will be happy. You won't. You won't be happier if you get the top spot. You won't be happier if you answer every call.

You say you work for a cause you believe in. You might be happier if you work more directly for your cause. I'm not sure what cause that is, but if it's, say, to create safer conditions for fishermen, you might be happier if you were actually fishing. Or if it's to keep the environment pristine, you might be happier if you were actually in that environment keeping it pristine. Or if it is an organization dedicated to helping people, you might be happier if you were actually helping those people yourself. That's one thing that happens with organizations, is that they alienate us from the ennobling activities they are formed to promote.

So there's that.

And this other thing is about being a person in an adversary relationship to the large economic and social forces that affect you. I grew up in a time when this was clearer. But it is still clear today.

Nothing has changed structurally; we are still a hateful, war-waging culture that denigrates women, celebrates killing, despoils the planet, plunders the resources of less powerful people, keeps a permanent underclass in virtual economic slavery and wages imperialist wars abroad. We're still the same country we were when I was growing up in the 1960s.

We just have better games.

That's it in a nutshell. The "military-industrial complex" Dwight Eisenhower warned us about had a public-relations disaster in the 1960s, when it failed to adequately sell its project to America's youth. Since then, it has learned.

The other day I was walking along wondering about the differences between people in their 20s and 30s today and during the 1960s and 1970s, marveling at the happy, well-adjusted faces I meet in the cafes and clothing stores, and wondering why my anguish and panic at our global state does not dent their cheerfulness, and also thinking about my largely unsupervised youth, unhygienic and renegade, and it occurred to me to see that today's parenting regime seems to have coalesced around the project of keeping youth constantly socialized and trained and busy so that they cannot sit around and wonder what's wrong. Because wondering what's wrong leads to troubling conclusions.

We have responded to the problem of existential anxiety not by confronting it with existential philosophy but by creating an ever-larger and more sophisticated web of 24-hour distraction and socialization training, so that young people are prevented from attaining the socially analytical skills that might lead them to see how they're being fooled. If they saw how they are being fooled they might disrupt the functioning of this system. They might go on strike. They might bring the whole thing crashing down.
Keith Olbermann the other day suggested we take to the streets. What happened? Nothing.

We don't know how to take to the streets. Besides, it looks just awful on television.

So you can go ahead and do your job, but just be aware that you are being conned. You are living in a dishonest and rapacious culture, and you are doing the best you can to make it work for you. Even those of us working for causes we believe in are working in a basically anarchic, amoral system, without the benefit of unions or workplace protections and in an economic system that has no moral foundation.

That's what we do. That's who we are. And that weird anxiety you feel from time to time, that's not a problem. That's just the truth seeping in.

You're OK. It's the world that's messed up."

On Connection

2011-08-05T09:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve decided to accept that, both in Richmond and Barnesville, I live in a state of grace.

I live in general grace, for, as we know, without the inbreathing and exhaling of the Holy Spirit, the earth would cease to be.

But more specifically, I live in a state of internet grace.

In both places, for mysterious reasons, my internet connections phase in and out as they please. Sometimes the connectivity pulses in and out by minutes or seconds, flickering on and off like the light of firefly. Sometimes I have blessed hours with connectivity, as if the cows of cyber-stability have been securely pastured in my field; sometimes, too, I am blessed hours without the internet at all and must do "other things." Sometimes whole days go by and I am forced to a McDonalds or a library.

I receive both being on and off the “web” as gifts. Like a farmer, I habituate self to forces I cannot control.

Inevitably, this has an impact on my blogging. I jump when the "ding" sounds--e-mails have flooded my mailbox, the connection is present!

When the moments of grace arrive, when the firefly is lit, and the internet pours out its presence, I respond first to the pressing demands—that (dozen) e-mail(s) that must be responded to right now, that article or review that ‘s due, that research that has been holding up my progress.

Then I go to blog, full of life, full of potential fire—and the light blinks out, the way closes. Posts linger, half written, in Word documents. Somehow, to write, I have to be “there,” in this blogspace.

And sometimes I am too tired, too spent, for the act of writing.

I have a long, backlogged list I hope to blog about: the Olney graduation, the change of seasons in Barnesville (complete with apring photographs taken on my cell phone), more on Dorothy Day, who I left hanging as an abused child without rounded the picture, posts about theology, about Earlham School of Religion, about my reading on Quaker women writers, heaven knows what else. Have I mentioned how much I loved the movie, The Winter Bones? Is it too late? Must my slower internal rhythm correspond with the lightning quick pace of the outer world, or is there something to be gained by the slippage?

Perhaps I should rename my blog BehindtheTimes, but I’m sure the name is already taken. :)

It occurs to me that my friends often cut and paste their posts and e-mails (have I mentioned I am a great Jane Austen fan? ☺) and render them, almost verbatim, as blogs? I’ve posted so much—on Jane Austen, on the Mysteries of Adolpho, on Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. Should I keep this blog circulating by moving these thoughts over here—to a blog about Quakerism? Yet all of this feeds this Quaker.

Well, I will keep on. Did you know it was a Quaker who named the types of clouds--nimbus and cumulus, etc.-- in the early 19th century? And that Jane Austen knew him, that they were neighbors? And that in Emma …

For another day.

Dear Rosa

2011-08-04T09:08:00.000-07:00

Rosa Shull died two days ago. She was in her early twenties

Death is almost always as surprising as it is inevitable. Despite images of the River Styx, with their tease of boats and crossings, the chasm between life and death is so total, so irrevocable, that it stuns us with its non-negotiable finality, its inflexible refusal to enter into dialogue. It goes in one direction only and won’t hear our pleas. Our needs are not its needs.

To be dead is to be parted from this earth as embodied, moving flesh, no matter what paradise, heaven or new life lies on the other side. I trust in an afterlife; I grieve the loss of this life.

Rosa, your death—so sudden, so unexpected, so young—is like the proverbial blow to the solar plexus, leaving me gasping, airless, groping for direction. How could it be? How could someone so vitally alive, so personable, bright, kind, artistic, with such an abundance of gifts to pour out on humanity, have died? How could someone so infused with the life force be gone? The mind reels.

I have a memory of you and Sophie walking across the Olney campus in front of the Main Building, a sunny day early in the Fall of your senior year. You both have short haircuts, that come to some sort of V at the back of your necks. You are both tall, blond, light eyed. You walk side by side with a confidence that is infectious, startling, healthy, alive, sharply radiant.

In another memory, we are at lunch and you are talking about a dessert—a pastry—that your grandmother used to make for you in Russia (or was it the Ukraine?), where you presented a seamless merging of a life far away and the present moment.

Annie Dillard writes, “I was …ringing. I had been my whole life a bell.” That is you, with your clear voice, the ringing, rounded cadences of a Midwestern accent, yet beneath the surface, music rising up and down, laughter.

I want to believe that when we die, we are transported to another "place," where we don’t know we’ve died, where we wake up and are healed and everything bad that went before is revealed to be a nightmare, an illusion. We go home and our relationships are whole and holy, infused with light. People we thought are dead are alive and present. We overflow with joy because everything has been set aright. We praise, we sing, we laugh.

Rosa, I can’t believe you are gone—it simply defies my soul’s comprehension—yet I can imagine you in heaven and also feel your spirit suffusing the earth. In the future, I will see you in things that move and remind me of your voice. All is still outside my window, but in a shadow of the window, cast on the carpet as a square of light, shadows move rapidly, dancing, waving at me.

Framing Dorothy Day, part II

2011-05-05T12:04:00.000-07:00

Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day wrote often about her childhood and cast it in happy terms. Her stories of making dolls from calla lilies or enjoying happy times gathered in the dining room reading and eating apples (which she would peel and salt) paint an idyllic picture of her girlhood. Even the privations are cast in positive terms-- a sheltered childhood allowed time to read and study; housework when the family could not afford a maid instilled discipline and a work ethic, being the primary caretaker for her baby brother when she was not at school gave her an opportunity to push the carriage up and down the streets of working class Chicago that had so gripped her imagation as she read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Poverty meant a chance to play with the poorer children. Prosperity meant a more comfortable home.

Yet between the lines--and within the lines of her autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin--a harsher picture emerges. She states in The Eleventh Virgin that as a child she was “slapped for many things.” (EV, 8). When Della and Dorothy were holding horsehairs in a brook, hoping they would turn into snakes, Della fell into the water and Dorothy (called “June” in the novel, presumably because in real life her middle name was May) was “whipped for it because, Mother … argued, June was two years older and should have known better.” (EV, 8) Later, Dorothy learned to cope with punishment through reading: A friend gave her a book about a saint and “thereafter, …[she] prayed to Pelagia, her birthday saint, every time a whipping threatened. It didn’t avert the punishment but her faith remained unshaken.” (EV, 16) She remembers being so tired from baby care of her younger brother John, born when she 14--including being assigned the four o'clock feedings--that she was exhausted at school, where she was working hard to earn a college scholarship.

She also recalls much housework--and perhaps most poignantly, isolation. Her father “in one his recurrent moods of superiority, would not let his daughter play with the girls of the neighborhood … Mother … assisting him in carrying out his idea of exclusiveness ….” (EV, 23) In such a state, “there were no adventures to make her realize that life was joyful.” (EV, 29) Dorothy longed for the days when the family had been poorer and she’d been free “to mingle with crowds of children in playgrounds and play in the dirty streets with strange little girls and tell them wild, imaginative tales.” (EV, 29) When the family moved to a more affluent neighborhood, “it was a humdrum life of lonesomeness.” (29) She longed, early on, for the freedom she saw among the working classes.

Why did Day frame her childhood as happy, when it clearly had its share of grief--and possibly abuse? She left home at 16 and was, for the most part, self-supporting for the rest of her days, preferring unheated tenement rooms and heavy labor to returning home. Late in his own life, her father described Day as the "nut" of the family, and wrote that he wouldn't have her around him.

I haven't read anything that discusses the possibility that Day was an abused, scapegoated child. I understand she didn't want to be portrayed that way. Also, what's considered abuse in one generation or culture is often normal child rearing in another. At the same time, it's not hard to see a person who was the underdog and scapegoat in childhood sallying forth as an adult to help those stigmatized and held down. What most interests me, as I look at 20th century "saints" (and Day resisted that label) is how we misread what seems to be lying in plain sight in front of us in favor of a narrative "line." Why would we not see what is there? Do we do her a disservice when we look away?

Framing Dorothy Day I

2011-04-30T17:53:00.001-07:00

In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, a character named Mary Crawford has grown up in the household of a corrupt uncle, a Navy admiral. At one point, she says wittily that she knows all about "rears and vices," following that with the statement "Now don't accuse me of punning." Of course, it seems obvious, even without Mary pointing to it, that she is indeed punning--she knows all about rear and vice admirals and all about their "rears and vices."

However, on the various Jane Austen lists to which I subscribe, violent fights break out periodically over this statement. One faction sees the worldly Mary punning, the other says no, of course she's not punning--look, she even says she's not punning. I have a level of frustration with this second faction, wondering how in the world they can't see the pun, especially given that Mary and her brother Henry are serpents who invade the "garden" of Mansfield Park, complete with allusions to Milton--and complete with adroit skills at manipulating language. I give enormous credit to Jane Austen for creating in Henry and Mary such well-rounded characters--they are so charming, so talented, so delightful, so capable, at times, of genuine social kindnesses--that you half fall in love with them, while at the same time knowing the "city" has twisted and corrupted them. Their vices hide in plain sight.

Dorothy Day was an enormously good woman who should, I believe, be made a saint. Her childhood contributed to that, and she's documented her tale of growing up at least three times. Yet because of the way she's framed it, the real story may be hidden in plain sight. To be continued ...(Not a tease, I'm just out of time right now ...)

Happy Easter

2011-04-23T17:23:00.000-07:00

With Easter almost here, I am imagining preparing the earth to be pleasing and welcoming for a loving God's return. If we made that our goal rather than profit or domination or personal pleasure, what a beautiful world we would create.

I imagine we would clean up our mess, plant trees and treat the animals kindly.

I imagine we would feed the hungry, clothe the naked and house the homeless.

We would definitely stop bombing and fighting each other with carnal weapons.

And, while we're envisioning this, what if God kept delaying his return day by day, so it was always tomorrow ... and we were on good behavior so long that it became a way of life?

What a wonderful world it would be.

Happy Easter.

New York Times: The Missing Photo

2011-04-17T13:27:00.001-07:00

I have been writing "utopic" visions and with others, have begun to envision a world of small, caring schools, floating to work on waterways and more time at home to hang laundry and grow gardens. This is the beginning of a lovely portrait of a shalom world, and it's fruitful to have these visions. "Without a vision, the people perish."

However ... in the real world, I sense something fearful.

I sensed it this morning when I woke up and pulled up the New York Times. I was faced with an image of illegal immigrants in Arizona, dressed in their black and white striped prison uniforms. For a moment, I couldn't quite register what I was seeing. If it hadn't been for the bright color photograph, I would have thought I was looking at a Nazi concentration camp. It was a disturbing image. So disturbing that I decided later I would blog about it.

But strangely, when I went back to grab the image from the New York Times, it had disappeared. A slideshow of five photos had been reduced to one image of students in Georgia protesting immigration. Hhhm. For some reason, the sudden disappearance of the inmates troubled me as much as the initial image.

The photo I've posted here is from the website: http://www.correctionsone.com/corrections/articles/1843990-New-program-uses-inmates-fingerprints-to-net-illegal-immigrants/

The photo we now see is captioned: "Approximately 200 convicted illegal immigrants were handcuffed together and moved into a separate area of what has been deemed Tent City, by order of Phoenix Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Wednesday, Feb. 4 2009. Arpaio is using Tent City to keep illegal immigrants separate from the rest of the inmate population. (AP photo)"

I wake up every morning and see the contours of life as I have always known it. There's food in abundance, a roof over our heads, warmth in the winter and gas for our cars. We take summer vacations and our children go to school or to college and we have gifts for Christmas and we read books and watch movies, take walks and visit friends. If we are sick, we go to the doctor. We put money away for retirement.

Yet since the financial crisis of 2008, I've felt anxious.

Roger and I spent a long weekend in Toronto last summer. We loved Toronto. Everyone seemed so relaxed and at ease. I didn't feel the undercurrent of fear that I do here.

At a weekend retreat in Barnesville, I asked a Canadian Friend about this, commenting on the different atmosphere I sense between here and Canada. Is it just me? I asked. Am I projecting my own anxiety onto the people around me?

No, he said. There's definitely some level of fear in the United States that's palpable. He feels it when he comes here. He doesn't know what it is.

Often, I want to brush all this away, like some nightmarish cobweb, to convince myself that it's some weird, warped fantasy devised by my own mind. Perhaps it's my fevered imagination that finds beneath the facade of normalcy that America is changing in unsettling and ominous ways. It must be me, I think. Perhaps I am spending too much time reading about Germany in the 1930s: Don't we always diagnose the illness we are studying?

And yet the dots ... I keep finding dots that unsettle me.

Five states, including Ohio, calling for sub-minimum wage for teenagers--along with a rollback on protections for teen workers.
IKEA taking advantage of the cheap labor in southern Virginia to open a factory there--$8 an hour for workers versus $19 in Sweden (their minimum wage).
Draconian laws against illegal immigrants.
A city in Michigan assuming "emergency powers ..." that takes governance from elected officials in favor of vesting it in an appointed board: http://michiganmessenger.com/48278/benton-harbor-emergency-manager-strips-power-from-all-elected-officials (HT: MM)
Constant reports of the dramatic increases in the wealth of the upper 1 percent of our country, along with the flattening and even decrease of wealth for the rest of us.
News that Paul Ryan, author of the bill that would replace Medicare with inadequate medical vouchers for seniors, requires his staff to read Ayn Rand, a "philosopher" hostile to Christianity and apparently to any form of compassion save self interest.

I'm sure much more could be added. I worry that something strange is happening in the United States that will strip most of us of our rights and our livelihood, predicated on a financial "emergency." Am I even thinking this? How can this be? I fervently hope I am wrong and this current period and its excesses will dissipate as the American economy recovers.

Thomas Wolfe wrote eloquently about about his gradual, growing awareness of the profound evil of Nazi Germany during a visit there in 1936. It was this awareness of what he called a primeval evil that led him to conclude he couldn't go home again. He'd lost his innocence. The passage below, written on the heels of his visit to Germany, could equally apply to today:

From You Can't Go Home Again

I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms
and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall
meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I
think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we
know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single
selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the
brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born
yesterday, or that he grew to manhood forty years ago, or that he
suffered sickness and collapse in 1929 [or 2008], or that we began without the
enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly
were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and
that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our
earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land.
I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the
fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own
possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content,
for the nature of the enemy is insatiate--tried finally to take from us
the crust.

I think the enemy comes to us with the face of innocence and says to us:

"I am your friend."

I think the enemy deceives us with false words and lying phrases, saying:

"See, I am one of you--I am one of your children, your son, your brother,
and your friend. Behold how sleek and fat I have become--and all because
I am just one of you, and your friend. Behold how rich and powerful I
am--and all because I am one of you--shaped in your way of life, of
thinking, of accomplishment. What I am, I am because I am one of you,
your humble brother and your friend. Behold," cries Enemy, "the man I am,
the man I have become, the thing I have accomplished--and reflect. Will
you destroy this thing? I assure you that it is the most precious thing
you have. It is yourselves, the projection of each of you, the triumph of
your individual lives, the thing that is rooted in your blood, and native
to your stock, and inherent in the traditions of America. It is the thing
that all of you may hope to be," says Enemy, "for"--humbly--"am I not
just one of you? Am I not just your brother and your son? Am I not the
living image of what each of you may hope to be, would wish to be, would
desire for his own son? Would you destroy this glorious incarnation of
your own heroic self? If you do, then," says Enemy, "you destroy
yourselves--you kill the thing that is most gloriously American, and in
so killing, kill yourselves."

He lies! And now we know he lies! He is not gloriously, or in any other
way, ourselves. He is not our friend, our son, our brother. And he is not
American! For, although he has a thousand familiar and convenient faces,
his own true face is old as Hell.

Look about you and see what he has done.

Dorothy Day and a good book on children's literature

2011-04-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a good book on children's literature called American Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood by Gail Schmunk Murray (1998).

What interests me about children's literature is the lifelong impact it has on readers: In other words, that it's formative. It colors how we view the world. As Murray argues, it's also conservative. Such literature is written by adults who have typically wanted to inculcate children with whatever they consider the prevailing "good" morality of their time period, be it Christian sentiment in the 19th century or acceptance of minorities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I would add too, that because it is imagined by adults who, inevitably, transmit the values of their own era--essentially the era before the birth of the child reader--children who internalize these values are carrying forward and conserving older values. If they express these values as adults, they are expressing the values of their grandparents' generation, though, of course, influenced by the experiences and values of their own lives.

Dorothy Day, a founder of the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s, was much influenced by the 19th century novels she read as a child. Two that impressed her were Wide, Wide World and Queechy by Susan Warner, both huge best sellers before the Civil War and an influence on a generation of literature to come. In these novels, which are sentimental by today's standards, young orphan girls survive in a cruel world through faith in God, patience, innocence, kindness, forgiveness and self sacrifice. Although these novels were written from an evangelical Christian perspective, Day was able to carry their values into the Catholic Worker movement. Along with other books, they gave her an inspiration and a touchstone. The Catholic Worker hospitality houses required huge amounts of patience, kindness and self sacrifice. They also ignited the popular imagination: the CW hospitality house movement spread quickly.

Books like Queechy and Wide, Wide World remind me of Shirley Temple films of the 1930s, often featuring Temple as a brave, innocent and virtuous orphan girl who makes her way in a cruel world. It interests me that such Victorian motifs carried into the 1930s, a time of great suffering, and that they manifested in both films and the Catholic Worker movement. One could argue that the compassion imagined in the 19th century is in many ways realized in the 20th century, especially during the New Deal of the 1930s, as many of the people who grew up reading 19th- century children's literature came of age. And it's surely possible that children's book like the Little House series, which, as Murray points out, promoted self help and implicitly critiqued government programs, have influenced the politics of our era in an individualist direction.

Questions that arise for me include: What values did I imbibe and have I carried forward as a child reading children's literature in the 1960s and early 70s? What values are today's young adults carrying forward? What impact have they had and will they have on how our society is structured?

Sub-minimum wage

2011-04-13T05:09:00.000-07:00

Here's on child labor: http://www.womensenews.org/story/equal-payfair-wage/110411/gops-attack-child-labor-threatens-our-daughters

Several states, including Ohio, want to roll back minimum wage for people under 20. The details vary from state to state, but apparently Maine is proposing $5.25 an hour for this specific group.

Here are my problems with this:

An acquaintance of mine has a daughter who started at the same state university she attended 30 years ago. She wanted the daughter to work her way through college for character building reasons, but noted that the cost of the education there had gone up by 10 times in 30 years while minimum wage had increased a mere 2.5 times. These figures made it impossible her daughter to earn enough to work her way through school. A sub-minimum wage would make that financial struggle even harder, especially as Pell grants are under attack now.

Apparently, at least in some states, the proposals abolish the kind of oversight that prevents abuse. In fact, some of the legislation takes away any requirement for record keeping. The message is clear: Employers can hire very young workers and do what they want with them. (This in the wake of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Fire?) The most vulnerable will be the most exploited.

I have been wondering when and how the assault on minimum wage would come. Never, ever do you hear anyone like Boehner, our representative from Ohio, say anything but "job creation." There's never any talk of decent jobs at decent wages with decent benefits .... Now I know how minimum wage will be attacked: Use the states, target specific groups, slice and dice, whittle and prod .... Then the "rest of us" will have to compete with $5.25 an hour ...

Where is the mainstream media on this? The New York Times spent masses of time on the Triangle fire but in the meantime, in real time, Rome is burning all around us. We hand wring over past abuses while politicians are trying to rewind the tape to recreate those days.

Perhaps this summer, when it looks like I will be unemployed, I can get involved in politics for the second time in my life. I'm simply not an overtly political creature ...

