Whose faith? Whose practice? (part one)

Editions: London Yearly Meeting, 1959 (my copy);
Britain Yearly Meeting, 2013.

I received my first book of Quaker faith and practice in 1975, when Ottawa Friends Meeting accepted me as a new member. Canadian Friends of that era had adopted London Yearly Meeting's Christian Faith and Practice for that purpose, alongside their own loose leaf supplement entitled Organization and Procedure.

British Friends, in the renamed Britain Yearly Meeting, published a new faith and practice book in 1995, now entitled Quaker Faith and Practice.

The word "Christian" was not exactly being deprecated—the full title of the book is Quaker Faith and Practice: The book of Christian discipline of the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. It may be tempting to interpret the title change in terms of the post-Christian trends among some British Quakers, but that's not what interests me today.

I suppose that in either case, Christian or Quaker, the prevailing assumption was that these books are for internal use among Friends. This is who we are, more or less. But what I like about the title Christian Faith and Practice is another interpretation entirely, one I have no permission or evidence to propose: this way of faith and life is not just for us; it's recommended for all Christians.

This way of thinking rubs against the ecumenical/interfaith spirit of our times. It paradoxically conflicts with both the modesty and diffidence of contemporary Quakers on the one hand, and our sectarian exceptionalism on the other. But it makes sense to me to interpret these books as our contribution to an ecumenical conversation: this is how we are trying to live with Jesus at the center of our communities; how about you? Can we learn from each other? Are we ready (with kindness) to point to each other's strong places, and each other's defects, blind spots, and worldly accommodations? Ideally, we Quakers are not forming yet another community of self-contained "enthusiasts" (in Ronald Knox's sense) but are eager participants and ecumenical allies in turning the world upside down in the Lamb's war against all forms of oppression.

I don't know how George Fox and his companions would feel about my interpretation of the true audiences of our "faith and practice," but one of his late interpreters, Lewis Benson, once told me, "I don't have an ecumenical bone in my body." He firmly believed that Fox didn't intend to organize a new sect, but to revive or reconstitute the entire Church. However, as Knox points out, the reality is that most reform movements, inside and outside the established confessions, have similar ambitions, so it's up to us to keep the lines of conversation open with all of them rather than tending to our own exclusive conceits.

The work of our late Friend Eden Grace at the World Council of Churches is a wonderful example of these kinds of conversations. Given the range of concerns among Friends worldwide at this grave moment in human history (speaking of ecological as well as political and economic challenges), there probably won't be many of us who will be called to make ecumenical conversation a priority. But if you are one who happens to understand "Christian Faith and Practice" as a contribution to a potentially unlimited audience, I hope these words are encouraging.

---

Related: Meditations on sectarianism; Functional ecumenism; Core sample of a Quaker culture, Are Quakers part of the Church? Your thoughts and links are very welcome.

To be continued next week in Part Two: Pope Leo XIV and "just peace."

---

Bill Samuel's list of online books of faith and practice.

Grace Spencer (Prospect): Disagreement among Friends. ("Keep or dilute God?")

Eden Grace: Quaker and ecumenical essays. Her Swarthmore Lecture (2019) with video and transcript.

George Demacopoulos (Orthodox Christian Studies Center): Is Donald Trump the Arius of American Democracy?

Gerrit De Vynck and Nitasha Tiku (Washington Post, gift article): Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meeting with Christian leaders.

Nancy Thomas, Poems of the Beatitudes, part one, part two, part three.

Kristin Du Mez comments on Keri Ladner's newly published book American Dominion, and provides us an excerpt. (Also see link to today's live episode of The Convocation Unscripted.)

---

"...When I heard that song, I said, 'Man, it's just what my soul needed.'" Eric Bibb remembering Lightnin' Hopkins performing "Needed Time" in the film Sounder. (Here's Lightnin' Hopkins' version.)

"Do not hold on to me." (A guest post.)

---

During our years in Russia, we celebrated Easter with our friends there according to the Orthodox calendar. This year, Easter on that calendar is this coming Sunday. Easter blessings to all of you who are in the midst of awaiting Easter Sunday on April 12.

---

Screenshot from Mary Magdalene. Source.

---

A few days ago, Friend Ellerie Brownfain sent me her thoughts about Easter. I loved them! I hope and imagine you may find them as insightful and helpful as I did. With her permission, here they are:

Easter Message

There is a moment in John's account of Easter morning that I keep returning to. Mary Magdalene has come to the tomb before dawn and finds it empty. She weeps. Not for joy. Mary weeps because she believes someone has taken the body of her teacher and she does not know where they have laid him.