Am I over-reacting to this? I really see this as a part of a "vision", not to bring the rest of the world forward to decent wages and benefits for workers, but to create a huge class of underpaid proles in America who can "compete" with Third World workers in a race to the bottom. It makes me deeply sad on spiritual level.

Visioning the green community

2011-04-11T07:03:00.001-07:00

Shak El writes:

"Green Utopianism does not have to mean a return to the farm (tho it would not stop those who wished to do so). It could easily embrace an industrial society based on green energies (sun, wind, wter, geo-thermal etc). necessary labor would be gradually reduced by moving ever towards full automation and shared work load divided amongst the population. Some estimate that we could produce everything we need with only 10-15 hours of necessary labor."

"Some estimate that we could produce everything we need with only 10-15 hours of necessary labor."

When I was growing up in the 1960s and even into the early 70s, a shorter work week was very much a vision. With increased productivity, we would could all live well and by working fewer hours live, paradoxically, more abundantly.

In the 1960s, the idea of a shorter work week was linked to the technological Utopia that was going to liberate us all, and we were less sophisticated about environmental issues. I remember the first Earth Day, when our elementary school class stood on the baseball diamond and let go a great flock of colorful helium balloons. We wouldn't do that today ... but we meant well.

What made my heart sing was hearing others speak (not just Shak El, but Alice, Hysery, etc.) of that seemingly long lost vision of an abundance of time rather than of material goods. I have been thinking much about vision these days, and the quote from Proverbs that "without a vision, the people perish" sticks in my mind. It's not just any vision that Proverbs means, but a vision, as the next part of the quotes notes, that is tied to the law--which, as I read it, links it specifically to the building of the shalom community.

We seem so surrounded by visions of scarcity. We are told must work longer and harder for less and less and do so in an environment of fear. Yet our productivity has grown massively in the past 50--and even 20--years. By embracing a vision of simply living more simply, and wisely using the technology we have, we could be released from lives of toil. If we lived at the level of the average family of the 1950s, we could all work shorter weeks, with less stress and more joy and time for family, friends and community.

Back in the 1930s, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker movement advocated for the same vision: People living simply by working 20 hours a week and spending another 20 hours a week in discussion and education, ie. in community. If people in a society that had so much less could have this vision, we can too. (I think. I hope.)

We live in a culture too that values work as work, so that one can be fearful of advocating for leisure. And some, but not all of us, will have passions, be it for building a bicycle from scratch to helping build a Friends boarding school, that will take up large amounts of time--but not feel like work.

Overall, this green vision is not about "leisure" per se but achieving a more balanced life. In The Overworked American, the author, Juliet Schor, cites studies that once people work 30 hours a week or fewer, they actually watch less television and are more apt to be involved in politics and community. Could this be the real reason we are told we must work ever longer and harder?

Not to restate the obvious, but maybe it needs to be said more often: Fewer hours in an office or commuting to a job might lead to less money but it would also open up more time for gardening and hanging laundry and walking places and enjoying life. Maybe we'd read more books. Maybe we'd be healthier, driving down health care cost. Perhaps I dream ...

Beautiful Barnesville, Fairyland and Walking.

2011-04-11T06:44:00.001-07:00

Roger and I walked the seven miles round trip to the Fairyland ice cream stand yesterday. One of the charms of Barnesville is how it captures a simpler, bygone era. Of course, my feet now hurt ... even after bathing them in Olney's lake. Ah spring!! How we love you!

I'm struck with Barnesville's quiet when I come back here from Richmond on the weekends. I live on a shady, quiet, old-fashioned street there, but Route 40, a few blocks a way, provides constant, subliminal traffic noise and there's the train whistle, and an undercurrent of hum from people in houses built in a row along a street. It's not bad noise, but it's noise. Our house in Barnesville, however, is surrounded by fields and a barn, with the lake on one side, and we are set far back from the road, so the quiet is profound, except for the birds and the geese, and occasionally, sounds drifting over from Olney.

Since, like Jane Austen, I live "half in" all the books I've read, our walk to the Fairyland reminded me of when Donna Parker and her best friend Ricky, a freckle-faced girl, took a long walk to the soda fountain on their day off from camp counseling in the Donna Parker books, a children's series written in the late 1950s, early 1960s ... which book was that? Of course, the soda stand looked a lot closer when they were whipping past in the car on the way to camp ... Has anybody read the Donna Parker books?

And while I'm ruminating on long walks ... trekking to the Fairyland reminded me too of a March of Dimes walk-a-thon through Baltimore when I was 14. I wish I had photos and/or a route map from that day, because it was street after street of tidy rowhouses with marble steps ... and most of that is probably gone now or in disrepair ... I took it all for granted, of course. I know there's a metaphor here somewhere. :)

Any walk memories?

Utopia?

2011-04-04T05:37:00.000-07:00

In her essay "Lush Life: Foucault's Analysis of Power and A Jazz Aesthetic," Sharon Welch quotes Steven Weinberg's list of five widely held utopian visions:

Free Market utopias: In this vision, government is limited and the world, freed of regulations, becomes “industrialized and prosperous.” However, “For many Americans the danger of tyranny lies not in government but in employers or insurance companies or HMOs, from which we need government to protect us. To say that any worker is free to escape an oppressive employer by getting a different job is ... unrealistic," Weinberg writes.

Best and brightest utopias: The best and the brightest are put in charge. The problem: all elites end up prioritizing their own interests.

Religious utopias: Religious revival sweeps the earth, getting rid of secularism. We know what happens when religious communities start to safeguard their "purity."

Green utopias: The world rejects industrialism in favor of simpler living and small communities. This vision “falls prey to the common tendency ... for those who don’t have to work hard to romanticize labor.”

Technological utopias: A dream of a world made efficient and rich through the dispersal of cutting edge technology. This vision doesn’t sufficiently address environmental concerns of loss of local community.

I've read much about all these visions, and the one I probably fall prey to is the Green utopia, probably because I never have supported myself through farming. Do you have a "favorite?" Are there more to add to the list? Could all of these work together or is that another utopic fantasy?

Against Polemics

2011-04-03T07:57:00.000-07:00

I've found an interesting book called Postmodern Theology, edited by Graham Ward (2001). The essays I have read so far have put an emphasis on joy, community, embodiment and mutuality as the hallmarks of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Who knew the postmoderns were such a cheerful lot?

Sharon Welch, a theologian, has an essay called "Lush Life: Foucault's Analysis of Power and A Jazz Aesthetic." One timely idea she culls from Foucault, who died in 1984, is a rebuttal of polemics. In an interview late in his life Foucault said:

“polemics allows for no possibility of an equal discussion; it is processing a suspect, it collects the proofs of his guilt, designates the infraction he has committed and pronounces the verdict and sentences him…But it is the political model that is most powerful today. Polemics … establishes the other as the enemy …against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears.”

Sadly, almost 30 years later, polemics still reigns in politics--and in religion. How many denominations, Quaker included, are threatened with being torn apart because two sides have locked into positions, each refusing to move one micron against the demonized Other?

Foucault located the future of philosophy in a post-imperialist world in non-European countries. Certainly, we've seen an explosion of global readings and perspectives on culture and history in the more than 25 years since Foucault died. However, it seems to me that most of this is still largely informed by Western European, and more specifically, French and German, philosophy, as we all process the ideas of their enormously important thinkers.

Finally, Foucault poses the question: How do marginalized people move beyond critiquing structures of domination and imperialism? How do we use what power we have in a way that doesn't involve dominating others? Foucault distinguishes between power and domination, putting him much in accord with Jesus, though Foucault would not, by any stretch of the imagination, have regarded himself as Christian.

One of his answers to the problem of domination is to veer from Utopic visions with their "certainty" and embrace a vision that acknowledges imperfection and mistakes, but nevertheless keeps on trying to build a better world. There's a huge amount of wisdom in that stance. Foucault wanted his ideas and theories not to be "grand narratives," universal and totalizing, but to fucntion as a "toolkit" from which people could choose what was useful. This humility, admission of human frailty and pragmatic idealism also aligns with the classical Christian worldview. (The Christian worldview that was not co-opted by imperialist thinking).

Welch compares this way of thinking to the creative and improvisational nature of jazz, an art form created by a marginalized group, which is more about invention than perfection.

I remember once, in a reading group in which we were discussing a visionary community, noting that these communities always seemed to fail after, at most, a couple of generations. Why? Another member of the group pointed out that we tend to hold Utopic communities to too high a standard. How many businesses last more than a few generations, he asked. When I thought of the number of cherished Baltimore businesses (the closest city to where I then lived) that had folded in my lifetime, I had to agree: most organizations are inherently ephemeral.

So as I envision us floating to work in our rafts and sending our children or grandchildren to small, caring schools or Quakerism revitalizing, and then see how these things can go wrong, I am comforted to think that we simply need to keep trying. So what is the next step?

Sexism: Alive and Thriving in 2011

2011-03-31T06:04:00.000-07:00

I was going to excerpt the blog post below, but the whole is worth reading, especially as it speaks, in general, to empowerment versus resignation. I wonder if as Quakers, where, mercifully and grace-fully, in my experience, women are not subjected to routine sexism, we can coalesce around speaking truth to those who stereotype women as "whiners." This is not about politics, "rights," or controversial issues, but simply about speaking up and saying that women are fully human, fully adult, and, whatever your specific religious language, made in the same image of God as men. And maybe we can laugh along the way--even at ourselves, but not at the caricatures of us that others invent. :)

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/03/25/scott-adam-sexist-mens-rights/

Without a vision ...

2011-03-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

When I've looked at old high school pix, I've noticed that before the 1950s, high school graduating classes were often small--fewer than 50 students total. I'm imagining my home state of Maryland dotted with small high schools offering individual attention to every student.

These small high schools are housed in old buildings that have been restored rather than demolished, saving resources. (As Polly Bart, a green builder once said to me, the greenest way to build is not to build but to use what you have.) An old building also connects students with the past. Maybe some of what the students do is study the history of their buildings and the community around it ...

In a talk on Colonial Maryland I heard once, I learned that in the early days, water was the main means of transportation. The colony was so densely wooded, clearing lands for roads was difficult. The big farms and plantations backed to rivers so that goods could be shipped in and out easily. In the 19th century, the Jones Fall canal ran into Baltimore from the north. Today, it's a highway.

The idea of traveling around Maryland on the many waterways that crisscross the state captured my imagination. What could be more peaceful--or green--than floating down river to one's destination enjoying the warm sun and the song birds?

Of course, as I pictured this beautiful scenario of small schools and river barges, reality intruded. Not everyone, I remembered, would want small schools. Many would still clamor for the large institutions. Well, I thought magnanimously, let us build one or two large high schools and admit those who qualify. But if students need to qualify--to show they can be successful in a school without individual attention--then those schools will be come the desired elite prize. Students in smaller schools will feel lesser. And then, with or without the big schools, the small schools will start competing with each other and a hierarchy will form, with some schools more desirable than others ... and people will start to move into those school districts ... or if we do away with school districts, the richer parents will start paying for tutors to help get their children admitted to the best schools ... and we will be back to the starting point.

As for floating down rivers in holy solitude with the sun shining through the leaves and the bright blue dragonflies landing on our knees--wouldn't such isolation invite piracy and crime? Look at what happened to Huck Finn and Jim--they were faced with a constant run of charlatans and shady characters as they floated down the Mississippi. And wouldn't people who weren't thieves nevertheless insist on stealing the serenity with loud motorboats to get places faster? Wouldn't collisions, accidents and drownings start filling the news? What would happen when the rivers froze?

And yet ... despite people with all their problems of ambition, the drive for superiority, the lust to get rich quick even if it means crime or to watch one's child triumph over the rest ... we know we can build a better world because every once in a while we do. At least two people, old now, have spoken to me of the day Martin Luther King spoke on the Washington Mall. Something happened that day that was so important that people remember it for a lifetime. Olney Friend School stays quietly alive. The Catholic Worker movement, started during the Depression, feeds and houses people, capturing the imagination of thousands. St. Francis preaches to the birds, dances joyfully and gives his money to the poor. George Fox has a vision on a hill and gathers a people to serve God. Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount. We hang on for centuries or millenia to these glimpses of the Kingdom of God breaking through into our world. Often I get depressed as I read the newspapers and think the forces of evil are taking over ... so I ask, are there other examples of alternative kingdoms alive around us?

Smaller Schools

2011-03-28T06:20:00.000-07:00

When I worked as an education reporter some years ago, my coverage area had unexpected crisis: a sudden surge in high school enrollment leading to massive school overcrowding. This was driven, in part, by the growth of the immigrant community, which threw off the county's model for calculating population by living in larger households than the average American family.

The school board and central administration had two solutions: adding on to six existing high schools to raise their student populations from about 2,000 to about 2,500 and building a new, 2000-seat high school for between 70 and 80 million dollars.

All my instincts screamed that both of these were the wrong solution. What the school system needed to do, I thought, was acquire small buildings here and there and set up perhaps 10 new high schools of about 500 pupils. The community I covered had a charming old brick school building, that would have been perfect for such a project, needing a few million dollars for a new roof and other repairs. (This versus $70 million for a new school ... $3 million each put into ten smaller buildings would be ... $30 million ... at least something for the frugal to ponder.) The high school in that community, which was slated for a 600 "seat" (not pupil, but "seat") addition, was already well past what experienced people agreed was its former its optimal size of about 1,200 students. It was, in many ways, dysfunctional despite the best efforts of teachers and administrators to run a good school.

While I couldn't "prove" anything, what I saw, in both the above county and a neighboring more affluent county, was that once schools pass a certain size, they tend to become impersonal, bureaucratic places. Administrators can't know all the students, and kids end up herded through the system in the most efficient way possible, which often doesn't meet their individual needs. I sometimes witnessed students being treated rudely by harried school staff. I could hardly blames the staff, but also had the uncomfortable feeling I wouldn't want my children spoken to that way.

Yet, parents clamored for the larger schools with all the bells and whistles. To send a child to school without the same state-of-the-art gym as the best school in the county, and without a full-blown music program and six languages to choose from was seen as unacceptable. To have all these amenities in one place meant building large schools.

But are these the most important things? I often feel as if I am sister from another planet, and somehow miss seeing life the way the rest of the world does, but how is a state-of-the-art gym better than a small, caring community dedicated to knowledge and to knowing each student personally? Obviously, it would be ideal to have both, but as Gym Ex illustrates, students' bodies can be well served through the simplest exercise technologies.

I wish we could focus more on the soul of our schools than on their material attributes. Are students nurtured and known? If that element is in place, and academics are taken seriously, learning will follow. Quakerism, in general, with its emphasis on "small is beautiful," is well-placed to be a leader in this alternative way of thinking.

Olney Gym Ex and the Quaker testimonies

2011-03-25T18:19:00.000-07:00

Every year at this time, Olney Friends School holds Gym Ex, a gymnastic exhibit. I love Gym Ex, because it so completely expresses the Quaker testimonies:

Simplicity: A 70-year-old gym, floor mats, a hand-made pole vault, jump ropes, and a trampoline are all the students need to put on an hour-and-a-half show of athletic ability and coordination. It's an impressive and unvarnished display of physical ability using the simplest of equipment.

Community: Gym Ex is the point in the year where the students show they have coalesced as a community. Community emerges as they work together to dance, jumprope in groups, do gymnastics together and build human pyramids. It's expressed as they applaud and urge each other on. It reaches a high point when the girls file in at the end of the evening holding candles and serenade the boys with a song they have a chosen. This year it was "I want to Hold your Hand." Community is expressed too in the continuity of Gym Ex from year to year. It's a tradition handed down person to person going back at least a century.

Equality: Everyone is equal, Everyone works with each other. Girls are as athletic as boys. I'm impressed at GymEx, as I always am at Olney, at the girls' ability to be the strong humans--in body and character-- that they are. I never hear the word "feminism" or the term "woman's rights" spoken at GymEx, yet, harkening back to the earliest Quakers, girls are treated as fully human. Maybe when that acceptance is part of a culture, terms like feminism can fade away. I wish there were a way to spread this respect out more widely into a culture that sexualizes women so totally. I could say the same for race, ethnicity and nationality: they are celebrated and yet don't matter because there's absolutely no shred of hierarchy. This is a Quaker model at its best, and I wish it could be shouted out to the world.

Peace: This is more subtle--and there's even friendly competition to see who can jump highest over the pole vault-- but GymEx is a peaceful display of athletic prowess.

Integrity: When the above four interact, integrity is the outcome.

As I have since I arrived at Olney, I wish there were a way to push this model of education out into the wider world. What perplexes me is the difficulty of spreading the simplicity of what the school offers. In a time when we are handwringing over the high cost of public education, this model is inexpensive, were the boarding school portion removed. (Feeding and housing students and offering 24/7 care does add to the tab.) None of what the school offers requires spending huge amounts of money. It does require establishing small educational communities with an emphasis on relationship building and the Quaker testimonies. Yet it seems to me by using simplicity to encourage academic ability and good physical health, trusting students and building respectful relationships, the school is doing what is most important towards nurturing the kind of functioning, whole people who can enter the world and make it a better place.

Why do you think it is so hard to replicate this model? This is what baffles me--its seems as though schools like this should be everywhere, and they're not. I would think parents would cry out for this model of humanity over a bigger chem lab or more language offerings, but for some reason, we don't. I wonder why not?

Dean's Beans Writes

2011-02-11T06:39:00.000-08:00

From Dean of Dean's Bean's:

"Sorry to write again so soon, but I need to take responsibility for a mistake I made in my last blast. I need to clarify that it was actually NOT PBS calling me. Apparently, a small industry has developed of production companies that claim to work with PBS, NBC and others, but who really don't. They get people like me to sign on, they produce a three minute DVD, send it to PBS etc so that they can say it was "distributed" to PBS. Then you get a copy, which most of us would put on our website proudly, especially as it bears a PBS logo on it. So it looks like it was made for and shown on PBS when in fact neither happens. PBS gets hit so often by this that that have a FAQ on their website about this, even naming the companies that do it. PBS has a legal department which apparently spends a lot of time calling people who put these DVD's up on their website, telling them they have to take the logo off as it is not a PBS production, although folks are free to keep the DVD up otherwise.

So please don't be angry at PBS for this. They are victims of this scam, as is anyone who falls for it. I am sorry for the misinformation. The point of the blog holds, that there is a play for pay world around recognition. Just add the occasional scam on top of that."

Awards for Mer ...? Never Mind,

2011-02-10T04:53:00.000-08:00

Roger and I, thanks to an endorsement by Scot McKnight, buy mail order Fair trade coffee beans from Dean's Beans or did in those halcyon days of prosperity. I found this e-mail from Dean's Bean's in my mailbox this morning and wondered what you think:

"I just got off the phone with PBS Biography, a show I have watched since I was a little kid (that's how I learned about the great figures of history when I was young). They called to say they were interested in doing a spot on me and Dean's Beans. I was honored, but I have been here before. So I bluntly asked what it would cost me. They said the same $22,000 "production fee" that they would charge George Bush or anyone else they were working on. I told them that $22,000 would go a lot further doing development work in farming villages or even keeping our prices down here at home. Also, to me, if we are doing something newsworthy, I still believe that newsworthy outfits, be they blogs or national newspapers, will pick it up and report it. We don't pay to play.

This is not the first time this has happened around here, but it is happening with greater frequency. We were approached by Visionaries, another series. That one was $40,000 We have been hit on by a ton of food shows who would feature us if we wanted to pay to play. Similarly, we were awarded the National Republican Council Small Businessman of the Year Award and the Ronald Reagan Gold Medal for Business Freedom several years ago on the promise that we would be big contributors to their cause (I did send $25 as it also got me an invitation to the Inauguration Dinner with then President Bush - if I was willing to fork over an additional $4,000-no dessert at that price - I still have the invitation, which is a pretty cool memento).

More problematic for me are the number of times we have been approached for Green Awards from organizations that want to recognize our achievements in sustainability. Several prominent new organizations supposedly dedicated to sustainability have offered to consider us for an award - for a fee. Even the august United Nations Global Compact, with whom I have worked for about five years, recently offered to put me on a board of top world thought leaders in sustainability - for another $20,000.

I know I might be naive to think in the current ethical climate that recognition for good works should be based on the works themselves, not on the ability of the person or organization to pay. Just call me old fashioned."

I had no idea awards were for sale this way. Did you? I was distressed, especially having just read Margaret Benefiel's moving The Soul of the Leader, about company heads who care about people and principles and prosper as a result. Beyond that, with all the self-examination a Quaker seminary education invites, I have been wondering at my own distrust of ... everything, and I realized that it's not an isolated, pathological paranoia but rooted in the reality that almost everything in this culture these days is commodified, almost everything for sale. An e-mail like the above suggests I am probably still too trusting. I know there is hope, but where, incarnated, outside of the Divine (of course, everything is part of the Divine, but you know what I mean) and prayer, both obviously powerful, is the hope manifesting? What can we do?

"The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."

2011-02-02T16:20:00.001-08:00

I decided to start, once again, rereading John Woolman's Journal and was struck by the famous story of the young Woolman killing the baby birds after he had killed their mother. This is a story that is so familiar that the last few times I have read the journal, my eyes have slipped over it unreflectively.

I have read or heard that Quaker children, when they are distressed and ask why Woolman killed the baby birds, are told he was a farm boy, understood without sentimentality the death of animals, and was trying to by merciful, because he knew the baby birds would die without their mother. He was being kind.

Yet, in the text, Woolman himself describes his act as cruel. What comes to his mind about what he has done is a scripture verse: "The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel."

This story is crucial, not just because Woolman was a tender-hearted and empathetic child who felt badly about causing distress to innocent creatures. That is a fine morality tale as far as it goes. It's heart-warming to see someone have the goodness of heart to regret the cruel results of an impulsive act of killing. It shows that the young Woolman already had an advanced moral sense: He was able to put himself, even as child, in the shoes (or nest) of more vulnerable Others and see the world from their perspective. He cared about the birds even without fear of outward negative consequences to himself for his act. This is a beautiful, St. Francis of Assisi-like tale.

Yet, I think his purpose from the very beginning was more than to tell a confessional story. With this tale, he establishes from the outset a theme that runs throughout the entire journal and pertains to all creation: Once you or I start doing even one evil thing, we create a chain reaction. It's never just one thing, period. Killing the mother bird for "sport" meant bringing suffering to her babies, which led to a "cruel mercy," and then to an anguish that might have led to hardness of heart. What we do reverberates beyond itself. I think he wants, from the start, for his readers to dwell on the paradox of a world where societies become so messed up that even mercies are cruel.Taken to it's extreme, it's the "mercy" of the torturer we know from spy movies, who warns his victim: By the end, you will be begging me for death.

"The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel." This is an unsentimental statement, a quote from Proverbs 12:10 that begins with "a righteous man regards the life of his beasts..." (Obviously, there was a childlike literalism that led Woolman to think this after killing the birds.)

What worries me about this Proverb is the application to charity. If we move to a system a individual charity, and away from the government system, what about the mercies of the wicked? Will everyone treat the poor and vulnerable with justice and compassion? History tells us no.

However, I am reading Woolman for another purpose, two, in fact. One is for the benefits that always come with reading the words of a person of universal compassion. The second it in search of the literary influences on Woolman. Certainly, the Bible as an influence hits us from the beginning as an explosion. He starts off, like a good Quaker, with "the pure river of the water of life" in Revelation. He mentions reading "some religious books" as a youth. Do we know what they were? I strongly suspect George Fox's Journal, but what else? What, beside the Bible, structures the narrative of his life?

The Man who Loved Books Too Much

2011-01-11T14:35:00.000-08:00

During the Christmas holidays, I read The Man Who Loved Books Too Much:The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett. The book centers on John Gilkey, a petty thief and con artist who steals rare books, and his nemesis, Ken Sanders, a rare book dealer who makes it his mission to catch Gilkey. The book brings the reader inside--at least to the peripheries of the inside--of the world of rare books.

For Gilkey, the appeal of rare books, which bit him hard, resided in his conviction that they lent him a patina of class and education . To own a library of rare books was to be Somebody, perhaps even an English country gentleman. Since the San Francisco-based Gilkey had no money, he used stolen credit cards, outright theft and bad checks to finance his purchases, as a result revolving in and out of prison as he pursued his collecting.

After spending much time with Gilkey, Bartlett backpedals swiftly away from him, fearful of being manipulated, and anxious, perhaps over-anxious, to identify herself with the "decent" people in the book, the defrauded booksellers. The moral issues Gilkey present disturb her, and Barltett is concerned not to be complicit with Gilkey's self-presentation as a populist bibliophile entitled to expensive books. Her strategy, however, is possibly counter-productive, for in her haste to stampede to the "good" people, she leaves the reader to defend Gilkey. Better to have told the story and trusted the reader to pull out the moral: that a life of petty fraud is difficult and tawdry; that books used merely to enhance status are no different from any other consumer good, be it a high-end car or designer clothes, and no less likely to provide more than an ephemeral fix.

Gilkey is a sleazy character, yet the nature of his self justification is not unique. His arguments are: Rare books are overpriced; the average person should have a shot at them; the only way the average person can have a shot at such books is to steal them. I've heard--actually more before the economic crash than after--variations of that theme fairly often from individuals who were highly compensated by the standards of our society and living with little or no chance of suffering the least want, and yet who complained of being underpaid and deserving more. Who do they compare themselves too? Wall Street CEOs, of course. The mind-boggling pay and bonus scales of the few leave some of the rest feeling entitled to more--and sometimes with the mentality, like Gilkey, that they should get more any way they can. Add to that the sense that many of the rich at the top of the heap accumulated their vast fortunes immorally, and the "why not me?" mentality becomes easier to justify. If the game is rigged, you take what you can. The point is, for all Bartlett's black and white morality, Gilkey, while sordid, didn't seem to me to be particularly "other" in his thinking. Neither are he (nor the people who compare themselves to CEOS) entirely wrong in an innate sense the pie is not divided fairly in this culture.

Gilkey seemed fairly typical too in that he fell into the common belief that ownership is everything. However, while the rich, by definition, will always be able to buy things the rest of us can't, another form of wealth we can all take joy in is appreciating beautiful and rare objects without having to own them. This is what museums--and behind museums, the belief in a civic, public, shared space in society--are all about.

Finally, we get to the Quaker testimony of equality, and excerpts from a book I am reading in my Conflict Resolution class called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. No matter how, wealthy a society, if disparities between rich and poor grow too wide, trust evaporates and the differences between people, not their commonalities, become accentuated. This makes the poor more desperate and alienated and the rich more anxious and stressed. While Gilkey is not entitled to rare books, all of us as a society would arguably do better if people like Gilkey had more access to society's fruits.

Serendipities and Coffeepots

2011-01-06T19:43:00.001-08:00

I had no sooner finished my last post, Coffee Party, part II, when I was meandering about the web (I never do "surf" it) and landed on a YouTube video of Michele Bachmann, tea partier extraordinaire, explaining that she became a Republican after reading Gore Vidal's novel Burr. Up until that point, she had been a Democrat, and her first trip to Washington, she said, was to attend Jimmy Carter's inaugural ball.

Who knew?

All that changed as she read Burr, which Wikipedia describes a "a [1973] historical novel challenging the traditional iconography of United States history via narrative and a fictional memoir of Aaron Burr."

According to Bachmann, she was offended that Burr "ridiculed the Founding Fathers."

This aligns exactly with what I discussed in the last blog: Tea Partiers have a vision that wants to pull the good from American history, and they are repelled by the seemingly endless negativity progressives appear to display toward that history, a negativity I believe most progressives understand as an attempt to articulate what the American experience was like to oppressed classes. But as I mentioned in the last post, to some extent it grows distasteful to many people.

Of course Bachmann is playing politics, but her Burr story rings true, and it seems clear in the video that she is heartfelt (or a very good actress) when she identifies her reaction to the book as a defining moment. Her distaste for its denigration of historical figures she "revered" led her to question her political allegiances, and she switched parties. The book's point of view clearly offended her at a deep level. It rings true to me that a visceral moment that shakes a person's deep held convictions would lead to the kind of change Bachmann describes.

That the book is fiction didn't matter. The aesthetic was offensive to her.

Wikipedia contends that the novel was meticulously researched and based on fact: "Vidal did meticulous research of hundreds of documents to come up with his alternative reading of history. In an afterword, the author maintains that in all but a few instances, the characters' actions and many of their words are based on actual historical records."

Bachmann doesn't argue that the book is inaccurate. She argues that it's vision was repugnant to her.

The question comes back to: Can the progressives create a vision that more people find compelling?

Coffee Party, part II

2011-01-06T17:49:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons I don't pursue political action is that I never know what is going on. This is true. I'm usually happily oblivious to whatever the latest trend is.

But I stumbled onto the Coffee Party in my usual Mr. Magoo way, which was to think, hey, we need a coffee party. Ok, the world has been there and done that. A year ago. Well, I have been thinking about this for a year too. ... my tendency to mull makes me a much better scholar than political activist ... :)

I went to the Coffee Party website, which is connected with Movement for the People (or perhaps Movementforthepeople). I agree that we need a government that works, an end to misinformation and a reexamination of the Supreme Court decision that allowed unlimited campaign spending. Corporations aren't individuals. I agree. But it doesn't say much. What is a government that "works?" What is "misinformation?" Tea Partiers also want a government that works and an end to misinformation. Do we need another group to stand for these abstractions?

I am thinking about coffee and coffeepots in a concrete, tactile way as symbols of a particular period in American culture in which the country pulled together and became a powerhouse while promoting equalitarianism. This is the period from the start of the New Deal to, let's say, the Arab oil embargo. What images from that period give us the "warm fuzzies?" What are the sensory images that conveys prosperity with decency, community and equality? I would argue the coffee pot (or cup) is a good starting point. People used to sit around the kitchen table and drink coffee and talk. People used to gather around the coffee pot at work and drink coffee and talk. What is more American that the coffee break? Does anyone have time for a coffee break anymore?

For 30 years now, people on the right have been imagining themselves in a better world--the world of McGuffey readers and Little House on the Prairie schoolhouses with desks all lined up in a row, the 3R's taught and nothing else, and they believe a bloated government has overcomplicated and corrupted us. This vision of simplicity and self-reliance powers the Tea Party movement on a visceral level, I would argue. (Obviously, I'm reducing a huge amount of complexity, but this is a blog.) Much as progressives would like to delude themselves that those "not-very-bright right wingers" are being brainwashed by a flood of corporate money, no--they're a grassroots movement that grew under the corporate radar, isn't stupid, is sincere and goodhearted and has a vision. I know this, because having traveled in Christian circles in the 1990s, I was plugged into it. The corporate world is now trying to ride this horse politically, having to some extent ridden it economically, and should be worried. I think they are worried.

But my point is that there's an aesthetic vision that drives the small town, small government, personal relationship and responsibility group, aka the Tea Party, and it is a vision with a concrete, tactile quality that harkens back, as Glenn Beck says, to the pre-1912, pre-income tax era. It may be an idealized picture and we may say, but, but ... pre-1912, look at the racism, look at sexism, look at lives broken by the "Panics," the exploitation of the immigrant, the 60-hour work week, but the point is, people are culling out the best from the past and using that as an ideal.

I think what some on the right hate about progressives is the tendency to always react to history with negativity. I think progressives are simply trying to right the balance and speak for the once voiceless, but that can get tiresome without an alternative.

So, while the period from 1932 to 1974 was fraught with severe problems: economic depression, war, a war economy, racism, sexism, pollution, corruption etc,, that should not deter us from finding the good. Every period is fraught with many bad somethings. But why not use the coffee cup or coffee pot as a symbol of what was admirable in that period? Good things happened. People shared sacrifice--just about a week ago, my mother-in-law showed me a ration card she'd saved from World War II. People endured rationing for the common good! Ordinary people owned nice but not oversized homes and bowled together and attended low cost colleges, and were able to find decent-paying, secure jobs ... these things did happen, if imperfectly. People paid higher taxes and prospered.

Well, I'm not a politician, and yet I think we can all agree that our country seems to be suffering and that we need to do something about it, which starts with a vision. More lives have been moved by the Peaceable Kingdom than the laws of Deuteronomy, at least imho. I think, too, especially at this cultural moment, we need to create a vision for the future by pulling from the past.

Coffee Party

2011-01-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

I keep thinking that we need to start a Coffee Party, as a robust alternative to the Tea Party.

The Coffee Party would support a strong and growing middle class, deficit reduction, an adequately funded government ( is it not shameful that we are letting our infrastructure fall apart?), and most of all, especially, if we are going to return to a pre-World War II mindset, a significant reduction in our military presence around the world. As a Christian, I would want peace on earth and full, loving care for the poor, but I am trying here to be pragmatic.

What do you think? For those of us raised on stories of 1950s coffee clatches and for those of us who need that morning cup of coffee to get through the commute to the office, or who drink a cup of coffee while looking through the want ads--for those of us regular souls who simply want some assurances that the middle class will survive and grow to embrace the underclass, for those who want the dignity and equality that a cup of coffee represents, especially if it is the fair trade variety, how about the Coffee Party?

Coffee is a "can-do" drink. It's not about "we can't afford it, we can't, we won't, we have to shrink and get smaller and shrivel all up." It's about finding resources we didn't know we had, revving up our energy and making things happen that are good for everyone. It's just so American.

OK--I have to say it: a Coffee Party "would be good to the last drop."

What do you think?

Thirteen months a vegetarian

2011-01-02T19:43:00.000-08:00

Shortly before Thanksgiving, 2009, I became a vegetarian. It was a step I had been thinking of for many years and I finally asked myself: What are you waiting for?

I have never been much of a carnivore, so giving up meat was not a huge sacrifice. (Giving up chocolate would be harder.) However, there were moments during the past year when I found myself fantasizing out of the blue about a tender roast chicken or a juicy hamburger or even a steak.

Overall, however, the relief of giving up a practice that was making me uncomfortable vastly outweighed any momentary pang of longing for a meat dish. I will continue as a vegetarian, with shrimp included now and again. (I recognize this is a process.) Veganism at this point doesn't seem realistic, as I think I might become crazy if I had to worry about whether there were eggs, dairy or bits of bone in my food. I would definitely have to take my own food everywhere, and I'm often unwilling or unable to engage in that level of planning.

But I wonder if I could give up chocolate? Now THAT would be hard.

Back to School/ the Feminine Divine

2011-01-02T19:09:00.001-08:00

I am in Richmond for a two week intensive at ESR. I had a wonderful Christmas holiday and didn't want to leave Barnesville, but I no sooner arrived here than I was delighted to be back in my cozy little apartment with the old house smell. I am also very much looking forward to my class in conflict resolution.

I have completed a year of the Mdiv program, and so far it has exceeded expectations. It has been such a pleasure to be here. The classwork has kept me busy, and I have very much enjoyed the intellectual stimulation. As I have mentioned before, I love the balance between intellect and creativity that the school offers, not to mention the spiritual framework and the opportunity to do a writing as ministry emphasis.

There's almost too much to comment on from last semester. One of the highlights was the focus on reclaiming the female divine within what we (or I) tend to think of as the patriarchal "Father" God of the Bible. Of course, it would stand to reason that an omnipresent, all-knowing God would contain the female as well as the male, but we so often learn to think of YHWH as solely masculine that we can lose sight of the references in the Bible to the feminine attributes of the divine. Last semester, in both Hebrew class and Women in the Old Testament, we looked at explicitly female imagery used to describe Jehovah, such as womb, mother, breast, child bearer, or mother bear. It is easy to forget images of God giving birth or nursing the young. Also, as women are more than wombs and breasts, we wondered if images typically ascribed to men can also be female attributes--the warrior God could be female, for we saw in the Bible examples such as Deborah of women as military leaders, and the shepherd (ess) God could also be female, as women herded sheep in Biblical times. We found that in Jeremiah, women were condemned for worshiping the Queen of Heaven, but recast this to understand that perhaps a more overtly feminine side of Jehovah was once celebrated as a Queen, and that this side was later suppressed.

It made my heart leap to think of the Judeo-Christian God in inclusive ways that valued the feminine aspects of the godhead. As a Quaker, I appreciated how Biblical imagery, by being so inclusive, can support women's equality with men. I dearly wish we could talk about this more in the culture in general, as I believe many, especially women, turn away from what they (often rightly) perceive as the misogyny in Judaism and Christianity led by a judgmental man on a throne. And yet there is so much in the Bible that points to a richer and fuller God.

The Saga Continues

2010-12-20T05:42:00.001-08:00

Ah, me of little faith.

I learned yesterday that Stillwater has provided for the family--a husband, wife and three young children-- who showed up in need a week ago with little more than a borrowed car to their names. Currently, they have moved from a motel and are living in Morland House, the Ohio Yearly Meeting's retreat center. That should be an ideal resting spot for them as it has three bedrooms and ample living space. However, since it's already booked for quarterly meetings, retreats, etc., they can't stay there permanently, so they are on the lookout, I'm told, for another home. In Barnesville that's an affordable prospect: A modest house can be rented here for less than $400 a month.

The husband may get a maintenance job at the Walton, the local Quaker retirement home, and the wife also may get work helping there and/or doing housecleaning. The children are enrolled in the local public school, so all is well at the moment for one family. There is, however, an undercurrent of grumbling by some longer-term Stillwater members about their own needs for job and money, their own dire straits, getting less attention.

I am impressed, all the same, with the kindness and generosity of Stillwater meeting. The issue of being aware of and sensitive to the needs of others who may be reluctant to ask for help emerged with the Fifth query, and the meeting answered it well, articulating a concern to notice people who may never step forward.

I do feel the cumulative weight of need all over and sometimes it feels overwhelming. But when I stay in that spirit of love and light described by early Quakers like George Fox, Isaac Pennington and Margaret Fell --what I (and they) would call the Holy Spirit--I am reassured, against all the visible signals to the contrary, that everything will be fine, and I should be at peace. However, it is easy to step out of that circle of light and witness a world that seems to be falling apart and a country that seems to be spiraling into decline. At these times, the story of Peter walking on water becomes a useful parable.

I also have to remind myself that I am not personally responsible for solving the world's problems. All of us are simply ordinary people with little to no control over the larger destinies of nations. As the Abbess implies, we do what we have to do, one person at a time. (However, I do support a strong government safety net, am willing to pay taxes for it and hope our country will maintain, improve and strengthen it.) One family in need doesn't mean a thousand families behind them will suddenly appear, all lining up at tiny Stillwater, clamoring for help. And I have to trust, were that to happen, resources would emerge. Here, I can lean into the story of the loaves and the fishes.

What other spiritual touchstones might there be for finding our way through economic times that are hard on many people? And since people need practical resources, not just temporary charity and well wishes, what else can we do?

How do we help?

2010-12-13T16:23:00.001-08:00

Sunday at Stillwater, a man who had never attended the meeting before stood and told a disturbing story. When he'd first come in, I'd assumed he was a plain dressing Friend because of his white shirt and suspenders; however, he was a Pentecostal who had recently gotten interested in Friends. He told us he'd been working in a barber shop in Pennsylvania, cutting hair. If I understood the gist of his story correctly (this, at least, is how I pieced it together), he was laid off some months ago after his employer learned that he done prison time.

The man lost his apartment next door to the barber shop, and he and his wife and three young children headed for help to Pentecostals they knew of in the deep south. The man said he'd been credentialed as a Pentecostal minister but that the Pentecostals in the south could do nothing for him. He then left with his family and stayed with someone in North Carolina, who eventually took him to the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where he and his family stayed with yet another person. Somewhere in the narrative their vehicle--I'm not sure what kind--broke down, and they eventually borrowed a van to come to Ohio. But before that, the wife earned some money picking tomatoes.

The man said, having researched Friends and discovered Stillwater, he came to Ohio, thinking he and his family might settle in the Barnsville area. The man spoke of his criminal past, of a crime he committed at 19, and for which he served five years in prison –in part, because, if I understood, he couldn't afford a private lawyer. He indicated that the past was the past, and mentioned that God transforms hearts. He said he was already in trouble here in Belmont County with child protective services for letting his children sleep in the van in the cold. He was now using his wife's tomato-picking savings to room the family in a motel.

I had to leave before he was finished, but his story has stayed with me, for the following reasons:

Right before he spoke, a meeting member, a very lovely and distinguished woman, had talked about the injustices in the criminal justice system. Public defenders, for whatever reasons, often don't have the time to prepare an adequate defense for their clients, and thus the system, which is supposed to serve the poor, is often stacked against the poor.

I don't think God acts by accident, and I can't believe it was simply chance that caused a man, poor and with problems related to the criminal justice system, to arrive on our meetinghouse doorstep the same morning a member felt moved to speak of her concern about the plight of the poor in the legal system. What we are supposed to make of this, I don't know, but it is on my mind.

Next, this man's story stays with me because of my mixed reactions to it. Part of me thought, "It's the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath, displaced by the economy and forced on the road, living hand to mouth out of their (borrowed) car. This is a story of our times, a story of how the most marginal are the first to be fired and thus the first to suffer the brunt of the recession. Where can he get a job? Will anyone hire him with a criminal record?"

However, another part of me said: "This man is a con artist. Why was his wife picking tomatoes? Why wasn't he? Of course he could get a job... so why is he forcing his children to wander around? What kind of education are they getting? Why are people constantly "pushing him on" down the road?"

Then, I thought, why am I so judgmental? Do I know anything, really, about his situation? Perhaps there's some good reason he can't pick tomatoes. And with jobs in short supply for everyone, it's not such a stretch to imagine he really can't find any work. Where is my heart?

The man, with his wife and children in our meetinghouse, made a strong emotional impression on me: they raised my compassion and my alarm. I kept weighing: should we help him? Shouldn't we? As Roger said, the decision is, do you help people regardless, even if you know you might be getting conned, or do you not? Most of me says, yes, of course, you help people, and you don't ask questions. But on the other hand ...

I keep thinking too, of the larger debate in our society now about who should provide the kind of aid this family needs: housing, food, a job. Should it be the government or should it be churches, meetings and other faith-based organizations? The argument, and I hear it from people I respect, is that the aid should emanate from the church and local community, one on one, based on developing relationships with the people in need. This family, by singling out our congregation, represents exactly the right model. We see their faces, we hear their voices and press the flesh of their hands as we help.

But I shy from this because inevitably, if charity is based on a personal relationship, even a brief one, in essence, I--or my meeting--is sitting in judgment on another person. Who am I (the "I" standing for my meeting) to judge? How can I judge? And yet, inevitably, in this situation I have to judge, because in the real world, our meeting lacks the resources to meet every need of every person. And maybe we don't need to meet all needs--maybe only as many as we are able to help will come to door. But it's hard to trust in that.

My impulse is to want to direct this family, these strangers in our midst, to the government social service agencies, even frayed as they are right now. I feel the agencies have more know-how and more resources than our meeting. I also want to turn to them because I believe they are objective--that they are not evaluating each person individually or emotionally, but by applying a set of standards that are used universally to determine need. This family may not get their every need met by the government, but they will be treated impartially.

I fear a system in which how much help a person receives is haphazard and dependent on his or her ability to convince my faith group that he is of the worthy poor, that he deserves aid. This is what I fear--know--will happen if we dismantle government services. People who are personable--or able to grovel sufficiently--or seem enough "like" us or enough lacking in the vices we disapprove--will receive our help. Because we can only help so many, we'll help the favorites. Then the outcast, as they always are, are left to the too few saints. I don't wish for that.

I fear it already happens in our broken health care system. As a journalist, I would sometimes cover local silent auctions or other fundraising events to help a family needing money for cancer treatments for a wife or a child's operation that wasn't covered by insurance. These were warm and bonding events for the communities involved, but in every case, what was emphasized to me was what good people we were dealing with. Good people. How much Jane Doe had contributed to the church over the years! How well-liked the parents of little John Doe who needs an operation! Always, without a fail, it was this way, and I would often wonder, what happens to the people who don't help out at church or who are disagreeable or disliked or simply not known? Do they die or go bankrupt? I don't know.