Turning, she sees a man standing nearby and assumes he is the gardener.

I have to say, if I had been there, I might have made exactly the same mistake. Though probably for different reasons. I cannot grow anything. Not even succulents. I buy the seeds and I read the instructions and I have genuine hope every single spring. And then somewhere between hope and harvest the plants just give up on me. But I keep trying. Every year. Because there is something in me that believes growth is worth the effort even when I have clearly lost the argument.

So when I read that Mary looked straight at the risen Christ and saw a gardener, I feel a kind of kinship with her. I know what it is to show up hoping something will grow and be surprised by what you find.

Mary says to him, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him and I will take him.

This is a deeply human impulse. She is not looking for a miracle. She is looking for a way to say goodbye.

And then the man says her name.

Mary.

And she knows.

Mary reaches for him. And he says something that has always struck me as one of the most important lines in all of scripture. He says, do not hold on to me.

Do not hold on to me.

I want to sit with that for a moment because I think it is near the center of what Easter asks of us.

Mary came to the garden looking for the Jesus she had known, the teacher who walked the roads of Galilee, who ate with her, who taught her, who died on a Roman cross. Wanting to recover him. Wanting things to go back to the way they had been.

And the risen Christ says, do not hold on to that. I am not returning to what was. I am going forward. And you must go forward too.

. . .

This is the thing about resurrection that we can miss if we are not careful. We can treat it as a restoration story. The happy ending after a terrible Friday. The tomb is empty, the crisis is over, and life resumes. But life did not resume. Not the old life. The resurrection did not restore anything. It transformed everything.

But resurrection is not restoration. It is transformation.

Paul makes this plain in his letter to the Romans. He writes that we who have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into his death. We were buried with him. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Newness of life. Not the old life resumed. Not a return to what was before. Something genuinely new.

Paul is talking about baptism but he is also talking about the shape of the Christian life itself. We do not follow a historical teacher who is safely in the past. We follow a living Christ who is present and active and always calling us forward.

George Fox understood this in his bones. When he spoke of Christ having come to teach his people himself, he was not speaking metaphorically. He meant that the risen Christ is here. Available. Present in the gathered meeting, present in the conscience, present wherever two or three are gathered in his name. The resurrection was not only a past event for Fox. It was a present reality. Christ is alive and moving in this moment.

The resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus. It is something that is always happening in this Society of Friends. Christ is always being raised in us and among us. And we are always being called to walk in that newness.

So what does this mean for how we live? I want to name three things.

. . .

The first is this. Resurrection frees us from the tyranny of the way things were.

Mary could not have gone and told the disciples if she had stayed in the garden holding on. Letting go of what she came looking for was the only way to receive what was actually being given. And then she went. The first preacher of the resurrection. That is not a small thing. The first person sent to announce that Christ was risen was a woman whom the other disciples initially did not believe.

She carried the news to people who would not even believe her. She could only do that because love recognized love. She heard her name and she knew him. And knowing him was enough.

We do this too. We hold on to how things used to feel. How our families used to be. How our faith used to be simple and clear and certain. We come to Easter looking for something to retrieve rather than something to receive.

The risen Christ says, do not hold on. Something new is being offered. And it requires your hands to be open.

This does not mean that what we have lost was not precious. Mary's grief was real. The disciples' grief was real. Ours is real. But resurrection says that grief is not the destination. The garden is not where we stay.

. . .

The second thing resurrection means for how we live is this. We are sent.

Jesus does not tell Mary to stay in the garden and rest in the warmth of this moment. He tells her to go. Go to the brothers and sisters. Tell them what you have seen. You have been given this not only for yourself but for the community.

Easter is not a private experience. It pushes us onto the road to speak and to act. But what action? That is the question we must bring to God in prayer and carry into the silence of our own hearts. The risen Christ commissions us but he does not hand us a script. He trusts us to listen for what we are each being called to do and to go do it.

What have you seen? What has the risen Christ given you that was meant to be shared? That is an Easter question worth sitting with in the silence.

Because the risen Christ does not appear to Mary so that she can have a beautiful private moment. He appears to her so that she will go. So that the news will travel. So that the locked room where the frightened disciples are hiding will have its door knocked on by someone who has seen something they need to hear.