So I am troubled. I would prefer to pay taxes and have the government impartially take care of people's basic needs. Then I can develop relationships with the people who come to my church or cross my path without them on their knees, begging.

What would you do in this situation? Give money? Send the family to social services? Something else?

Hildegard of Bingen

2010-12-13T09:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Roger and I saw the movie Vision: From the Life of Hildegard of Bingen, directed by Margarethe von Trotta. Hildegard was a 12th century nun and mystic, known for her visions.

The movie juxtaposes a 1950s-style Hollywood technicolor "Catholic" aesthetic with a feminist portrayal of a nun. The convent/ abbey is a somber place--lots of gray stone and women swathed in identical habits marching down corridors holding thick lit candles or surrounding the beds of dying like blue-clad vultures. Hildegard, who becomes its abbess, is a strong and serious leader and also an herbalist and healer. Some scenes show her in the convent garden gathering herbs with her nuns as she sternly quizzes them about which herb heals what ailment. In a feminine divine moment, the nuns act out Hildegard's play, Play of the Virtues, with the nuns playing the virtues, Hildegard as Anima, or the soul, and a friendly priest playing the Devil. The young nuns and Hildegard, their hair free and festooned with flowers, dressed in soft white shifts like May Day dancers, defeat the Devil and tie him up. An old nun who refuses to participate condemns the women for showing their hair.

Setting a bleak tone, the movie opens with villagers huddled in a cold church on New Year's Eve, 999, awaiting the end of the world. However, as we know, the world does not end--nor is Hildegard born for another 98 years. Following that, the opening sequences show flagellations juxtaposed with the young Hildegard being taken under the wing of the saintly and somewhat saccharine "mother" Jutta, the abbess, scenes which could easily have been lifted from a church-approved 1950s film. Not long after, Jutta dies, and we find that she has been mortifying herself with a metal mesh sash tied around her waist and working its way into her flesh under her habit.

Hildegard's visions serve to forward her own agenda. She is powerful and determined. But while she achieves her goals within the larger church hierarchy, such as establishing her own convent apart from the men, she is thwarted when her favorite nun and protege, from a noble family, is taken from her to become abbess of her own convent. Hildegard fights the transfer with all her might to no avail. This adds to the complexity of Hildegard's character. She undoubtedly is in love with the nun and selfish in wanting to keep her, as the young woman points out to her.

The film, a German production, is in German, and for anyone post-Nazi (ie., all of us) the emphasis on order, hierarchy and faceless uniformity, not to mention "mountaintop visions," carries a chilling layer of reference and serves as an implicit condemnation of the Catholic church. I have to imagine this was deliberate on von Trotta's part.

The movie was beautifully filmed, well acted and despite a slow pace, seemed shorter than it actually was.

I'm ambivalent about it however. Is it a cliche to add flagellation to a movie about medieval nuns and priests, especially when its not integral to the plot--and when flagellation did not burst into vogue until after Hildegard's death? Is it a cliche for a nun to fall in love with her protege in a strange, repressed way? Or are both realistic? Does anyone know anything about Hildegard? As a mystic, she seems a person who would be of interest to Quakers.

Thrift store fashionista

2010-12-12T19:36:00.000-08:00

How to dress for less in this recession. Between the Salvation Army store and Gabe's (Gabriels), Roger has been able to dress at bargain prices. The moss green suede jacket was a Salvation army find. At $20 this Weatherproof brand jacket was expensive by Salvation Army standards--but in perfect condition and a perfect fit. He wore it to Pittsburgh today in a light snow, so it keeps him warm. The heavy wool REI ribbed zipper sweater underneath also came from the Salvation Army--for $6. The pumpkin tee shirt beneath that was $2 at Gabe's. Roger guestimates his light brown Gabe's jeans came in at $10. So he achieved the layered look--with a jacket that works in winter weather--for $38 total. Take off the jacket and his indoor wear comes in at $18 for three pieces. Not bad.

The photo also shows our Barnesville kitchen, remodeled two years ago when we moved here. I tend to like everything made of natural materials, but I love this pergo floor.

Ambrose and Day

2010-10-20T07:49:00.000-07:00

I have not blogged for awhile, and that has been weighing on me. I've been censoring myself since I wish to blog about "the state of the United States"--ie., politics (inevitably), and yet, I hesitate because politics are divisive and lead to misunderstandings. As a person who at least attempts to stay spiritually grounded, I understand that truly lasting and Spirit-led political change comes from a deep place of compassion and unity. On the other hand, I find myself distressed and worried about the state of the union.

In seminary, we read about Ambrose and John of Chryostom, powerful fourth century bishops. Both believed that God created an abundant earth for the benefit and use of all humans and that the rich are stealing from the poor when they allow people to go hungry and homeless. I was encouraged by the compassionate theology of sharing of Ambrose and John; I was saddened when, doing a little more research, I found them labeled "Christian socialists." I wonder why every sort of sharing is labeled with that term. They were simply stating that the rich have a moral obligation to share with the poor because their goods are not "theirs," but God's. Jesus seems to have said something similar to Peter: "Feed my sheep."

Dorothy Day, in our century, also made a central mission of sharing the world's good with the poor, setting up soup kitchens, homeless shelters and Catholic Worker farms. She wanted to combat what she called the "dirty, rotten system," understanding that many people become poor because the system is stacked against them. But whether they were the so-called deserving poor or the unworthy poor, she opened her home to them all, because she believed this was what the gospel preached. Interestingly, especially in light of our times, her Catholic Worker cofounder, Peter Maurin, was what we today would call a libertarian. (Day called him an anarchist.) Day and Maurin couldn't have been farther apart politically: He was highly distrustful of government, feared government tyranny, and believed in one-on-one, personal charity rather than government programs. Day, on the other hand, worked to change the system and establish government programs to help ordinary people. Despite their differences, however, the two were able to work together, respected each other deeply and pooled both sets of ideas and opinions to create a whole that was bigger than either one. Is this possible today?

Arriving in a Lear jet

2010-09-28T05:04:00.000-07:00

Sometimes an image jumps out. Here's this from the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/opinion/28iht-edcohen.html?hp):

The share of national income held by the top 1 percent of American families has doubled in recent decades to 20 percent. That’s a huge shift. I spoke to Doug Severance, a Vietnam vet who’s a hotel employee in Aspen, Colorado. "When I moved here in 1984 we were all family,” he said. “Now either you arrive in a Lear Jet or you’re a servant.”

“Now either you arrive in a Lear Jet or you’re a servant.”

Unfortunately, this seems all too true. I've thought about this often as I ponder the state of air travel ("as if" I do much of it) and wonder if it would be in this state (even first class, I hear, is a mess) if the rich actually still flew on commercial flights.

In Maryland, our family lived in Columbia, a planned community developed by James Rouse, a visionary who wanted to mix all races and economic classes, back at a time when segregation was still legal, and who thought, rightly, that this could be done by the private sector at a profit.

A few years ago, the Columbia Historical Society (Columbia goes back all the way to 1966!) had a tour of early homes, including those of James Rouse and one of his corporate cronies (and neighbor) Padraic Kennedy. They moved to Columbia in the 1960s. Their houses crystallized the opposite of the image of the rich arriving in Aspen in private jets and the rest of us (and it IS the REST of us) arriving as the "help." Rouse and Kennedy lived IN their communities, in houses that were slightly (but not much) bigger than the average single family home, beautifully custom designed and on a lakefront--but a block away from townhouses and apartments. These "big executives" were not removed from their communities in gated enclaves. They were not living in MacMansions. By the standards of today's rich, their homes were beyond modest--small lots, four bedrooms, a combined living/dining room in the Rouse home--comfortable but not ostentatious. And the Rouses opened their home frequently for parties to which the entire community was invited. This was just 40 years ago. Even 35 years ago. Black women my husband used to ride the commuter bus to Washington to work with joyfully remember attending these parties.

It's almost unimaginable now that chief executives would live that way. Now they seem more like royalty, completely removed from everyday life and the average trials and tribulations of the rest of us. I remember the heads of the auto companies flying to Washington two years in private jets to receive their bailouts. They seemed entirely clueless about how this level of privilege might look.

This kind of disparity in wealth does not reflect the Quaker equality testimony or simplicity testimony and ultimately sows the seeds of war. Yet there's a rhetoric that supports this inequality running through our culture that we need to push back against. It's not "socialism" to ask for social justice. How do we, in the words of Dorothy Day, create a society where it's easier to be good? How do we sow love (not fawning) for the very rich and in the very rich?

John Woolman writes:

When I ate, drank, and lodged free-cost with people who lived in ease on the hard labor of their slaves I felt uneasy; and as my mind was inward to the Lord, I found this uneasiness return upon me, at times, through the whole visit. Where the masters bore a good share of the burden, and lived frugally, so that their servants were well provided for, and their labor moderate, I felt more easy; but where they lived in a costly way, and laid heavy burdens on their slaves, my exercise was often great, and I frequently had conversation with them in private concerning it. Secondly, this trade of importing slaves from their native country being much encouraged amongst them, and the white people and their children so generally living without much labor, was frequently the subject of my serious thoughts. I saw in these southern provinces so many vices and corruptions, increased by this trade and this way of life, that it appeared to me as a dark gloominess hanging over the land; and though now many willingly run into it, yet in future the consequence will be grievous to posterity. I express it as it hath appeared to me, not once, nor twice, but as a matter fixed on my mind.

Woolman's point is that a few living in too much ease on the backs of the miseries of others has a corrupting effect on the rich that makes them unhappy as well.

And this, which speaks to our condition of high unemployment today:

In my youth I was used to hard labor, and though I was middling healthy, yet my nature was not fitted to endure so much as many others. Being often weary, I was prepared to sympathize with those whose circumstances in life, as free men, required constant labor to answer the demands of their creditors, as well as with others under oppression. In the uneasiness of body which I have many times felt by too much labor, not as a forced but a voluntary oppression, I have often been excited to think on the original cause of that oppression which is imposed on many in the world. The latter part of the time wherein I labored on our plantation, my heart, through the fresh visitations of heavenly love, being often tender, and my leisure time being frequently spent in reading the life and doctrines of our blessed Redeemer, the account of the sufferings of martyrs, and the history of the first rise of our Society, a belief was gradually settled in my mind, that if such as had great estates generally lived in that humility and plainness which belong to a Christian life, and laid much easier rents and interests on their lands and moneys, and thus led the way to a right use of things, so great a number of people might be employed in things useful, that labor both for men and other creatures would need to be no more than an agreeable employ, and divers branches of business, which serve chiefly to please the natural inclinations of our minds, and which at present seem necessary to circulate that wealth which some gather, might, in this way of pure wisdom, be discontinued. As I have thus considered these things, a query at times hath arisen: Do I, in all my proceedings, keep to that use of things which is agreeable to universal righteousness? And then there hath some degree of sadness at times come over me, because I accustomed myself to some things which have occasioned more labor than I believe Divine wisdom intended for us.

Libraries

2010-09-27T07:38:00.000-07:00

This makes me very sad. Must we work librarians to death for profit? I love librarians. To me libraries are sanctuaries, places of calm and peace and good cheer ... and a Quakerly quiet, and librarians are the key to maintaining that atmosphere.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/business/27libraries.html?src=me&ref=homepage

But the bigger picture is perhaps the lack of imagination that allows us to be willing for librarians or any workers to be harried and rushed and overworked. People are already strained with commutes and bills and childcare, eldercare, the many complexities of navigating life these days, and perhaps every job doesn't need to be turned into a treadmill. I don't begrudge librarians or any other worker some time to gather their wits on the job or a moment to say a few kind words to a client. Are any of us going to be happy or at peace in a Gradgrind world of endless toil? Are libraries going to be come as crowded and unpleasant as airplanes have?

A second thought. People, according the article, still volunteer--more than ever--at these for-profit libraries. I am all for volunteering, truly I am, but I do wonder at volunteering where the money is padding the pockets of somebody who, apparently from what he said in the article, doesn't care about the worker. Especially in these times of high unemployment, I think we need to be careful not to do volunteering that takes jobs away from people. It might be better, as the paid librarians are going to be worked into the ground anyway, to challenge these libraries by not volunteering, so that the actual cost of labor is reflected in paid labor. But I struggle with this too, because work should be intrinsically about dignity more than pay, and volunteerism exemplifies that spirit. On the hand, I don't think librarians make all that much money that the owner of the for-profit library company couldn't pay a few more to do the work of the volunteers and make a profit that is real. What do you think?

On Burning the Quran

2010-09-11T06:55:00.002-07:00

I am glad the Quran burning has been called off.

Burning the Quran is a bad idea. It does not love the neighbor. It does not love the enemy. It is arrogant and rude, the opposite, Paul tells us, of what love is.

Also, it would be pointless. Should all the Qurans in the world be burnt, its words would live on in the heart of Muslims. Further, I can't imagine even one Muslim being moved to convert to Christianity because we destroyed their holiest text.

However, that being said, I am sorry for all the attention paid to this event. God is stronger than one angry man. Yet this proposed act diverted attention and energy from more pressing, systemic problems. For instance, workers at Dr. Pepper/Motts/Snapple plant in New York state are striking because the company, although profitable, wants to reduce their wages from an average of $18.50 an hour to $14.50. The company argues that the lower rate is what the other bottling plants in the area pay. That's a race to the bottom and a betrayal of the implicit promise that says the rising tide of business should raise all boats. I wish we would pay more attention to these issues. I wish business owners' hearts would be changed to feel compassion for the workers. Even my dear, beloved friends who I know disagree with me on this issue--I would love to know your thoughts as only through prayerful discussion can we come to best solutions.

Quakers and the age wars

2010-09-10T18:30:00.001-07:00

Micah Bales posted a blog at http://lambswar.blogspot.com/2010/09/bridging-generational-divide-in.html which made good points about the way Quakers (and other denominations) need to change to be relevant and attract membership. Like him, I agree that Quakerism needs to become less institutionally bound and more open to community (more missional) and transformational in order to attract new members. I too deplore that lack of younger Friends. However, I also regret the lack of Friends my age (late Boomers) and the lack of early Boomers and the lack of older-than-Boomer people who are alienated from Quakerism and other faith institutions for the same reasons as younger people.

Below is the comment I posted at Micah's blogsite, cleaned up but not polished, so I hope you will respond to raw thoughts. I also want to say that my comments in response to your comments keep disappearing into the ether, but I will continue to try to respond.

Micah,

I enjoyed and resonated with your post, which was thoughtful and held insights. We do need change, but perhaps need changed hearts, not changed generations.

Although I am statistically a late Boomer, like many of my cohort, I think like an emergent (in fact, the emerging church movement was started by disaffected Boomers), so I don't believe that a generational explanation is the best explanation for the lack of change, growth and vitality you see. It may be more that the people who seek--and hence get--fixed, institutional power with strong boundaries and privileges have a certain mindset that is identified as "WWII" and "Boomer" because these are the people who happen to have by this time worked themselves into the institutional power positions. In other words, certain ways of thinking aren't necessarily distinct to certain generations as much as they are distinct to certain people within generations.

Unfortunately, our society works to divide people along lines of color, ethnicity, political affiliation, etc., and age is another way increasingly used to pit people against one another, especially now that we have largely arbitrary labels for different age groups. Does someone born in 1963 (a "Boomer") has more in common with someone born in 1946 than someone born in 1969? I believe we need to be careful about not fostering divisions. I have noticed in my life that in any time period I have studied or lived through, the same attitudes crop up again and again. Dorothy Day, eg, who was born in 1897, in the 1930s held much the same attitudes as many Generation Yers do now. Luckily for her, the dark powers and marketing forces had not yet stamped a label on people born between say, 1888 and 1902 that marked them as different from anyone else. She was able to gather around her like minded people of all ages. And so must we.

I believe we are increasingly sliced and diced into generational groupings by powers that would like to pit us against one another. "Boomers" are pitted--unnecessarily-- against the generations that follow when it comes to programs like Social Security, as if we are not all in this together. Divided we fall. I believe the powers of darkness would love an intergenerational war between Quakers that would divert us from the larger and more important concerns of loving God and neighbor with all our hearts, minds and souls.

Dr. Pepper/Snapple workers still striking

2010-09-10T15:32:00.001-07:00

http://rwdsu.info/en/archives/9/rwdsu-accepts-us-secretary-labor-soliss-call-resume-negotiations-immediately-urges-mot

Sunflowers

2010-09-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

We have a beautiful field of sunflowers just beyond our front yard, along with rows of corn and squash. Roger took a picture of one of the sunflowers, which you can see here.

It's hard not to think of Van Gogh when viewing a field of sunflowers. (Can we equate Barnesville with Provence?)

I remember that Van Gogh started out to be a preacher, but when he gave all his money away and showed too much solidarity with the poor, he alarmed his evangelical superiors. Eventually, sadly, because he lived the Sermon on the Mount too literally, he broke with the church, and became an artist. Yet in becoming an artist, pouring himself into and out through that creation, he became a blessing to the world. So, in the sunflower, I see Van Gogh and God, human creation illuminating God's creation.

The weather has been beautiful and it has been easy to enjoy the hills, the orchards and the views around Barnesville. A few nights ago the sky was moonless and lit with thousands of stars. We could see the Milky Way clearly. These are the times I love living in the country, with the view of Olney Friends School across the lake, and I think of what a gift it is to the students to be around all of this nature.

Things Hidden in Plain Sight

2010-09-06T07:03:00.001-07:00

In an essay on a Vermeer painting,Woman Holding a Balance, literary critic and Bible commentator Mieke Bal moves us toward the navel.

She discusses the stillness of this painting, of a woman in blue and white standing before a window in front of a set of scales, and how, because it is so still, so serene, so fixed on a particular moment bathed in light, critics have seen the painting as descriptive rather than narrative, a still life rather than a story.

The painting shows an obviously pregnant woman standing with scales—weighing what?— her apparent assessing mirrored in the painting of the Last Judgment—another weighing of worth—hanging on the wall behind her. Critics have wondered at the meaning of these juxtaposed images. The woman’s unworthy judgment versus the judgment of Jesus?

Bal provides a new reading—the pregnant woman in blue, her head covered in a white veil, is the Virgin Mary. Bal also brings us to a nail hole, carefully painted and lit, in the wall above the woman’s head. Is this just Vermeer’s slavish adherence to creating versimilitude or does he want to draw attention to this nail hole?

Vermeer, Bal argues, wanted to reveal that he moved the Last Judgment painting. This movement disrupts the idea of the painting as still or merely descriptive—it points to a narrative, to a story, a sequence: Something changed, and that change is documented. The painting has a beginning, a middle and an end, but you have to study it carefully to see it.

Bal also interprets the nail hole as a navel. She repeats the traditional theory about text: the pen/brush is the phallus, the ink/paint is the semen, the page is the body/canvas on which the semen is spilled, resulting in creation, new life (form), the work of art, and the underlying message that creation corresponds to maleness. Text is masculine, text reveals. Derrida counters this image with that of the text as the hymen: something that conceals, something that repels and resists penetration, something that would hide its own meaning, something feminine. Bal, looking at Woman Holding a Balance and a Rembrandt nude, locates the symbol of the text in the figure of the navel, be it the navel on the nude or the “navel” as nail hole—the text as revealing what is hiding in plain sight. We never think about navels but they are always there, signifying the dependence of the male on the female.

Bal is being playful, but also, I think, offering profound insight into how often we miss what is in plain sight. Quakerism, in part, is a response to this: God will reveal to us what we need if we only stop and listen. Further, by not being attentive, we unthinkingly repeat what might be a mistake: I am thinking in this instance at a series of paintings of Eve, mostly from the Renaissance, that I looked at in conjunction with a class I am taking on women in the Old Testament. In almost all of these paintings, Eve is, first, presented as a sexual seductress, which is inconsistent with the text of Genesis, but also, depicted with a navel--which also, arguably is inconsistent with the Genesis account--she was not born of woman but created by God from dust or from Adam's side. Perhaps God did fashion her with a navel, but the point is, none of the painters seemed to have the least concern with this issue. Bal, in pointing us towards navels, points us towards attentiveness.

She also brings to mind the question: What else are we overlooking?

Cats and Caring

2010-08-30T09:58:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago my daughter brought home a stray kitten, which we dubbed Junior Cat, as he is a miniature version of our current cat, a gray tabby.

I was dismayed at this acquisition: With everyone in the family very busy, we can barely manage one cat. I was clutching my head over two cats.

However, since Barnesville is overpopulated with stray cats, I resigned myself to devising some sort of outdoor shelter for this cat when winter came, getting it neutered and feeding it forever after.

A happier ending came when our new Olney Spanish teacher, Hannah, saw the kitten and has adopted it! I am delighted. The kitten is very sweet and loves people, and needs a real home.

The lesson I draw from this is that responsibility--and hospitality--can be temporary and beneficial to all parties.

Dominance?

2010-08-25T06:05:00.001-07:00

The semester is ready to begin at Earlham School of Religion and I am again welcoming the combination of the intellectual, creative and spiritual that the school offers as I prepare for classes in Bible and Christian history, writing and spiritual formation. I have never attended a school quite like this and find the synergy exciting and energizing.

I have stumbled across the Dutch thinker Mieke Bal, who I vaguely remembered as an art history critic who wrote an essay I once read about Vermeer and the navel. She's also a specialist in narratology and has written a book about women in the Bible called Lethal Love. The book is old, dating to the late 1980s, I believe, but I am playing catch-up. Bal is "out there"--and I don't agree with her reading of the Adam and Eve story-- but it is precisely her challenge to everyday thinking that I find stimulating and provocative.