You have seen something too. This community has seen something. The question Easter puts to us is whether we are willing to go and say so.

. . .

The third thing I want to name is perhaps the most personal. Resurrection means we are not defined by our worst moments or our deepest losses. And if you doubt that, look at who Christ came back to. He came back looking for his disciples. The ones who had run. Peter had denied Jesus three times and wept bitterly over it. They were in hiding, behind locked doors, afraid and ashamed and probably not sure what to do next. Easter morning does not erase any of that. The gospel does not pretend Friday did not happen. But the risen Christ did not seek out the faithful and the steady. He went looking for the ones who thought they had failed him.

But it says that Friday is not the last word. Death is not the last word. Failure is not the last word. Grief is not the last word.

The risen Christ appears first to the ones who are weeping. He shows up in locked rooms where frightened people are hiding. He walks alongside two disciples on the road to Emmaus who are so deep in their grief that they do not recognize him until he breaks bread with them. He meets people where they are and then he moves them forward.

This is not cheap comfort. It does not minimize the weight of suffering. It does not tell us our pain is not real. It says our pain is real and it is not the end of the story.

Paul puts it this way. If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. United with him. Not observers from a safe distance. Participants in the same movement from death to life. That is what we are being invited into this morning.

I want to close by coming back to Mary standing in the garden.

She heard her name spoken by someone she had believed was dead. She recognized him. She reached for him. He told her not to hold on. And she went.

There is a whole life of faith in those few verses. We come to God carrying our grief and our need and our desire to make things go back. We encounter the living Christ in ways we did not expect and often in places we did not think to look. We want to hold the moment. And the Christ we encounter is always sending us forward into something we cannot yet see.

Do not hold on. Walk in newness of life. Go and tell what you have seen.

That is the Easter message. Not a return to the garden we remember but a commissioning to become people who have met the risen Christ and cannot stop talking about it.

— Ellerie Brownfain

---

You may have experienced a deluge of writing concerning the war with Iran and the events of the last few days. In lieu of a list of links that's no better than what you no doubt already have, and will inevitably go stale in a matter of hours, I'll just offer you this fascinating and disconcerting conversation on Donald Trump's "wishcasting."

Diana Butler Bass: "Don't let the tomb overtake the resurrection."

Heather Cox Richardson on journalism and an unhinged president.

Sergey Radchenko renounces his Russian citizenship, and why, and what next....

Consider supporting this Kickstarter campaign to fund art for the Friends Incubator for Public Ministry's new book, Constellation of Witness: Quaker Stories in Public Ministry.

---

Gospel blues from Kee Eso Pitchford, with thanks to Daniel Smith-Christopher for the introduction.

"If you want me to love my enemies, I'll say yes."

Artemis II

The Artemis II astronauts; their lunar mission began yesterday.
(Left to right: Jeremy Hansen, Canadian Space Agency; NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman. Photos: crew: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani; launch: NASA/Michael DeMocker.)

---

Did you know that a lunar spaceflight began yesterday, with a crew of four astronauts aboard?

If so, did you care?

I couldn't help caring. As I've written before, space exploration has fascinated me since childhood. But ever since the Apollo project (1961-1972) made lunar spaceflight practically routine, I've been impatient about our next grand goal. After Apollo, low earth orbits just weren't all that impressive. (If the earth's diameter were the height of an average adult male, spaceships in low earth orbit would pass only a couple of inches over his head.) But we've seemingly lacked the ambition and focus to send people beyond those two inches.

It's not that we haven't done some incredible things in space by means of robotic explorers who've already traveled distances that crewed spacecraft aren't likely to reach for perhaps centuries. Some of them, such as the Hubble and JWST projects, have extended our vision into time/space up to just about the theoretical limit of the early universe.

As for money spent on space exploration, our legislators have poured vast amounts into equipment. Since it began in 2011, the Artemis program of heavy-lift rockets and Orion spacecraft has thus far produced two launches, including yesterday's, but it has cost something like US$ 69 billion. The immediate costs associated with yesterday's launch ran to about $4 billion. Despite its bloated costs and gigantic delays, every argument to replace the Artemis launch vehicle with more economical and project-focused alternatives has run up against congressional defenders determined to preserve the associated jobs in their states and districts. These debates have mainly occurred among insiders, because even these astronomical (sorry) costs haven't earned the attention of the ultimate funders—the taxpayers.

(Speaking of human spaceflight expenditures and delays, I won't even mention the problems of the Boeing Starliner.)