A quote from her chapter in Lethal Love on Eve speaks to my heart (and, as I realize she theorizes about "quotation," I recognize that I am re-contextualizing her):

The alternative readings I will propose should not be considered as yet another, superior interpretation that overthrows all the others. My goal is rather to show, by the sheer possibility of a different reading, that "dominance" is, although present and in many ways obnoxious, not unproblematically established. It is the challenge rather than the winning that interests me. For it is not the sexist interpretation of the Bible as such that bothers me. It is the possibility of dominance itself, the attractiveness of coherence and authority in culture, that I see as the source, rather than the consequence, of sexism.

What do you think? I love the idea of a space of equality and integrity, for the play of ideas without a "winner;" I fear the "too neat" package (why I am ever railing against formulations such as "religions are different paths up the same mountain"); I also fear (as do Bal, and Derrida, whom she is reacting to) a mindless chaos, an anything-goes individualism, a Tea partyism gone off the deep end.

Repentance

2010-08-21T15:58:00.000-07:00

A lovely--and apt--poem about repentance by Jon Karsemeyer. Unfortunately, I can't seem to hold his spacing ...

Birthday Cake/Chocolate Chips

Repentance means turning
from denial and error. If
you've tried it you know
it's a really really good idea.
If you never made a mistake
you may not know. Some
actually, too many!
believe that they could
not be mistaken.
I've tried that too.
... Sorry

Telling the Story

2010-08-14T18:46:00.001-07:00

Having just finished a two-week intensive at Earlham School of Religion in "Writing the Story"--in which I wrote a short story--I have been thinking about the importance of story. Of course, "everyone" for the past decade or so has been focused on narrative, because narratives contain nuance, irony, particularity and layers of meaning that can't be captured when one reduces their ideas to axioms, propositions or laws.

In our class, we read an anthology called Faith Stories, edited by C. Michael Curtis, which contained, with a few exceptions, a rich array of short fiction.

I wonder why it is that in this particular cultural moment we are so focused on the story. I'm delighted about it, because story cuts across political and religious divides. It's not left wing or right wing and is embraced by both religious conservatives and religious liberals. It seems to me a way we could, possibly, cross divides and possibly start coming together again as a culture. And it seems a safe way to examine our flaws.

I am interested, however, in why the story now?

Women's Work?

2010-08-11T20:24:00.000-07:00

I wanted to highlight what Hystery wrote on another blog:

I see how access to money and gender are so often linked. In natural disasters, women are more likely to die because they are more likely to stay behind or be slowed down in their attempts to save children, elders, and the disabled. Even today, women often find themselves in this caregiver role. Those women (and men) who are in this role become like Martha in the kitchen while Mary and the disciples spend time with Jesus.

Like Martha, she may feel separated from the spiritual work of the meeting by her own and other Friends' conscious and unconscious expectations of her role as a woman as caregiver, cleaner, cooker, and fusser over others' physical well-being. These issues become more complex when we add social class. A poor woman cannot afford to bring her loved ones with her nor can she afford to leave them at home. I see how access to money and gender are so often linked.

My personality is rather more of the "Mary" rather than the "Martha" variety so I noted the difference in how I was treated when I became a mother. I noted that my husband, although he is actually more willing than I am, was rarely expected to look after children or leave a discussion to engage in cleaning up or setting tables, or whatnot. Suddenly I was "Martha" and I didn't like it at all. I can recall my mother's reaction to that biblical story. "If Jesus and the disciples got up and helped Martha with the meal, then they all could have talked together!" lol

Friends could use a little CR.

I too often felt--especially when I had young children--that I was expected to fill the Martha role. I remember once being at meeting for business--held at night--where the babysitter did not show up. Of thirteen of us, two had children. Only one of the 11 who did not have children would help with childcare. While I knew that my children where nobody else's responsibility, I still can't get over that only one person would offer to help. As I have gotten older, I have continued to notice that women do take on more of the hospitality and nurturing roles in meetings I've been part of. I would especially like to see men take on more of the nurturing roles.

Quakers and the War Disconnect

2010-08-03T05:29:00.000-07:00

On July 4, our family went to an Independence Day party at a lovely home on a lake. Part of the evening entertainment was a fireworks display.

My almost 16-year-old twins helped unwrap the hundreds of fireworks, but when they were asked to light them with a blowtorch, I thought this was much too dangerous, as did the one twin who shook his head at me vigorously to say no. Luckily, the boys were able to back out graciously.

My twins likely would have come to no harm, but my mother's heart was nevertheless still having palpitations when another, older male began lighting firework wicks with the blowtorch. Much of my thinking involved comparisons between the laws in freewheeling Ohio and safety-obsessed Maryland. You can't have these kinds of fireworks in Maryland! What are they thinking in Ohio? And people in Maryland have to wear helmets on their motorcycles! In Ohio, you see people all the time on motorcycles with nothing protecting their heads but bandanas! It's harder for a teenager to get a driver's license in Maryland than in Ohio! And what about car seat laws! (I actually know nothing about them in Ohio, but in my mind's eye they're much more stringent in Maryland.)

Ohio is a wonderful state, but I was filled with the jitters just thinking about my almost 16 year-olds in conjunction with a blowtorch.

The realization struck me that in two years, when they turn 18, they could legally enlist in the army and be put in danger so acute that lighting fireworks with a blowtorch would seem like the child's play it isn't to me. I felt overcome with fear. I had to sit down on the lovely lawn sloping to the lake, where the fireworks were bursting overhead in arrays of stars and colors.

I think I was seeing stars. How can we live with this cultural disconnect, I wondered? How can we have so many laws to protect our children in minute ways and then, the minute they turn 18, be "OK" with sending them into horribly dangerous war zones halfway around the world? My sons, because they aren't quite 16, can't use a lawnmower in their summer jobs with the state, because it's not safe, but in two years and two months could be sent to Iraq (of course, we are supposed to be out of Iraq in a month) or Afghanistan, where they could be blown up at any moment? Could be allowed to wield machine guns and rocket launchers? Not to mention the fact that they would be killing other humans. How do we tolerate this?

In Maryland, new public playground swings have to be suspended from T's, so the children can't trip over the inverted V's that used to form swingset supports. Children are in booster seats in cars until age 8 now, I believe. Let your seven and ten month old child come home from school unattended for 10 minutes and you can be arrested for child neglect. A 17-year-old in Maryland can't drive a car past a curfew. I support these laws but how do we square this almost choking, compulsive concern with safeguarding our children with our total willingness, after age 18, to throw them into the worst kinds of danger?

How, as Quakers, are we not protesting the wars more than we are?

When I lived in Maryland, and we went to Baltimore or Washington and we had occasion to drive through the poorer parts of those cities, I would often notice children playing on playing on basketball courts amid broken glass or young children squatting in trash-filled gutters by the sidewalks in front of their houses. There was nowhere else to play. On hot summer days, when the doors to the old Baltimore rowhouses in the slum neighborhoods were opened (I know we don't use the word slum anymore, but I'm using it deliberately) I would see into houses with holes punched through the walls, rat-gnawed doors, missing railings up the stairs, dangling cords, sofas losing their stuffings ... taking a gander, I would imagine these "homes" would not pass standard safety inspections. I would also imagine that the children I saw milling around the streets lived in these houses ... and we middle-class people, who are so worried about every hair on the head of our own darlings, seem to tolerate this. I understand too that the military recruiters come to the poorer neighborhoods.

I struggle with the draft. The last thing I want is a draft, not with children of 19 and almost 16. Yet were there a draft, would we be in these wars? Would we allow our middle-class darlings to go? I think not. I know that were a draft to begin, ending the wars would be a front and center concern in my life. Now .. oh well, it's not really my problem because "my" children--at least in my illusions--are "safe." Of course, I'm "against" the wars in theory, though let me hasten to say, like everyone else, I support our troops. But do I do anything to support them, by say, working to end the wars in any urgent way? No.

To have two classes of children: those whose every hair is micro-protected with compulsive care and those who, from earliest youth, must take their chances, violates my understanding of Christianity. Didn't Jesus say that everyone who followed him was his brother, sister, mother, father, child? Aren't "those" children "my" children? Quakerism is a second layer, reinforcing the radical overthrow of hierarchy inherent in ancient Christianity. Where, I wonder, is our equality testimony? How do we live with these contradictions? And I ask that question of myself more than anyone else because I am first in line for apathy.

What should we do?

Peace, peace

2010-08-02T07:01:00.000-07:00

"God promises peace peace (literal translation of the Hebrew) to those whose minds are stayed on him, as they trust in him (Isaiah 26:3). And a peace from him that passes our understanding, as we entrust ourselves to him in prayer and thanksgiving (Philippians 4:6-7).

Peace in scripture fundamentally has to do with the well being of all creation occurring through the new creation in Jesus. It begins in this old creation, groaning as it is impacted by the fall. Beginning in and through us in Jesus. But in this already/not yet present, this peace will ebb and flow, it will come and go. But the deeper and truer we give ourselves to God by faith through Jesus, the richer this experience of peace as in well being, and inward tranquility, will become."

The above is from my cyber-friend Ted Gossard's blog at http://communityofjesus.wordpress.com. I love the idea of peace in Isaiah actually being "peace peace," a doubling or deepening of the concept of peace, not just a superficial peace, but that deep peace which permeates the soul. I also agree strongly with Ted that peace in scripture has to do with well-being of all creation ...

Fragments

2010-07-31T06:07:00.000-07:00

There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
Anaïs Nin

I feel a weariness with arguments, about universalism versus Christianity or being Christian versus Pagan. All we need to do or are asked to do is love one another. A truism. But true.

And yet--I get pulled into the arguments. And I want to say, that language matters. Language--in the great discovery of 20th century philosophy, building on Nietzsche--is not a clear window pane into reality. Language is tainted. The early Quakers knew this. Women and minorities know this. Anybody who has been damaged by the culture knows this. So when people say, oh the God stuff, it's just the different words for the same concepts ... the words themselves are the concepts, we're caught in the prisonhouse of language, and context changes concept, and there's always context, always baggage, and if the words really don't matter, why don't we all use the Christocentric language of our culture?

i feel like telling you everything
talking until my words aren't a part of me anymore
they are part of the air
and suddenly they are not my problem
and i am free

So maybe that's why I'm "just saying." (These quotes come from a blog called paperdollblewsaway.)

Last weekend, Roger and I went to Toronto. We stayed Jaya's apartment. We visited an art museum, ate Thai Food (thanks to Jaya's parents), shopped in bookstores, went to an island where it rained and sat under umbrellas at sidewalk cafes.

In the meantime, a stray dog and a stray kitten have shown up at our house: Larry and Junior. Larry was a kind old hound dog who followed us home one day. Then he followed us around the lake, to the campus proper, hung out for awhile, possibly understood people were talking about the "pound," and wandered off again. Or maybe he's simply a wandering hobo of dog and it was time to hit the road again.

Sophie brought home the stray tabby kitten, who, we were told, would be put to sleep by the shelter should we take it there. Too many cats in the world. Junior, who is a minature version of our gray tabby, Andre (hence the name junior) is so quivering with the very life force of the universe, so full of intensity and joy, that we can't imagine the death sentence. We also can't keep him. Right now, he's living outisde--and before long, we'll have to figure out what to do. It is coincidence that these animals keep all of a sudden wandering into our lives?

Tomorrow I leave for a writing class Earlham School of Religion.

I will try to stay in touch.

God's Initiatives

2010-07-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

"Now the Lord said to Abram: 'Get out of your country, From your family and from your father's house, to a land I will show you..'" Genesis 12:1

"The most dramatic changes in your life will come from God's initiative, not yours. The people God used mightily in Scripture were all ordinary people to whom he gave Divine assignments that they could never have initiated. The Lord often took them by surprise ..."

From Experiencing God Day-by-Day: Devotional, by Henry and Richard Blackaby

"All religions are the same"

2010-07-17T07:02:00.000-07:00

I find Max Carter to be an excellent writer who, in his "On Faith" essay (http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/max_carter/2010/07/are_all_religions_the_same.html?referrer=emaillink) paints an appealing vision in which we all, whatever our religious backgrounds, are equally members of God's family, with God as father and mother, sharing the same DNA. Yes, I agree that we are all children of God, vessels made in the image of God, eikons of God, and I understand Max's emphasis on our commonalities.

However, I think the question Prothero is raising is not "Do we have the same spiritual DNA as humans?" but ,"Do all religions share the same spiritual DNA?" So I believe Carter is answering a different question.

I also see Carter putting himself in the God position rather than human position: He writes:

"Are all religions the same? Of course not. Nor are my three biological children [note the slide from religious institutions to individual children], even though they came from the same parents. While sharing many common characteristics, our two daughters and one son are as different as can be in many respects - religiously, politically, vocationally, temperamentally.
But my wife and I focus on our deep love of each, irrespective of those differences. We love no one of them more than the other; favor no one of them more than the other. We recognize the biological similarities, their common interests in living meaningful lives, their desire to be loving partners, and their devotion and love for us as parents. They have the same hopes and fears that any human beings have: anxiety about job security, health, their children's lives, the future....
I think of the world's religions in much the same way. "

In this analogy, Max puts himself in the parent/God position, looking down from above on his children/the world's religions. But we humans are not in the God position--we are not standing above the table of religion, looking down. As humans, we are at the table, constrained by time and place, looking across. And maybe because of that, our vision isn't so clear.

Thus, while I believe one can be a hyphenated universalist (and I am, in the traditional 17th century Quaker sense, a Christian-universalist), I think it is difficult to be a stand-alone Universalist, because, whether you mean to or not, that can easily slide into the false-for-a-human God position: "Yes, I am the parent and I love all religions equally. I am above the fray." But we are not. We are the fray.

At the end of his essay, Carter slides back into the "child" position. We can all be brothers and sisters, fighting and yes laughing, at the same picnic. It's a lovely picture, but I would argue we can't have it both ways: we can't be both parents and siblings.

I am passionate and perhaps a bit cranky about this subject, but I believe--along with people such as Marcus Borg--that we need to pick a faith and embrace it tightly, dig deeply into it, and acknowledge its humanity, including its deep flaws. We need to try to correct our faith's problems, but we can't do that if we don't have a faith. Further, we can't be "above" all faiths and then call our interfaith partners "brothers and sisters." We can't treat them with full respect as equals if we take the stance that we are the parents and they are the children. Or so I think.

Universalism: What do you think?

2010-07-16T11:39:00.001-07:00

I'm interested in response to the piece below by Max Carter that ran in the WaPost at http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/max_carter/2010/07/are_all_religions_the_same.html?referrer=emaillinkthat addresses Steve Prothero ... (Hat Tip to Tom Smith for emailing me this link)

and to the two other pieces below (HT to Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog at Beliefnet).

The third is a response to Max. The one sandwiched in between is a statement of Christian Universalism that seems to me close to the traditional Quaker position. This is more than I usually put in one blog, but not all that long.

Religions are siblings but not twins
by Max Carter
Q: Are all religions the same? The Dalai Lama, who just celebrated his 75th birthday, often refers to the 'oneness' of all religions, the idea that all religions preach the same message of love, tolerance and compassion. Historians Karen Armstrong and Huston Smith agree that major faiths are more alike than not. But in his new book "God is not One," religion scholar and On Faith panelist Steve Prothero says views by the Dalai Lama, Armstrong and Smith that all religions "are different paths to the same God" is untrue, disrespectful and dangerous. Who's right? Why?
Are all religions the same? Of course not. Nor are my three biological children, even though they came from the same parents. While sharing many common characteristics, our two daughters and one son are as different as can be in many respects - religiously, politically, vocationally, temperamentally.
But my wife and I focus on our deep love of each, irrespective of those differences. We love no one of them more than the other; favor no one of them more than the other. We recognize the biological similarities, their common interests in living meaningful lives, their desire to be loving partners, and their devotion and love for us as parents. They have the same hopes and fears that any human beings have: anxiety about job security, health, their children's lives, the future....
I think of the world's religions in much the same way. Products of human beings who are biologically descended from the same "parents" yet subjected to different cultural forces and even the whims of those "parents" at any given time, religions develop differently in response to those differences.
Yes, there are many similarities in the world's religions. As I developed a curriculum on world religion for a Quaker school in Palestine recently, I was struck by how many common elements each of the eight major traditions I included have. All religions have to deal with life and death, hope and desire, fear and the need for acceptance. And each has come up with a system to offer meaning to humanity in a world that ultimately kills us. The elements of that system are very different in many respects. Codes of ethics are often very different.
But as brothers and sisters, offspring of the same "parent," we can find common cause, celebrate the richness of each other's discoveries of meaning, share in each other's quest for more Light. Will there be family fights? Of course. Can there be reconciliation and a fun time at the family picnic? Yes.

Read more: http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2010/07/religious-colonialism-4.html#comments#ixzz0ts8MdbNp

Piece number two

http://zoomtard.furiousthinking.org/2010/07/14/i-am-a-universalist/
I Am A Universalist
12 Comments Published July 14th, 2010 in Uncategorized.
Reading Gutierrez’ “A Theology of Liberation” last week I realised that the best word to describe my view of the Christian Gospel is universalist. I believe in the universality of salvation.

Now, before you swipe my “Bible believing evangelical” credentials (or leper bells depending on your view) from me, let me assure that I still think that Jesus was telling the truth when he said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.” I think salvation only happens through faith in Christ.

But the quantitative universal question (who is in, who is out and how many people are saved which is typically how the word universalist is used) is not nearly as interesting to me as the qualitative universal question. I do not know if all will be saved and I am not certain that when 1 Peter says that Jesus went to preach to the captives in hell that this indicates that all humans ever conceived will be redeemed.

But I am certain that the whole testimony of the Bible proclaims that the restored union with God that is the “hope of the Gospel” goes far beyond simply gaining entry to heaven. I think it has universal consequences for the individual, for the community and well, for the universe. If it is true that through the forgiveness of sins the Christian has the primary relationship of their life restored to them, that is, union with God, then that must utterly transform how they approach every other relationship and interaction.

The way that I have understood this in the past is that the Gospel exerts a four-fold reconciliation. At the heart of my being I have been reconciled through Christ, in-dwelt by the Spirit and adopted by God.

This security is the basis for my second reconciliation, the internal one to myself. If the Creator of the Universe sees me as wholly holy and blameless then I must be willing to share grace with myself and accept and forgive myself.

Off the basis of this peace within myself over who I am, I am charged up for the third wave of reconciliation with the Other, the neighbour, any other human being I encounter. As someone at peace with myself and secure in God’s identity for me I ought to be able to embrace even the most tiring and draining of people, say rugby fans, with a new found ability to repent (healing old relationships) and embrace (building new relationships).

Then the fourth-fold reconciliation comes to bear as a community of people who have enjoyed the benefits of reconciliation with God, peace with themselves, renewed relationship with each other, take this new Creation energy and let it loose on the Cosmos. Whether in the ecclesial, political, economic, cultural or ecological environment, the reconciliation of God expresses itself here in regenerative action. As Tom Wright might say, we live in the now shaped by the sure and certain knowledge of God’s certain future. We join in with what God is about.

But the extent of that transformation was always limited for me. In each of those four quadrants I think that the Gospel extends universally, which may even mean infinitely. There is always more internal healing and peace-making to be done and the Gospel is always relevant. There is always more repenting with your neighbours to be done and the Gospel is the only way we can do that. There is always more re-creation to be enjoyed in the wider world and the Gospel sets us up for that in a way that transcends and perfects both hedonism and conservationism. Underwriting all this activity is of course our primary conversion – being captured more fully by the beauty of God.

So I may be warping Gutierrez entirely in this interpretation, warping or perhaps correcting (!) but there is much to dwell on in what he has to say:

Salvation – the communion of men with God and the communion of men among themselves – is something which embraces all human reality, transforms it, and leads it to its fullness in Christ: “Thus the centre of God’s salvific design is Jesus Christ, who by his death and resurrection transforms the universe and makes it possible for man to reach fulfillment as a human being. This fulfillment embraces every aspect of humanity: body and spirit, individual and society, person and cosmos, time and eternity. Christ, the image of the Father and the perfect God-Man, takes on all the dimensions of human existence.”

(The text he quotes is from the 1968 declaration of the Latin American bishops at Medellín)

Piece number three http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/john_mark_reynolds/2010/07/pressing_beyond_niceness.html

Nobody has religion totally right, but some errors are more serious than others.

People are all similar. Reality does not change from person to person, but the interpretation of reality can be different. Nobody should be so "nice" they end up insulting other faiths by refusing to admit they make truth claims that cannot be sustained.

If one religion says that it is good for people to be poor and another that it is evil, then both cannot be right. The law of non-contradiction does not stop at the church door.

Just because a religion, or religious person, gets something wrong does not mean it gets everything wrong. Old and tested ideas, like all the great world religions, must get more right than wrong in order to have survived the hardest test of all: time.

Most great religions are mostly right, but "mostly" is not good enough. Making an error in physics, even a small one, can be fatal to the body. Making a metaphysical error, even a tiny one, can be fatal to the soul.

Christianity proves to be the best explanation for the world as it is: both the metaphysical and the physical. Some religions downplay the importance of nature and others downplay the importance of the spiritual reality. Both are too simple to explain a cosmos full of matter, energy, and personality. Mind does not come from matter and matter does not come from mind.

Christianity, with Judaism and Islam, gets this balance right, but Christianity also has an explanation for the life of Jesus. Jesus, so great nobody can ignore Him, stands at the center of history. His empty tomb demands explanation and His wisdom compels respect. Who is Jesus? Only Christianity adequately explains His marvelous life.

Christianity also built marvelous cultures. It can inspire Bach to his great Mass in B Minor and Newton to his science. It has built great churches in Ethiopia, hospitals in India, and colleges in Idaho. Every inquisitor inspired a Dostoevsky, bad bishop a Saint Francis, fundamentalist a Thomas Aquinas.

Christianity, though not always Christians, has been good, true, and beautiful. To the extent that any religion does not acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus it has gotten something dramatically wrong. It is not explaining all the data.

Or so it seems to me.

Metaphysical reality is, however, not different from person to person, so mature faiths tend to agree on many "big ideas." Love just is greater than hate. Libertine sexual values have never built a culture, but have destroyed many. Judaism and Islam particularly deserve our respect. Christianity owes its existence to Judaism and has learned much from Muslims. Both can sustain both science and high culture.

I have gained great insight into my life from other religions and from people who disagree with me. Even if Christianity is true, it does not contain all truths and many Christians have misunderstood the truths it contains. Any reasonable believer would also admit that he might be totally wrong and open-minded to other possibilities.

Studying the works of other Christian traditions or other faiths is never a waste of time. I have always learned something or enriched my own faith in the process. For example, I spent a profitable year studying the Book of Mormon. At the end, I did not think the Book of Mormon was the Word of God, but I did think it a work of literary genius. It was often compatible with my beliefs, it got much right, but the differences were important and real. The claims of traditional Christianity and Mormonism could not both be true. Reading it stretched me mentally and, even though I came to reject the truth of its unique religious claims, the sheer act of carefully reading Mormon apologists was good for me.

Faith is wonderful, because it allows you to wonder! You commit yourself to your faith and then you see.

There is only one group that does not deserve our respect: the extremist wrapped in certainty. From the jihadist to the Dawkensian atheist, a certain personality type is sure about the big questions. Their opposites are all fools or cads and they can dismiss every different religious point of view as wrong, obviously wrong.

These people lack faith, because all they have is certainty. Certainty leads to a loss of wonder, because there comes to be nothing to wonder about. Those atheists, theists, Christians, Jews, Hindus, or any other philosophical tradition that commit themselves, but are still wondering about things, deserve our respect and attention.

The journey to see the Good is long, but even if it lasted a thousand years I am convinced that if we are motivated by love and pursue it, then we will see Him at last clearly. Lord how I want to be in that number!

Least of These

2010-07-10T10:27:00.000-07:00

Having just read C. Wess Daniel's blog on John Woolman (there's a link through Quakerquaker below and to the right on this blog), I wonder if we can tie our Quaker witness to the following, which appeared in today's New York Times. Bob Herbert writes:

"Listen to the soft-spoken new president of the U.A.W., Bob King.

“My view of the labor movement today,” he said in an interview, “is that we got too focused on our contracts and our own membership and forgot that the only way, ultimately, that we protect our members and workers in general is by fighting for justice for everybody.”

The fundamental issue is that “every human being deserves dignity and a decent standard of living,” he said, “and the whole point of the labor movement is to help make that happen.”

In Mr. King’s view, the fight to organize workers and improve their wages and benefits is important, but it’s part of a much broader effort to improve the lives of individuals and families throughout the country and beyond. He is a believer in cooperative efforts and shared sacrifice, and is unabashedly idealistic as he outlines what can only be described as a new activism on labor’s part.

He promised his members last month that the U.A.W. would be marching and campaigning and organizing — for jobs, for a moratorium on home foreclosures, for civil and human rights and against the mistreatment of immigrants, and for peace."

I find myself responding to this unabashed idealism and a vision that is not narrowly "unionistic" but wants to make life better for everyone. What do you think?

Is it scary?

2010-07-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

How do we get into dialogue with people like the following, named "Sky Blue," who made the following comment on a Jesus Creed thread about the topic of closing down public libraries:

Unfortunately, public education, as much as we love it and as much as it benefits our society, is socialism and so should have no place in our structure.

(Read more: http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2010/07/do-we-need-libraries_comments.html#post#ixzz0t2i3LZFB.)

I would love to understand where he/she is coming from.

My feeling is, if public libraries and publicly funded education represent "socialism," sign me up for (Christian) socialism. I have trouble envisioning living in a society with no public sector and wonder what people are thinking. I really do. Can anyone help me understand this? Should I be as frightened of this mindset as I am?

I'm thinking much lately about how to structure a discourse in a way such that institutions can be publicly funded and yet not labeled "socialist." Is it possible to frame a positive conversation about public sector?

Strawberry Parable

2010-07-09T06:05:00.001-07:00

"A man was wandering in the wilderness when a tiger appeared and began to chase him. Panicked, he fled to the edge of a cliff with the ferocious beast on his heels. Spotting a thorny vine rooted on the rock, he swung himself down over the chasm.

Above, the tiger howled and pawed at the rock; below, he saw the gaping jaws of a second tiger. Suddenly, a white mouse and a black mouse appeared and began to gnaw at the vine, but the man did not notice. He had found a plump, red strawberry growing on the face of the cliff. Holding onto the vine with one hand, he plucked the fruit with the other and popped it into his dry mouth. How sweet it was!

Is this story, which appears in the book Fishing for the moon and other Zen stories, by Lulu Hansen, which my friend Alice gave me as a birthday present, another version of "sufficient for today are the evils of today?"

Is it about "mindfulness" or about how life is so terrible that all we can do is eat a strawberry before we ourselves are consumed? What IS it about?

Quakers and Univeralism

2010-07-08T03:43:00.001-07:00

I have been saying this for years but Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed said it succinctly and well in reviewing a new book by Stephen Prothero.

A pastor once said to me that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam believe in the same God but just worship him differently. I said two things back: (1) Not true, for no Jew or Muslim believes in or worships God as Trinity, and (2) just try getting an ordinary Christian, Jew or Muslim to say they think that we all have the same God.

I have believed for a long time that touchstones are to be used but the only honest way to dialogue about our faiths is to tell the truth about our faith and tell the truth of what we think of the other faith, and then to listen to the other person say the same to us and of our faith. With love from first to last, but with the truth of love and love for the truth. The worst thing we can do is to pretend we are all really saying the same thing.

But the pastor's comment is common and widespread. For instance, Swami Sivananda said, "The fundamentals or essentials of all religions are the same. There is difference only in the non-essentials." To which Stephen Prothero, author of God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter , says both bitingly and truthfully: "This is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectul, and untrue."

I see this sentiment to which Prothero addresses himself in his new book to be a religious colonialism. It is a way of incorporating the beliefs of another into what one person believes and clarifying, for the truly enlightened, that after all these religions are all variations on a theme. Once you get the theme, and one must be exceedingly broad-minded to grasp it, you can see that we differ only on particularities. Prothero's book is designed to rebut the whole approach of religious colonialism. Here are a few of his opening statements:
He calls this religious colonialism "naive theological groupthink -- call it Godthink" (3).

"God is not one. Faith in the unity of religions is just that -- faith." It's "an act of the hyperactive imagination."

Karl Rahner once spoke of others in other religions as being anonymous Christians. Hans Kung answered back: "It would be impossible to find anywhere in the world a sincere Jew, Muslim or atheist who not regard the assertion that he is an 'anonymous Christian' as presumptuous."

Yes, Prothero says, the world's religions share one thing: they all believe there is a problem or something's wrong. But from that point on they differ, and often dramatically. The solutions show how much they differ. They are not all climbing the same mountain but they are on different mountains.

Read more: http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2010/07/religious-colonialism-1.html#ixzz0t5PveqJS

I'd don't know how many times I've heard Universalist Friends say "All religions are the same." To my mind, this is modernist thought that arises from the same Enlightenment impulse that led botanists to classify plants into categories. There's nothing wrong with the Enlightenment, but we have seen its limitations and are in a period of paradigm shift. Also, as more than one postmodern thinker has pointed out, our understanding of "comparative religions" is heavily influenced by the worldview of those mid-twentieth century scholars who wrote the textbooks: primarily white Protestant males from elite East Coast college and OxCam backgrounds: not precisely a broad spectrum. What they give us, some have argued, is a distorted understanding of world religions to begin with.

I'm glad more and more people are challenging the truism that "all religions are the same." As both a Quaker and a religion reporter I chose to bite my tongue more than once when an older white male leaned over to me and said, as if revealing the secret of the ages: "Buddha and Jesus believed the same things" or "all religions are the same." After hearing the "revelation" about 50 times, I found myself having to suppress sarcasm: "Wow! Is that so? I never thought of THAT!" I've often wondered how otherwise intelligent people have gotten stuck on that groove or morphed the idea that some religions share some common tenets into a history-denying and specificity-erasing truth claim all faiths are the same.

It troubles me that so many liberal Quakers hold unreflectively to the "all the religions are the same" falsehood. The same people who deride the Christians who say with conviction "Jesus Christ is my personal savior" will in the next breath say with the same conviction that all religions are different paths up the same mountain--and if you disagree, will judge you with all the scorn of the fundalmentalist Christian towards the unsaved.

Is it "colonialism" to say that all religions are the same? Are Jews--fewer than .02% of the world's religious population--wrong to be worried about being subsumed or erased under thinking that throws us all into a common melting pot? Is a universalist worldview "dangerous?" Why or why not? Why are some Quakers so bent on this universalist worldview? Is there a way forward?

Heat

2010-07-07T15:42:00.001-07:00

It's so hot I can't think straight, and yet here in Ohio we're "merely" in the 90s, 10 degrees cooler than the record-breaking East coast. The East has gotten hit hard this year, between the heavy snow in the winter and the current heat wave.

As I mentioned on Facebook, we live in a campus house at Olney Friends School, which, like all the other campus houses (unless somebody is holding out on me!) has no central air. Even the Main Building, home to the administrative offices, lacks air, unless you count those rotating fans like flowers on stems. It's truly "green" living here.

It's also a touch of how people lived 50 years ago, and of how I grew up as a child in hot, humid suburban Baltimore. I do remember feeding a big square "air conditioner" ice cubes that would melt and blow out as cold air. We could hardly feed the ice fast enough, and it always ran out too soon, even when we bought bags of it at the local store.

So, although I still want to --and hope to--comment on the comments on the Russian mathematician who turned down the million dollars, my brain, hooked to a body soggy with heat, isn't functioning at that "deeper" level.

The heat is roosting in our house, despite ceiling fans, lots of windows (cross ventilation) and our "prospect" atop a hill (usually, that means breezes). Pre-air-conditioning architecture can only do so much. At Ohio University, where I'm teaching, the school shut off the air all through the long weekend and the classrooms are still warm. I comfort myself that the school is saving taxpayer dollars, as well as the environment, but it's difficult, in mid-afternoon, to teach in a sauna-like environment. Yesterday, we went outside to a picnic table under a tree, where we benefited from a breeze. Today, at the end of class, we moved to the basement vending machine room, which was cool, but lacked a blackboard.

I'm accepting all of this as participating in God's planned rhythm of nature, even if climate change is entering the mix. Yes, I am moving at a slow crawl and trying not to be anxious about all the things I need to get done, and yes, I wish I dared to shave my head to get rid of what currently seems a very thick head of hair bearing down like a wool hat and muffler on my head and neck, but I am taking all of this as meant to be a natural slowing in the cycle of life. Maybe it's good just to turn down the human engines for a few days.

On the other hand, from what I've read in the Baltimore Sun, when this weather hit in the pre-central air days, offices and houses would close as people headed en masse for the beach or the mountains--or at least an outdoor "bed" by a local lake. Perhaps, as we wean from fossil fuels, that's the model we should be looking to.

Or perhaps we should all be heading to another old-fashioned institution: the public library.

Ban Libraries?

2010-07-05T16:03:00.000-07:00

FOX news floated the idea of getting rid of libraries: here is a
beautiful post--a piece of poetry, imho--on the value of libraries: http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2010/02/twelve-theses-on-libraries-and.html.

Wise or Foolish?

2010-07-02T06:35:00.000-07:00

I read this in the New York Times:

Three months ago, a famously impoverished Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman was awarded the prestigious $1 million Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize for his groundbreaking work -- having solved a problem of three-dimensional geometry that had resisted scores of brilliant mathematicians since 1904.

Thursday, the institute announced that Perelman, known equally for his brilliance and his eccentricities, formally and finally turned down the award and the money. He didn't deserve it, he told a Russian news service, because he was following a mathematical path set by another.

The president of the Clay Institute, James Carlson, said that Perelman was a mathematician of "extraordinary power and creativity" and that it was he alone who solved the intractable Poincaré's conjecture. "All mathematicians follow the work of others, but only a handful make breakthroughs of this magnitude," Carlson said.

I'm awed by this man's integrity, in part because I would be hard put to refuse $1 million.

What do you think? Foolish or wise?

And yet, if more people behaved this way in disdaining money ... what a wonderful world it would be. Or would it? Does it expose as a lie that the only incentive for people to achieve is material? Or is this guy to be dismissed as an eccentric?

cell phone idea?

2010-07-02T04:33:00.000-07:00

We are getting frustrated trying to renew our AT&T cell phone service. We'd like to keep the basic plans we have had. AT&T makes it very difficult to renew without buying extra services. All of our phones broke at the same time right at the end of the contract (I'd think conspiracy but I don't think AT&T has the technical know-how to so well fine-tune it's strategy.) Right now we have no phones. To make a long story short, it has entered my mind that we could sign up with a socially responsible cell phone service company.

Any suggestions?

Solitude

2010-06-25T09:17:00.002-07:00

"But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray." Luke 5:16

I came home from the beach early to begin teaching Freshman Comp, and realized I have spent probably more time alone these past six months than in the past 25 years. It's been a fruitful solitude, and Barnesville, where I am sojourning by myself at the moment, hardly fits the description of a desolate place-- it's bursting with all the fecundity caused by a rainy spring, including my abundant raspberry patch--but I am here alone.

I do miss Roger and my kids--and that's a good thing. It's a good thing when you can say you miss your teenage children and mean it!

This past semester at ESR, I was also in solitude often, as I rented a small apartment near campus and stayed there midweek to attend classes. Often, it was so bitingly cold that I hurried home to be in the warmth and do my reading. As spring came, I made friends, for which I am glad, but often was still alone with my work.

I realize my time in Richmond at ESR was a joyful, rich solitude, and quickly understood that my deliberately austere apartment was my version of Thoreau's cabin, a place stripped down to the essentials where I could "front" life. The solitude was creative and clarifying, though I would miss Roger terribly at times.

My children being gone--either to college or boarding at Olney--has created much of this solitude. While I was glad the boys could board at the school last year, I also wonder if we should have kept them home another year. I developed a pattern of stopping at Sophie's college town en route to Richmond so we could have lunch together weekly, which was a good way to keep in touch.

I know people have different tolerances for solitude. I am glad Jesus went off by himself to commune with God and refuel. I wonder how other people deal with solitude and whether they find it helpful or not.

Today

2010-06-21T05:38:00.000-07:00

Right now, I am in a brief period--a few of hours--of transition between a week at the beach and beginning teaching my summer English class at Ohio University. The vacation-- at Chincoteague--was glorious in terms of weather, and it was a rare opportunity for family time with all of us together. I loved the marshes, the cry of the seagulls, the brackish smell, the unspoiled beach.

I look forward, however, to beginning teaching. My class numbers only six and that marks a wonderful opportunity for workshopping and individualized learning. I also redid what had become the weaker parts of the class and feel excited about trying some new ideas. On this longest day of the year I feel both stretched and centered, whatever that means.

"Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation." Habbukuk 3:18

How are you?

Quaker Education

2010-06-13T16:17:00.001-07:00

Note: I started writing this before Jeremy's comment, which I will refer to later ...

When I was an education reporter, I covered home-schooling from time to time and couldn't help but notice that many home school parents wanted to do more than teach their children "at home" all the time. Many homeschool parents networked to provide enrichment for their children and a whole industry had arisen around providing classes to homeschooled children during regular school hours. For example, I did one story on a women who had made almost a full-time job out of offering Latin I through IV to homeschooled high schoolers--classes that enrolled anywhere from eight to 16 teens.

I realized that many homeschool parents were not rejecting the classroom model per se, but the constraints and problems of public and private education. Some homeschool mothers I interviewed would have liked a private school for their children, but either had too many children to afford it or too little income. Others homeschool parents tried private schools but found they mirrored too much of what they didn't like in public schools, such as discouraging substantive parental involvement or dismissing parent concerns or not teaching phonics. In other words, at least some homeschooling parents would have been glad to place their children in a school, could they have found an affordable school that lived up to their expectations.

At one point, I covered a homeschooler's "school," and I can't shake it from my mind. This school was parent run, started by two women who wanted more for their children then the loose homeschooling group they were part of. To make a long story short, they banded together, found some other interested parents, borrowed Sunday school rooms in a large church, chose a curriculum and held classes for their children two days a week, with the rest of the at-home school week structured around lessons arising from the classes. By the time I arrived, the school, which still met twice a week, had grown to cover grades 1 through 12, and enrolled 125 students.

Parents ran the school--there was no administration, though there was a parent board--and parents were clearly heavily involved in the day-to-day activities of the school. The school cost $1,000 a year per student, and students who created problems or who could not keep up with the curriculum were asked to leave.

I think about this school because it was as "out of the box" an enterprise as I saw during my time as a reporter. (There's one other one, but that will be a different post.) This was clearly a case of parents a school to fit their children's needs, not setting up a school the way a school "should be" and forcing children to fit it and parents to pay the price.

It dovetailed with other thoughts I have had over the years, chiefly involving Quaker education meeting Quaker family's needs. The biggest need I have seen is affordability. So I would suggest starting there. Find out what parents can afford to pay and work around that, rather than what a school "must" have at ... 10K or 12K a year ... or more.

I can envision a scenario in which, say, nine Quaker families decided they could each put $1-2K a year into a pot to educate their 15 elementary age children. Let's say they ended up with $17K, including donations from Quaker organizations, and some in-kind donations of supplies, etc. The first step would be for all the parents to become approved homeschool parents, and the second would be to get together and fashion a set of goals and principles. I would strongly recommend a first principle being "serving other people's children," to weed out the parents who are only it in for what they can "get" for their own offspring. Third, I would see how much collective education the 17K would buy and work from there. Maybe the parents could obtain free use of Quaker classrooms connected to a meeting. Maybe they could rent at very low cost, say $1,000 a year, from a church or community center. Maybe they would designate another $2,000 a year for supplies and opt to keep $1,000 in reserve for emergencies. This would leave $13,000.

While I don't know the details of all this or what insurance liabilities would be (and perhaps this would all have be done in homes ... I don't know) conceivably, the school could hire a part time teacher for 6K a year total--kind of an adjunct--3K a "semester" who would come in and lead school for 21/2 hours a day two days a week. This could be supplemented by a parent-run meeting for worship before the teacher began her day, and followed by parent-run recess and lunch. And to be part of the group, each parent might be required to offer a few hours of enrichment each year/quarter to all the students ... and that would be a start. Maybe a weekly service project would be another part of the school. Perhaps the rest of the money could pay someone to coordinate the school. Accreditation would not be a problem as all the parents would be homeschoolers. The key point is that it would start with affordability.

The main goals, I believe, for a Quaker school is transmitting Quaker values and serving Quaker children. Much thought needs to be given to what those values are and to what serving Quaker children means. I write this as someone whose children are past the need for this type of schooling--who are two years from high school graduation.

Jeremy Mott went on a similar track when he wrote: "Someone might try to get a little
grant from the Clarence Pickett
Fund---see website---to develop a course on Quakerism for
Quaker parents who are home-schooling their children (I think there are many of them now.) The course could also be used by any of the numerous new Quaker schools which have no Quaker teachers; but
that wouldn't be the emphasis, for Friends Council on Education already tries to help them. The
material might be based, in part,
on what Max Carter of Guilford
College has done to develop curricula on Quakerism and on world religions for the upper grades of the Friends Schools in
Ramallah in Palestine (You can
find this info in their latest newsletter on the web.) There have
got to be ways to make Quaker education less expensive, even in
the U.S.A."

What do you think? Would you be willing to trade in the "bells and whistles" for a school built around Quaker values? What should these values be?

Olney Graduation

2010-06-07T05:52:00.000-07:00

Saturday saw the class of 2010 (19 students, 17 present) celebrate graduation at the Stillwater Meeting House. Friday was the annual almuni meeting at Stillwater, which is part of the graduation ceremony. Every year, the alumni meeting includes a roll call of classes. This year 13 out of the 21 from the 50th anniversary class (class of 1960) showed up and five from the class of 1940. We learned that oldest known living alumna is from the class of 1924, presumably 104, and still living independently.

When I watched commencement, the alumni meeting and, earlier in the year, Gym-Ex, I was reminded of how long it takes to build traditions and how they can't simply be replicated from scratch because they carry with them pieces of other times. I'm always impressed with the loyalty of the former students, and am glad the school has changed little and slowly, opting to keep to Quaker ways rather than embrace every new fashion.

I wish more Olneys could spring up around the country--small schools offering strong ethics, a safe community and excellent academics in a simple environment. In a time when many private (now called "independent) educational institutions (including many Quaker schools), have, like the rest of the country, followed the pattern of becoming the elite few separated from the deteriorating public sector, Olney is a refreshing reminder of an earlier time. The school offers a distinctly Quaker education in a setting that is still middle-class, not impossibly posh and elite. I really love that, and mourn that I don't know of more schools that follow this pattern.

Of course, Olney is still expensive, even with generous financial aid (though I imagine most people from the coasts would find, after aid, the entire cost of tuition and boarding less than the average Quaker day school) and the school has been pondering how to become more affordable. Perplexingly, the real cost of attending Olney has risen over time, even with salaries kept as low as possible (much compensation comes in the form of room and board) and a very careful eye on other expenses. The school will be having a summit in the fall to consider, among other things, ways to lower the cost of an education here. Those who can't participate in the summit can go to the Olney website and fill out a survey, and the school is looking for as much input as possible.

I sometimes worry that parents of potential students might be concerned that the school doesn't offer all the bells and whistles of an elite Quaker boarding school. We're struggling to put up the new activities center (gym) and in the meantime, parents drive past the old, disused tennis courts. I hope we can convey that something better is going on at the school--something more rare, more elusive, more difficult to find--than state-of-the-art buildings (though we hope soon to have a "green" gym).

While I have issues with the Harry Potter books, and know that Hogwarts is an over-used (and often false) comparison, Olney does have several things in common with the fictional boarding school. It's old, with a long tradition, and it builds strong community. Of course, it's Quaker and doesn't indulge in magic and occult. It's most like Hogwarts, to me, in not being visible to the average "muggle" eye: If you are looking for outward packaging or a particular kind of school, all you will see are old buildings and a school that doesn't offer 12 languages. It's as if it is disguised from the shallow and materialistic. But if you have the eyes to see ...