The alternatives to those traditional government-owned and -funded programs are the public-private collaborations that produced the SpaceX and Blue Origin spacecraft, among others. But to quote Amy Shira Teitel, "...it's opening the door to an era where NASA could become a contracting agency, funneling its budget to billionaires" instead of providing the leadership and focus of NASA's first decade of human spaceflight and its amazing record of successes in uncrewed exploration.

Again, I share Teitel's concern about the Artemis program in its larger context, if there even is a larger context:

...We have two landing missions or we have four landing missions. Then what? You know, like there's still that big question of what comes after that. And I just feel like we're almost kind of kicking the can down the road a little bit. Like, great, we can have a couple more missions. We can get a bit more science. Um, but then what? We're just delaying having to make a big decision about whether or not to retain this over-budget rocket or try something different or pass it off to commercial partners. It feels like that's an inevitable point that we're going to get to. (From this video.)

Exactly. If we are looking forward to establishing a moon base, as has been proposed, there's not much practical planning evident for how that will happen, given the current maximum of four more Artemis launches (if sticker shock doesn't hit us first!), or even a coherent attempt to persuade us that such a base is a worthwhile project on the way to some specified greater goal. 

And I'm sorry, vague references to China aren't enough. President Kennedy at one point suggested replacing a U.S.-only Apollo project with a collaboration with the USSR and other nations. Is anyone designing a 21st-century version of his vision?

In the meantime, I'm following the Artemis II mission more or less constantly, and hoping very much for its safety and success, but I admit that it's not the same unmixed devotion I had for Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

---

Eric Berger has a somewhat more positive take on Artemis II...but his title points to the lack of public excitement: Why is NASA bothering to go back to the Moon if we’ve already been there? And while you're on the Ars Technica Web site, see Stephen Clark's NASA officials sidestepped questions on Artemis II risks—there’s a reason why.

Nancy Thomas and her "super-salad" moments.

Mike Farley on Sein zum Tode. "Death is an old friend."

---

All Saints Cathedral, Nairobi, Kenya. "Jesus, Remember Me...."

"No Kings" shorts

Portland, Oregon, June 14, 2025

The third "No Kings Day" program of protest actions in the USA are being organized for this Saturday. We will be out of the country that day, but hope and pray for a peaceful day, and a good turnout. I'd love to see lots of creative messaging that will reach new audiences, and a minimum of stupid caricatures.

Some USA citizens here in the United Kingdom will be marching under a slightly different banner, "No Tyrants," since here there is an actual king. The king is styled "sovereign" but, ironically, in normal times the British sovereign has practically no political power in comparison to King Donald.

The kings and queens in constitutional monarchies do have enormous symbolic power in their roles as stewards of national identity and guarantors of continuity. They would quickly lose that legitimacy and its grounding in the affections of their people if they became kings in the ancient tyrannical model described by God to Samuel, who—in vain—passed that warning on to the people demanding a king.

Many actual monarchs, having more majesty than power, still have the use of grand palaces, elaborately decorated, and they participate in impressive rituals and spectacles. They may have buildings, organizations, and various projects named after them, and their pictures may appear on currency or on the walls of government offices, but, again, if they themselves were to decree these arrangements, their legitimacy would suffer.

King Donald wants both power and spectacle. May he get an unmistakable NO on Saturday.

---

My June 14 sign.

On his blog, Interrupting the Silence, Michael K. Marsh points out that this upcoming No Kings Day is on the weekend of Palm Sunday.

This Saturday, March 28th, is the third No Kings Day protest and Sunday, March 29th, is Palm Sunday, but here’s what I wonder:

What if Palm Sunday was the original No Kings protest?

What if Jesus, the disciples, and the crowd that follows Jesus are protesting violence, injustice, and imperial power?

Instead of protest songs there were shouts of “Hosanna!”, a cry for deliverance and liberation, a plea for change. Instead of protest signs there were cloaks and palm branches, symbols of joy, peace, submission, and the celebration of a new way.

Please read the full post.

---

Here's how Nancy Thomas has been using slugs in her writing. It reminded me of the tradition among some pastors and seminarians to challenge each other to embed some incongruous word in sermons they'll be preaching.

Philosophers, political scientists, and advocates of civil discourse are grieving the death of Jürgen Habermas.

Jeremy Morris tells us why he thinks "Paul D’Anieri’s updated Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War is the single best book you can read to understand the domestic and geopolitical causes of the current war." He managed to persuade me to buy the book. I haven't started reading it yet, but I think Morris's post is interesting on its own ... as usual.