At graduation, we also saw our friend from Patapsco Meeting in Ellicott City, Ramona Buck, class of 1965. Johanna Danos, another Patapsco Meeting friend, whose son Elvin just completed his first year as an Olney student, arrived with her mother Helga, a healthy and glowing 83 year old who was much impressed, as I was, by the commencement address given by a recent humanities teacher.

As with most things in the "upside-down" kingdom, the school's financial struggles in the recent past (it almost closed a decade ago) are what have kept it true to itself. Now, however, with the economy down, the school could use more scholarship money as well as the rest of the funds for the new gym, but there's a trust that both will come as needed.

I hope the school will be more and more accessible...and that more people will be able to see that the school is an attainable goal for their children.

Jobs for the Young, retirement $ for the Old

2010-06-03T17:23:00.000-07:00

Young people can have jobs and old people can pursue, not the rocking chair, but fulfilling second ...third ...fourth ....careers ...
IF we push back.

According to the June 7, 2010 Nation:

"Social Security has accumulated a massive surplus--2.5 trillion now, rising to $4.3 trillion by 2023. This vast wealth was collected over many years from workers under the Federal INsurance Contributions Act (FICA) to pay in advance for baby boom retirements. The money will cover all benefits until the 2040s--unless Congress double-crosses workers by changing the rules. This nest egg does not belong to the government; it belongs to the people who paid for it. FICA is not a tax but an involuntary savings."

Our God is a God of abundance.

We could retire earlier ...

2010-06-02T06:50:00.002-07:00

From the New York Times (http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/how-high-can-the-retirement-age-go/?scp=2&sq=retirement&st=cse):

Beth Almeida is executive director of the National Institute on Retirement Security, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington. She is the co-author of “A Better Bang for the Buck: The Economic Efficiencies of Defined Benefit Pension Plans.

She writes:

Longer lives do not necessarily require longer careers. Yes, seniors are living a few years longer than they did decades ago. Life expectancy at age 65 has improved by about 35 percent since 1950. But our country’s gross domestic product is also roughly six times larger than it was in 1950 and household incomes have grown by a similar amount.

Higher retirement ages are not economically or demographically necessary.
That means not only can we still afford retirement, we can afford even more of it if that’s what we want. That’s good news. Yet somehow, longer lives have become an economic bogeyman.

I have often thought about this: We have so much more wealth as society than we used to even 50 years ago that we don't "have to" up the retirement age. We could, for example, decide we don't want to provide 50 percent of the world's military budget. We don't have to assume that younger people won't want to pay for older people's retirement. I can easily imagine younger people buying into the idea that if they pay now, they will have the same benefits to look forward to when they get older. We could also allow more immigration if we are short of working-aged people to support baby boomers.

Another writer talked about the changes in aging in this country and argued that people want to work longer, take care of "unfinished" business and do meaningful work as a long as they can. I agree with this, but don't think it means we need to somehow limit or do away with retirement benefits. For many people, meaningful and part-time work at the end of life is only possible because of the cushion of social security and other retirement income. Also, I worry that what is good for the middle and upper classes--a lifetime opportunity to work--could become lifelong wage slavery for working class people. I hope we will find the will as a country to continue to both finance retirement and allow people opportunities to contribute to the common good or their own enrichment as long as they can.

The Bible speaks to this by noting that love casts out fear. If we are loving others and putting first the kingdom, there will be an abundance of resources. The story of the loaves and the fishes illustrates this point.

The hermeneutic of imagination

2010-06-01T06:10:00.000-07:00

Recently, I finished my first semester at ESR, and my first semester as a full-time student in a very long time. It's been an interesting experience and there's so much to say about it that it becomes too long for a blog, so I will talk here about one piece of it.

The program merges an emphasis on scholarship with a push towards creativity. In both my Old and New Testament classes, despite the rigorous scholarly approaches, we were encouraged to be creative in our final projects. Since I am engaged by both scholarship and creativity, I did both, developing what I call a "hermeneutic of imagination."

The hermeneutic of imagination worked as follows: I first very deeply imagined myself into both the book of Revelation (for New Testament class) and the stories of Abigail and Bathsheba (for Old Testament class). For Revelation, I took to heart Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza's advice to approach the book imaginatively, and as I read, I lived beside John touring heaven with the angels as his guides. It pulled me into John's vision of heaven in a new way. I then took what I "saw" on that journey and used it as an entry point to a scholarly reading of Revelation. What I learned touring with John is that heaven is incomplete without The New Jerusalem: that heaven, a pallid, emotionless space (except for endless praises to God and the Lamb) needs the robust embodiment that earth offers as much as humans need the justice and mercy that heaven offers. It's a symbiosis. This surprised me, because I'd thought of heaven as perfect and complete--that which we aspire to. John's heaven is not. It needs the "juice" of earth and humanity--of God's worldly creation.

I also imagined my way into Abigail and Bathsheba, and soon realized that although they are kept separate in the narratives, they must have known each other, since both were David's wives. I imagined them together and what they might say to each other. I learned from this that both, despite the misunderstandings of the scholars, were empowered by silence, and I learned that you can't impose the same interpretive grid on both David and his wives, because David had a great deal of power and the wives didn't. For people with less power, the ability to operate silently--underneath the radar--is so important. For a person such as David--a king--public displays of power are all important.

I made many interesting discoveries about Bonhoeffer, and somehow intuited that Shakespeare was a lens through which to understand him. This gets back to a subject that has been much on mind: the role of fiction in understanding fact.

Somehow, God is central to this: the God that wants all of us, body, mind, heart and soul, imagination and reason.

The Practical Part is Called For

2010-05-24T16:02:00.000-07:00

"A doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." James 1:25

"Now the practical part is called for. For people must not be always talking and hearing, but they must come into obedience to the great God of heaven and earth." George Fox, From Mind the Heavenly Treasure

Knobby Dragon Skin

2010-05-24T15:51:00.000-07:00

My cyber-friend The Abbess writes: "It takes Aslan's [the lion who is Jesus] powerful and sharp claws to sink into that thick, knobby dragon skin and peel it away and release our true selves from bondage." The Abbess is alluding to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis and talking about the armor that we develop to protect ourselves from others.

I like The Abbess's images. I can almost physically feel the relief of being freed. This differs from the more ethereal concepts we often use to picture the entrance of Jesus or the Holy Spirit or the Divine into our lives, such as light or living water. Are there other images of the incarnation that you particularly like?

A good novel

2010-05-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

I recently read Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada. This novel about life in Nazi Germany was written in 1947, but apparently not translated into English until very recently. It's based on the true story of a working class couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who became so frustrated with Nazism that they started dropping postcards denouncing Hitler all over Berlin. This seems a fairly innocuous action in a country with free speech, but in Nazi Germany it was a death-penalty crime--and the couple knew it.

The couple eluded police and Gestapo detection for two years.

The book is gripping and a page turner. It's well-written, even in translation (there are some word choice oddities however) and puts you inside the world of the characters with great immediacy. The story, of course, is compelling.

More importantly, for all the books I've read recently on everyday life in Nazi Germany for a paper on Bonhoeffer, nothing captures the experience of living in a totalitarian regime like literature. Novels such as this one and George Orwell's 1984 bring totalitarianism to life in a way no amount of delving into Gestapo archives, compiling lists of facts and figures, or discussing repressive legislation and Nazi social programs can do. As a person who loves and values both history and literature, I am happily reminded of how well the two complement each other. We can't fully understand literature if we read it in a vacuum; likewise, we can't fully grasp a historical period without entering it imaginatively--often best led by someone who witnessed the era and can transform that witness into art.

I also very much appreciated the novel's depiction of most of the women characters as strong, independent, resourceful women. More often than not, it's the women holding things together, from households to earning income. This corroborates the histories I read, where, despite Nazi propaganda about sending women back to the home, women tended to be employed in large numbers, both because they worked for less money than men and were more docile. Of course, once World War II began, the government depended on women's labor to fill in for the men at war. Whatever the reason, I very much appreciated Fallada not reducing his females to sex objects or stereotypes.

There's also nothing like literature to communicate the "total" in totalitarian: the people in the book live in a world of black and white. Either you are entirely loyal to the system in every way or you are a traitor. There was almost no gradation, no "I'm Ok with this part of National Socialism, but against that." As a Quaker, I am struck that there was no conscientious objector status: you either went to war when you were called or you were given the death penalty. People apparently pulled strings all the time to be kept from the front, but the concept of objecting on the basis of conscience was not tolerated. The idea of having an inner life that differed from political policy was not tolerated. It's difficult to imagine what it would be like to live in such a world, but the novel goes a long way towards filling that gap.

50 unusual churches

2010-05-22T13:40:00.000-07:00

There are some truly interesting churches here (HT:SM):

http://www.boredpanda.com/50-most-extraordinary-churches-of-the-world/

Ivy: Let it grow, let it grow

2010-05-22T05:42:00.000-07:00

Despite all the critics who told me ivy would "ruin" our walls, I planted ivy on either side of our front door in Maryland seven or eight... or nine ... years ago. I planted a clipping from a friend's house in Oil City, Pa. Over the years, independent lawn contractors have approached me once or twice and offered to "get rid" of that ivy for me. Friendly eye roll. It's an aesthetic thing. Now, I feel vindicated:

"In a three-year project, Oxford researchers analysed the effects of ivy growing on buildings in five different parts of England and discovered that the plant plays a protective role. They found that an ivy canopy was like a thermal shield, combating the extremes of temperature which often cause walls to crack.
English Heritage commissioned Professor Heather Viles of Oxford University's School of Geography and the Envrionment to analyse the effect of common ivy (Hedera helix) to guide them in their important role as the steward of hundreds of historical sites. Professor Viles’s research team monitored the effect of ivy on walls situated in different parts of the country with varying climates and challenges.They found that ivy acted as a thermal blanket, warming up walls by an average of 15% in cold weather and cooling the surface temperature of the wall in hot weather by an average of 36%. The ivy was also found to absorb some of the harmful pollutants in the atmosphere. Walls where ivy was growing were less prone to the damaging effects of freezing temperatures, temperature fluctuations, pollution and salts than exposed walls without ivy.
Professor Viles said: ‘Ivy has been accused of destroying everything in its path and threatening some of our best loved heritage sites. Yet these findings suggest that there are many benefits to having ivy growing on the wall. It not only provides colourful foliage but also provides walls with weather-proofing and protection from the effects of pollution.’" (http://www.physorg.com/news193055372.html)

I would note that I have learned that it's best to plant a native ivy or ivy-like vine rather than invasive English ivy (if you are outside of England).

There's something simple, Biblical and earth caring about this finding. Creation works. Plants protect. Ivy warms.

This was a case of following the heart. I know we have to think with our heads as well as our hearts, but are there times you wish you had or hadn't followed "prudent" advice, such as don't grow ivy on your walls? Or something more important?

Keep Tender

2010-05-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

"Because thine heart was tender ... I have even heard thee." II Chronicles, 34-27

Give no occasion of stumbling; keep tender; for hardness of heart is worse than an outward plague, for that brings destruction in many ways."
George Fox, Mind the Heavenly Treasure

Since Fox would have witnessed--or at least been alive during--the last of the plagues, the strength with which he believed in "tenderness"--what we might call compassion or sensitivity--is immense. I think of the common use of the f-word and how that word alone tends to coarsen us. It is so easy to get callous. It's interesting that in a world that continues to encourage both a physical and pyschic swaggering and toughness ("get the f. out of my way!"), just as it did in the seventeenth century, Fox, from the great beyond, directs us to put a premium on ... lovingkindness. I believe he is asking for a giving up of self for other, an embrace of vulnerability, and a truly countercultural point of view that values and does not ridicule earnestness and sincerity. Around now, many people are probably asking: who would want to live in that kind of goody-two shoes world? Probably a lot of people who are suffering right now and wouldn't mind an earnest word of kindness. Also, we do remember that people like Fox and Fell are hardly namby-pampy halo heads--their writing is alive with their anger and indignation at what they saw all around them. They were quite interesting and outspoken livewires--but what moved them arose from tenderness. Or so I think. Do you?

Desire the Lord's Blessing on All

2010-05-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men. Galatians 6:9

"We are not against any man, but desire that the blessing of the Lord may come upon all men, and that which brings the curse may be destroyed; and in patience do we wait for that and with spiritual weapons do we wrestle and not against any man's or woman's person. For amongst us, Christ is King."

George Fox, From Mind the Heavenly Treasure, compiled by Gary Bowell

Habits and Quaker Hospitality

2010-05-19T17:43:00.000-07:00

One blog leads to another. My cyberfriend Hystery writes:

I often think about how difficult it is to feel close to other Friends ... Hospitality is a great spiritual gift. I do not refer to the hospitality in which people try to impress each other with fine homes and fine foods, but the kind of hospitality in which hearts and homes are open with a genuine generosity. Could we model that with each other so that Friends' children grew up in a family that extended beyond their biological and/or adoptive kin? We could then model that for others in our communities. How well do we know each other? It is not enough to share an hour of silence followed by polite conversation and a cookie. We have to make ourselves more vulnerable to create a beloved community. That is a difficult and a frightening thing to do for many of us including myself.

What can we do to extend hospitality, especially in a world in which "natural" hospitality seems to have retreated?

A recent blog offered me the gift of remembering that I had a friend in junior high school--as we called it then--who, looking back, I now realize was going hungry. How did I miss it then?

A. I was a child, and it was difficult for me to understand that, in fundamental ways (I understood window dressing differences) other families saw things differently from my own.

B. My friend lived in a bigger house, took better vacations and her father owned a more expensive car than we did. Her home was "done" by an interior decorator, so it had early 1970s glamor items, such as wall-to-wall shag carpeting and pop-art on the walls. It wasn't an environment that cued one to think "hunger." Though I should have seen it, as it was right in front of me, I didn't realize that the family was putting forth an image they couldn't afford, and then "affording" it by not buying food. (These were the days before easy credit.) It wasn't the right frame for me to think of deprivation.

C. My friend never said she was going hungry and encouraged me to think of her worcestershire sauce sandwiches and bird seed eating as quaint eccentricities.

When I remember her, I am reminded that people around us can be suffering physically, emotionally and spiritually, and we might not recognize it because they're the last person/family we would expect to .... fill in the blank or because we can't imagine a certain thing (such as literacy) being a problem.

I am reminded, once again, to be gentler, less judgmental and more open to the people right around me. This doesn't mean unwarranted intrusions into people's privacy, making assumptions, feeling superior or expecting to find things "wrong" behind every facade. Those behaviors make it difficult for any of us to be vulnerable.

I believe the best way to offer the hospitality needed is simply to offer general hospitality. When my childhood friend came to our house, we fed her, not because she was hungry, but because that's what we did. Thus, because we did that, we fed a hungry person. In a sense, we fed Christ. These behaviors were natural and extended to anybody. And we were not a particularly "great" family by any stretch of the imagination.

I do think too, however, that we need to be on the lookout for places where people could be expected to need help, instead of putting the burden on people to "ask." I have been in religious environments in which the whole issue of helping others was dismissed with the statement: "If people want help, they need to ask for it." However, in my experience, often the people most in need of help are often the least able to ask for it. I say this aware that I am terrible at seeing needs that should be obvious, which is where developing better habitual behaviors of hospitality could come in handy.

I believe, because of the testimonies, Quakers are well positioned to offer hospitality in a very natural way. We can respond to the people who, for whatever reason, cross our paths or whose paths we cross. We could make our simple meals, our events and our homes warmer and more open to others, and thus gradually expand our ability to serve.

Finally, what are some other ways to extend hospitality?

Then and Now

2010-05-18T04:57:00.001-07:00

We all get to an age where we can look back over our lives and track change. I remember the 1970s in New York City, where we used to visit relatives fairly frequently. The city truly was grittier, dirtier and more chaotic back then. I remember high rises going up, relatives shaking their heads and wondering where all the extra people were going to fit in the city, the explosion in crime, and most of all, my mother's regret that New York was not the way she remembered it growing up.

I'm not usually a great David Brooks fan but enjoyed his column in today's New York TImes, which discussed crime in New York City in the 1970s and now: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/opinion/18tue1.html?hp.

My mother loved New York, loved the possibilities it presented for a young immigrant, the easily accessible arts and culture, the window shopping, the good educational system (including free college tuition for those that qualified) and the safety. As a teenager in the 1940s and early 1950s, it offered her a tremendous amount of freedom. She died in 1980, and one of my regrets is that she didn't live to see New York return to what I imagine is something akin to the city she remembered.

Who knew in the 1970s what would happen?

A few years ago I saw a play from the 1970s, set in NYC, that captured all the grittiness of life back them. It was set in an English class for foreign speaking immigrants, and its theme was that we continue to live in a tower of Babel of miscommunications. It was funny, but played on situations that seem archaic now, at least for NYC--a broken elevator, a lost contact lens. While it accurately described a world I remember, it might have been set a 100 years in the past. I thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder of the Little House books, who woke up one day and realized what was, to her as a child, ordinary life as a covered-wagon pioneer, was now the stuff of history books and movie adventures. I remember the jolt I had when I recognized that something as simple, natural and seemingly timeless in my childhood as a pick-up baseball game organized by neighborhood kids "sent out to play" was as exotic a fantasy to my son as traveling to the moon. I remember feeling a sense of loss ... who knew that this easy community and freedom of childhood, of all things, is what would go away? We never know.

Brooks traces the phenom of worried, helicopter parents to the fears of the 1970s, when the crime rate was high and people were fleeing to the suburbs or traveling nervously from their urban homes. I think genuine fear, love and anxiety does lead parents to hover, to the extent that we do, but I also take a darker view of the competition and triumphalism of some parents for whom "ultimate hovering" becomes a form of conspicuous consumption and a highly visible sign moral superiority. To the extent that it seemed not genuine (and I've certainly met the genuine), it bothered me, because it seemed to be based on the premise that "I can" do this or "we have the power." Often, it seemed a way to flaunt leisure time or status: of course "my husband" can time blocked out of his schedule to come to the little league game. How often did I hear, "I'm so lucky my husband can support me" or "Can you imagine being one of those mothers who let's someone else raise her children while she goes to work?" I would wonder about the women who had no choice (of course, the idea of "no choice" was pooh-poohed) but to work. Being in a situation of having to work--especially a low wage job-- seemed evidence of moral failure and hence "the sins of the fathers" was fitting retribution for the children. And a high school friend who had her child in her 40s reminded me of the pressure that a bullying Queen Bee mother can bring to bear even on her privileged peers--my friend wanted to tell off the tyrannizing younger woman who ran a preschool playgroup but didn't for fear her child would be ostracized. In my childhood--at least as I want to remember it--when children could make their own friends more easily, parents had less incentive to kowtow unhealthily to the "Nazi brigade." This kowtowing, while well meant, is not good role modeling for the children--our children. My friend knew all this, and yet felt helpless.

I'm glad crime has decreased and cities--at least New York City--are safer. However, I deplore living in a society where we're not in it for everyone's children, where there's such a push to protect mine and mine alone. Aren't we all supposed to be brothers and sisters? Isn't everyone's child in some sense my child? Isn't this what Jesus preached? It seems to me, looking back, that we had more of that sense when I was growing up. Of course, from what we know of history, at least in Western civilization, parents have always put their children first, but it seems to me that in the 1960s and 70s (and before, from what my parents would say) that there was more of sense of building bridges to other children to give them a hand, not pulling in behind the moat and watching for the safety of the ramparts as these families flounder. How can Quakers be part of the solution? Or am I misremembering?

Women and the vote

2010-05-09T05:10:00.000-07:00

My cyber friend Diana has an interesting blog on English suffragettes:

http://lightbrightandsparkling.blogspot.com/2010/05/buried-in-santa-monica-visit-with-dame.html

We forget how much women a century ago endured to open the door to women today having a part in the political process. Does anyone know if Quaker women in Britain were involved in the woman's movement there? I also wonder what would motivate a wealthy, aristocratic woman like Lytton to see so thoroughly through the eyes of the underclass--the view from below--that she would throw herself wholeheartedly into the woman's movement of her time.

George Fox to BP

2010-05-06T05:26:00.000-07:00

As the Lily, Ye All May Grow

He shall grow as the lily, Hosea, 14:5

Take heed, that with all your mind [you] may be kept up to God, who is pure; that as the lily ye all may grow, and receive wisdom from God how to use the creatures in their places, to the glory of him that created them."

George Fox, from Mind the Heavenly Treasure, p. 38

Amen, George.

Song of the Angels, Fox and Revelation

2010-04-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

Angels in Revelation

In the words of Peter Carrell, angels function as “heavenly beings distinct from God and from human beings, who exist to serve God as messengers, as the heavenly congregation at worship and as agents of the divine will.”

When I decided to travel into the Book of Revelation, I chose to link myself to the angels. In popular culture, these benign and non-threatening creatures flit invisibly through the air to aid and comfort humans. Perhaps they would—gently-- protect my journey through the violence of the apocalypse.

Angels abound in John's Revelation. If Eden existed as a serene garden, overseen by a single couple, with God occasionally strolling through to observe, Revelation’s heaven is a city, populated by a multitude.

In Revelation, however, angels provide little comfort: they are mighty, they speak in loud voices, they blast trumpets, and they wield instruments of doom. They unquestioningly obey the divine commands. They never argue with God over the horrendous damage they’re instructed to inflict on the earth. They are not Lot, pleading for Sodom and Gomorrah, and they stand in stoic contrast to John, who weeps when he thinks the scroll secured with seven seals can’t be opened. They’re not the graceful, winged bird-people of Renaissance annunciation paintings or the disarming cherubs of Baroque ceiling art. Instead, they are the powerful, masculine figures painted by William Blake.

George Fox wrote about Revelation and claimed to understand it. Its apocalyptic imagery saturated his writings as he anticipated the establishment of the New Jerusalem in his lifetime. Most interestingly, he interpreted Revelation through the lens of the peace testimony. He writes “Now the holy angels of God are spirits, so then they had spiritual weapons, and not carnal swords, muskets, pikes, and pistols, &c. to fight with the dragon.”

We're told to enter the "conical spiral" of Revelation imaginatively, and many artists have done so. Apparently, Fox did so, reading through its violent imagery to a message of spiritual warfare overcoming carnal weapons.

The William Blake painting above of a mighty, muscular angel with his arm upheld captures the imagery of Revelation's angels. I have also included a Turner painting, highly impressionistic, of an angel blocking the sun, a tenth-century miniature of an apocalyptic angel playing a zither in heaven, and a 14-century tapestry of an angel blowing the second trumpet, causing the seas to rage. None of these paintings, however, show heaven as a city teeming with angelic beings.

I particularly like the way the poems below echo the hard, grinding ethos of these angels who poured woe on the earth. This is how Revelation's angels look from below, from earth's perpective. In heaven, they are a different story, mighty and loud but part of the divine harmony, tens of thousands of them singing praises to God and the Lamb.

Interestingly, the first of the two poems below speaks of silence:

O, clanging choirs of angels,
pour your holy cataract of echoing silence
into our deaf listening ...

Yet, we as Quakers, don't gravitate anymore to this strange, poetic and sometimes terrifying book of the Bible. Why not? Should we reopen it?

What do you think of these angels? Of the book of Revelation? Of these poems?

Song of the Angels II

by Hildegard Elsberg

Earth axis grinds,
shutters of the netherworld rattle,
gates of Heaven creak in their hinges.

Approach fast, you lyre-bearers, with rhythmic step.

Air whispers at offenses with baited breath,
waters moan under their insult.
fire, the lions, roar revenge.

O, angelic voices, begin humming now,
from afar, break into sound.

Rocks crack open, stones split hissing,
grasses shake, flowers weep,
shrill birds shriek, foxes yelp.

O, empyrean melodies, draw near,
ring in, ring in, reach our ear,
break our soul's sound barrier.

Men sigh, women grieve, children whimper,
prisoners scream, the insane muffle their outcry,
the old wail, the lonely sob.

O, clanging choirs of angels,
pour your holy cataract of echoing silence
into our deaf listening,
rend our disused year with your high harmonies.

Song of the Angels III

Hildegard Elsberg

Sword-carrier of justice
wings frosted by cold air of divine detachment,
before your implacable presence
our passionate lifeblood is stayed,
our ardent pulse numbed with terror.

Celestial strider, rider in glory,
pouring out vials, wisdom filled;
parched fields of our comprehension ravaged gardens bereft,
their fruits of knowledge fallen, gnawed by the worm,
stretch wide beneath your dew.

You, planter of the heart-tree,
ruby on your holy forehead, perpetually plummeting
charity from your infinite perspectives,
by your fire melt, you, our floes,
grip, you, formidable, in piercing pity, those roots.

Angel of the great Turning,
meet at crossroads the voyager,
step in the way of a mountaineer, flung into spiraling descent,
who wring from themselves lonely return;
your glowing joy is their viaticum.

Majestic messenger from the land beyond the river,
you, of fierce mercy, by our hair,
from the bowels of our yearning, pull us across.
Blow, on your resounding trumpet
splendor of sunrise in a new land.

Quakers and creeds

2010-04-28T04:53:00.000-07:00

Oswald Chambers My Utmost for his Highest, a book of devotionals published after his death in WWI, fascinates and perplexes me. In today's reading, he sounds much like a Quaker:

"When we become advocates of a creed, something dies; we do not believe God, we only believe our belief about him. ... 'Believe also in Me,' Jesus said, not 'Believe certain things about Me.' Leav[ing] the whole thing to Him, it is gloriously uncertain how He will come in, but He will come."

I see the problem with creeds that Chambers spells out: Our beliefs about God or what God "should be," can block our direct, unmediated experience of what God IS. Quakers are rightfully concerned about having that direct experience. However, I also understand how in Quakerism the lack of structure or framework can lead to a spreading, anything-goes dilution, like wine spilled out from a container. We learn in the Bible that we need new wineskins not no wineskins.

I also wonder if Quakers make an idol--or a creed--of not having creeds.

What do you think? Leaving aside our own sense that "creeds are bad," does it help or hinder Quakers to be adamantly against creeds?

Query: Mary and Quakers

2010-04-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

I am working on Mary, as in the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Quakerism. From what I can find, the Quakers have more or less routinely ignored Mary, except for early Quakers like Fox, who excoriated Mary worship as exhibit A in their challenge to idolatrous papacy. Am I missing any strain of Mariology in Quakerism?

Crossan, Jesus, Fox

2010-04-19T05:50:00.001-07:00

Apologies for the long gap in posting, which has been a function of lack of internet access rather than lack of time or (heaven forfend!) thoughts ... :)

John Dominic Crossan, author of The Historic Jesus, visited ESR this weekend and was a riveting speaker. He placed Roman ideology side by side against early Christian ideology. The Roman ideological (or theological) paradigm was war leading to victory leading to peace leading to (distributive) justice. In other words crushing the enemy established peace and in a peaceful world society could be ordered in a just way so that people's economic needs were met. Jesus and his followers claimed that to achieve peace and justice, one had to start with non-violence. Non-violence leads to economic justice, which in turn leads to peace. Needless to say, we know which paradigm still dominates today.

Caesar Augustus was worshipped as human and a divine, a God and a son of God because he unified the Roman Empire and brought peace through victory. Jesus, Crossan says, who brought peace through non-violence, was worshipped in the same terms because those were a construct a first century audience in the Roman world would have understood. Further, people in those days would not have challenged Jesus' resurrection--"wonders happened all the time"'--but would have asked, " what does it mean for me? What will it do for me?"

Crossan's most important point--and one he pounded on (and one I happen to strongly agree with)--is that history matters. Jesus arrived in a moment of opportunity, where, because of historical circumstances, his ministry was allowed to flourish for several years. Twenty years earlier or later, Crossan said, and he would have been crushed instantly. That brought mind to the Quakers and their emergence at another "window" of opportunity--the era of relative religious freedom during Cromwell's reign. Twenty years earlier or later and they would have been flattened by a state apparatus designed to keep people in conformity with the dominant ideology. (I might conceptualize this a little differently but that's for another post.)

I remember several times hearing people say, "If George Fox had been born in China, he would have been a Buddhist." OK ... yes, one's faith expression is obviously influenced by one's society. But the point is, George Fox wasn't born in China, Spain or the Ottoman Empire but England. History matters. I remember Tich Nat Hanh writing that if Buddha had lived in the Roman Empire, he, like Jesus, would have been crucified. Well, perhaps ... but the point is, he wasn't. If he had been, I imagine Buddhism would be much different today.

So I wonder: what would Quakerism look like if we were more willing to embrace the possibility of miracle and more rigorous in insisting that history matters? What miracles do we miss? What realities do we distort?

The Beatitudes: A Black perspective

2010-03-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

I am working on a small group project at ESR looking at the Beatitudes from different social locations. I have very much appreciated the comments on the first Beatitudes post. Below is a look at the Beatitudes from a different social location. This is a bit more formal than my usual more spontaneous posts, but still readable, I hope--and short. I'm interested in what you think--I believe Hayes's view align with the responder Steven, even though he looks at the Beatitudes from a Torah-based location. Both see the Beatitudes as a radical call to change.

In "Through the Eyes of Faith : The Seventh Principle of the Nguzo Saba and the Beatitudes of Matthew," Diana L. Hayes views the Beatitudes from the perspective of an African-American Roman Catholic. She identifies the Beatitudes entirely with the oppressed and enslaved, and places them within a context of African religious beliefs, rejecting Eurocentric readings that spiritualize their message as otherworldly.

To Hayes, the introduction of slavery into the New World overturned the prior assumption that all humans, regardless of race, were equally part of the human family, and replaced it with an ideology of racial superiority and inferiority. Conversely, the Beatitudes (along with the rest of the Sermon on the Mount) represented a “dramatic shift in understanding from … ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ … to the calling down of God's healing grace upon those who suffered trials and tribulations for the sake of the Kingdom of God.” (20)

The Beatitudes, to Hayes, are nothing less than a call to revolutionary change. (20)

For Hayes, the Beatitudes, in both Luke and Matthew, address slaves and former slaves, but not the rich. Both versions are equally important: Luke speaks to material needs, but Matthew calls the downtrodden to internalize their own significance: “For, as the poor, as the mourners, as the oppressed and marginalized … Matthew's audience was in the unique position of having the freedom to see clearly what was good, what was just, and what was righteous before God, because they had no vested interest in the outcome.” (21)

Further, Hayes identifies Jesus with the subject of the Beatitudes. He is not simply the speaker from afar: “Jesus knew how hard it was to be poor, because he was poor; to thirst after justice, because he did and died still thirsting; to mourn the loss of loved ones, because he brought Lazarus back to life. Jesus knew … .” ( 33)

Likewise, the American slaves understood the Beatitudes through lived experience and drew comfort from Jesus’ promises in these verses.

Hayes also aligns the sermon on the mount with the African Nguzo Saba or Seven Principles: unity, faith, purpose, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics and creativity. (These principles are celebrated in Kwanzaa.) (26) Like the Beatitudes, Hayes says, the Seven Principles call for revolutionary change in this world, not an afterlife. (22)

Finally, Hayes understands Jesus as black. “The Jesus of history … was and is black himself in his very being, if not physically, because he was born into and identified with the poor and marginalized.” (31) She quotes from James Cone’s God of the Oppressed (New York: Crossroad/Seabury, 1975): "It is in Jesus that blacks see the validation of their humanity; Jesus is, therefore, black because we, as the oppressed, are black. It is because the black community is an oppressed community, because—and only because—of its blackness, that the Christological importance of Jesus Christ is found in blackness.” (31)

Hayes’s social location is quite different from mine and offers a powerful reading of the Beatitudes as a text that excludes me and my peers. By marginalizing my group—whites, the well-to-do, the not-oppressed—Hayes challenges me to understand Jesus’ message in a more radical way and to knock on a door that is closed to me, whether or not I realize it. If Jesus is black and is himself suffering oppression, mourning, spiritual brokenness and persecution—and if I love and align myself with Jesus—I must also align myself more closely with the marginalized and suffering. Hayes’s message is humbling: whites must join blacks and other afflicted people, and not vice versa. In the circle around Jesus, whites and the wealthy stand on the periphery. Blacks and the poor are closest to Jesus.

Do you agree that Jesus was "black himself in his very being?" IS Jesus the Beatitudes embodied?

Why we blog?

2010-03-19T05:22:00.000-07:00

This from the New York Times:

"It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.

“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” Dr. Mehl said.

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people."

Is this true for you?

What should we talk about?

How would you respond?

2010-03-16T10:30:00.001-07:00

Recently, a blog asked the question: Should the government get out of the business of charity and leave that work solely to faith groups?

The conversation was civil. Some answered that government help should be avoided because it's inherently immoral to give people goods they have not worked for. One line of thought went as follows: it damages the recipient to receive something for nothing. We are helping people more to insist they pull themselves up by their own efforts.

As humans, I think we're expected to do many things simultaneously, rather than either/or, so I support both private charity and government help. I also believe that as a civilized country, we're morally obligated to establish an economic baseline so that people don't have to go hungry, naked or homeless. I understand that some will cheat the system, but I accept that as the price of doing the right thing.

On the blog, I asked whether there were not two sets of standards, one for the rich and one for the poor. If receiving money you haven't worked for is morally destructive, what of inheritance? Should young people --or any people--become fabulously wealthy from money they didn't earn? Should we block (tax) inheritance to encourage people to work?

I received this response, which was a polite attempt at discourse.

"Thank you for your comments. I do think it is different when money is passed down from one family member to another. We can hope that there was some teaching/training/modeling about charity and sacrifice going on before the money was passed down. The teaching the government is doing is that there is no accountability to use the help offered and get back on your feet- thus allowing people to become more and more dependant [sic] on the government funds."

What would be a helpful response?

The Beatitudes

2010-03-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

The Beatitudes (see below) have always been clear statements to me of what we might expect in the Kingdom of God. They reflect the "upside-down" kingdom that Jesus preached, and speak to deep longings in the human heart for justice, peace, mercy and comfort.

The Beatitudes say that everything we might be tempted to do out of haste, fear, self-interest or thoughtlessness--letting the hungry go hungry, arming ourselves to feel safe, denying our need to mourn, trodding on the meek--are the opposite of what we need to do to participate in God's kingdom. They are a reminder of God's justice and of the way God looks at the world. God blesses the gentle, the humble, the sorrowful, the hungry and the peacemaker, as well as the persecuted and the merciful.

The Beatitudes advise my community to behave gently and build peace, to walk humbly and seek righteousness.

As we know, Matthew's Beatitudes are more "spiritualized." Luke's Beatitudes treat physical situations: blessed are the poor, not the poor in spirit; blessed are they hungry, not those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. The Lukan Beatitudes also offer four warnings or woes directed toward those with money and status.

My social location as a woman, a Quaker, and a person in solidarity with the poor and oppressed draws me towards the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes reflect what I wish my values to be and challenge an aggressive world (and self) to become gentler. As an educated, middle-class white person from a wealthy country, they also challenge me to resist aligning with ruling class attitudes and complacency. The "woes" in Luke raise a certain level of discomfort, and remind me that God--rather than money or the opinions of the world--confers blessings and sides with the poor.

Because of my location in a highly individualist culture, I tend to look at the Beatitudes through the eyes of "me," rather than "us," and see them as a "personal conscience inventory" for assessing my own journey. My challenge is to interpret them as communal values and shared goals in which I can participate. They encourage me to find out where God is already at work in the world and to join that effort.

Do the Beatitudes mean anything to you? If so, what? Do you have any ideas how we can we enact them in more communal ways?

The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12)

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.

Blesses are the peacemakers: for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake: Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in heaven.

Source: Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition of the Bible (in the public domain)

Beatitudes ( Luke 6:20-26)
20 And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said: "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. 21 "Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. "Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh. 22 "Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! 23 Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets. 24 "But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25 "Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger. "Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. 26 "Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.

Bonhoeffer and Peace

2010-03-01T05:55:00.000-08:00

Kevin writes: Diane, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis for attempting to bring peace through treachery and murder. In my opinion, the lesson he has to teach us is that even compassionate and deeply sensitive people can be led astray when they decide they know better than God what it is he wants from us.

Kevin,

I agree and am grieved that Bonhoeffer chose the path of violence in responding to Hitler, in essence becoming the mirror of the thing he hated.

I don't think Bonhoeffer ever truly became clear on pacifism. He was strongly influenced in that direction while at Union Theological Seminary, but when the crisis came, I don't think the small plant of peace growing in him was big enough to withstand his need to "do" something.

He makes a strong argument for "exceptionalism"--Hitler was an exception to the normal rules--but pacficism lives or dies on our ability to love all our enemies, even in exceptional circumstances (And aren't "our" circumstances always exceptional?) On the other hand, I believe the mature Bonhoeffer was groping away from blanket, universalist laws, maxims and principles in favor of a lived particularity centered on the reality of the suffering of Jesus. How this turned into killing Hitler--which I believe is not what Jesus would have done--is an interesting set of arguments. He wanted to stand with the suffering people--with Christ--which was right, but he couldn't quite bring himself to stand with the suffering in weakness and powerlessness--he felt compelled to try to act from a position of worldly power.

Bonhoeffer knew he was participating in activities that were less than pristine. He accepted that he would possibly be disowned by the church after the war when his role in the various plots and subterfuges were uncovered. He ultimately justified himself as willing to get his hands dirty --to look bad--to do the right thing. How much of this was self-deceptive romantic posturing? I don't know. Bonhoeffer had a strong sense of his own importance--but he WAS important. He was a privileged person from a privileged family with options unavailable to many desperate souls. If we had wanted to stay in the U.S., he was welcome with open arms and had several job options at a time when many U.S. citizens would have been thrilled beyond measure to have even one job offer. One doesn't even need to imagine how many German Jews would have given anything for the visa he was handed to come the U.S. Further, his sister, who married a man with some Jewish ancestry, was able to ride out the war with her husband and their children in England. Again, how many German Jews would have given anything--their right arms- to change places with his sister? Finally, in Germany, it seems fairly clear that the Nazis were, to some extent, trying to avoid entanglements with families like the Bonhoeffers, those upper and upper-middle class Aryans who were, after all, the people they courted. He was treated relatively gently, even in prison.

I think, however, all this privilege did weigh on Bonhoeffer, and that he believed "to whom much has been given, much is expected." A case can be made that his sense of Self and Destiny led him to know better than God what the answers were. On the other hand, he was aware of--and fought--his own self-aggrandizing tendencies as far as he could. Perhaps his mistake, if it was one, was his tortured desire to "do" something rather than "just" "be" something?

I can't help but think that if he had sidestepped the plot to assassinate Hitler and other overheated machinations to unseat the Nazis--which were actually not welcomed with open arms by Allied governments--he could have survived the war. Yet on the other hand, I am acutely aware of whom am I to judge--would I even had done an iota of what he did?

Thanks, Kevin ... I'm taking this opportunity to think aloud. Bonhoeffer is compelling and frustrating, a fully human person who was trying to live in obedience to Christ. Bonhoeffer's life makes us think. I can't help but be awed at him and yet wish he had followed a different path ... but I wasn't, thank goodness, in his shoes. As a Quaker, I'm impressed that he tried to enact his faith--that it wasn't divorced from his everyday life, that he took a stand.

I wonder, is it better to take the somewhat wrong stand, with passion, or no stand?

Abigail: Peace and security

2010-02-28T07:17:00.000-08:00

"Peace is confused with safety. There is no way to peace along the way to safety. For peace must be dared. It can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I've been thinking about this Bonhoeffer quote and how true it seems to me. Why do we so often confuse security with peace? If we could understand that security and peace were two different things, would that change everything? Would we become less fixated on "security?" (Of course, Bonhoeffer is talking about worldly security, not religious security.)

On the largest level, we believe that if our borders are "secure" no "enemies" can get through and we will have peace.

We believe--some of us--that if we have a big enough arsenal of weapons, we will be secure from the mayhem of a "home invasion."

In our private lives, perhaps we think if we have enough financial security--enough money in the bank--we will have peace of mind. We won't have to worry in case something "happens". But the lesson of history is that you can never have enough.

These "securities" separate us from our fellow humans. Instead of making us more secure, they make us more fearful of the people who might want what we have.

Achieving peace means allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to other people. It means sacrificing some of our security.

One of my favorite Bible stories is the tale of Abigail, a peacemaker.

David--later to become Israel's king-- was fleeing Saul, who was trying to kill him. David sends some of his men to ask Nabal, a wealthy landowner, for a present, presumably food, because David and his men have been guarding Nabal's vast flocks. Nabal dismisses David's men empty handed, referring to David as a "slave." David tells his men to buckle on their swords and vows to slaughter Nabal and everyone associated with him.

Since Nabal is more or less worthless, Abigail, his wife, acts without consulting him. She has raisins and bread, figs and wine, loaded on donkeys and with these gifts and some sheep goes out to greet David. She falls down in front of him and begs him not to slaughter her people, appealing to his peace of mind. When he is a great king, he won't want to have innocent blood on his hands.

David calms down, accepts her gift and blesses her for preventing him from shedding blood out of anger. He vows not to harm anyone and he doesn't. Shortly thereafter, when Nabal, who appears to be an alcoholic, dies of a seizure, David marries Abigail.

What do we learn from this story?

First, a conflict can be resolved without killing. Nobody dies through violence in this episode. This is somewhat remarkable for the Old Testament, in which violence is the normal way to solve conflicts. Abigail does not feel any inclination to, for example, hammer a tent peg through her husband’s skull—and David doesn’t ask her to.

Second, no treachery is involved. Abigail approaches David without consulting Nabal but she does it to save Nabal, not betray him. Further, David doesn’t ask her to betray him or her people.

Third, to attempt peace, Abigail has to act courageously. She has to become vulnerable. She has no guarantee that David won’t murder her and her party, and good reason to think he will. She also has no guarantee that David won’t kidnap and rape her or sell her into slavery. Peace making means risk taking.

Fourth, here the patriarchal male is not the savior of the people. In a crisis, a “young man” turns to Abigail. Her earned de facto leadership rights trump Nabal’s gender and de jure headship, undercutting the notions of “anointed” leadership emphasized in the previous story, in which David protects Saul--even though Saul wants to kill him-- because he’s a king. This dovetails with the Quaker notion that anybody can be chosen by God to be a leader, messenger or peace maker.

Fifth, Abigail appeals to David’s honor and imagination, telling him he won’t want to wake up one morning as king with a massacre on his conscience. She talks him down from his anger—and he’s grateful. He even admits the slaughter would have been wrong. From this, we learn of a yearning to be released from the endless cycle of violence. Thus, this story undercuts the heroic narrative of David as warrior king, at least raising the question: Is military leadership the right model of kingship or has it been forced on David? And how many people wish an Abigail would step forward at the right moment and prevent a bloodbath that seems inevitable?

Finally, we learn that vows can be broken. Minds can change. David, like Jesus in the story of the Syro-Phoenician women, listens and learns. This shows that we have the ability to break cycles of violence through empathy. We’re not required to be rigid.

I love Abigail. While the men are posturing, she's peacemaking. I love her story, because it shows we don't have to resort to violence.

Is there anything you'd like to add?

Broadening our DNA

2010-02-13T07:35:00.000-08:00

Earlham School of Religion functions in tandem with Bethany, a Church of the Brethren seminary, sharing campus space, courses and programs. For example, two of my classes are under the auspices of Bethany. I think this is healthy for Quakers, who can get insular and ingrown and then suspicious of outsiders. Thus I was interested in a blog article on the need for faith groups to widen their "gene pool" at http://biblical.edu/index.php/media/missional-journal: You have to click on the pdf for Founder's Effect. ( I found this through the Jesus Creed site.)

It noted the need for incorporating the message of marginalized groups into the faith discussion, noting that mainstream, evangelical Christianity is dominated almost entirely by white voices and white, middle-class perspectives.