Jennifer Rubin and Martin Kelley on the hard truth about César Chávez.

Alexander Hurtsellers on healing hypermasculinity in the Church, an Orthodox view.

---

Rick Estrin, Steve Guyger, Mikey Junior ... harpists having fun.

Bewildered and confounded

Sarah and James Polk; Donald Trump
Sources: left, right.

He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.

—Congressman Abraham Lincoln on President James K. Polk.

Unlike the 2026-? war with Iran, the Mexican-American War (1846-48) actually included a U.S. congressional declaration of war, but one that was arguably obtained under false pretenses. Essentially, the U.S. army had to lure Mexican soldiers into a fight in order to obtain a pretext for war. 

Abraham Lincoln consistently opposed this war, and he bluntly gave his reasons in, among other occasions, this powerful speech in the House of Representatives in January 1848.

His arguments seem to me to apply pretty well to the war that we and Israel are in now, against Iran. The war with Mexico was an unconstitutional war, based on fiction; it was supposed to be a short war; the supposed gains of the war should have outweighed the losses in combat, but didn't; in any event, the object was to steal from Mexico, which Lincoln judged an offense to the honor of the USA. Lincoln memorably referred to the way that war's romantic propaganda distracts from the shameful reality: ...

... [Polk aims] to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye that charms to destroy, he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.

---

I do my fair share of following war news on the Internet. So much of the coverage features analysts and commentators doing their best to make sense of an insane war. I see them sitting behind impressive desks or standing in front of charts and digital displays covering whole walls, but mostly what they are doing is trying to guess what this or that inarticulate soundbite might mean.

The reality, which they are not really equipped to analyze in terms of dignified commentary is this: the war was initiated by two corrupt men, one of whom is a completely rogue U.S. president. The news programs are reduced to providing us endless scenes of smoke rising from the impacts of missiles, drones, and the remains of midair interceptions, punctuated by excerpts from bombastic, factually irrelevant statements and press conferences. Donald Trump's contribution to this scene is his constant referral to himself. Everything is about him and what he feels in his bones. Even Stalin pretended to be answerable to structures and committees! This is not a scene that lends itself to rational commentary, but those analysts have jobs to do, cameras pointing at them, and three minutes and fifteen seconds to fill before it's the next well-meaning analyst's turn.

And they're certainly not entirely useless. Today I heard Jon Stewart say, "War is how Americans learn about geography."

I appreciated Anne Applebaum's blunt description of this unprecedented dependence of a whole country, and its fateful global consequences, on an incompetent and thoroughly corrupt individual. 

Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.

He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.

Applebaum's full article is here: Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done.

---

Back in our own communities here in the USA, are we living life as usual, or are we in one or another form of the chaos the people at the top have unleashed? Our "dual reality" was well illustrated in an illustration on Vox by cartoonist Pete Gamlen:

Sigal Samuel's accompanying article: Your friends are still acting like everything is normal in America. What do you do? She describes this dual reality in the terms proposed by a German Jewish political scientist and labor lawyer, Ernst Fraenkel, who observed the pre-WWII Germany becoming divided into a compliant, passive, and comfortable "Normative State" and its terrifying parallel "Prerogative State" under direct, arbitrary, and repressive state power. Remain passive and compliant and maybe you won't someday find yourself abruptly transferred from normalcy to repression, a transfer that is entirely at the discretion of those in power.

As Samuel's article acknowledges, we're not yet quite at that point in the USA, but that may be small comfort to Renee Nicole Good of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and her family ... and all those on the left side of Pete Gamlen's graphic.

Sigal Samuel's article ends with several suggestions of how we can avoid fatal passivity and regain connection across these divides for the sake of justice. Here are a few of mine; please add yours! As always, the best-fit involvement takes into account your own spiritual gifts, your temperament, and the mutual obligations you have with your own community.

• Keep observing the realities around you to the best of your capacity, and don't let propaganda from any side or camp  (including your own!) do your thinking for you.
• Send blessings and prayers to the individuals you become aware of as you follow the news. (Even though the USA's news channels tend to show Arabs as faceless masses, for example, look for the human beings as best you can, and pay attention to their credible spokespeople.)
• Join ethically-organized and ethically-led protests. The more local protests and movements may be just as important as the mass downtown events.
• Following the principles of evangelism with integrity (for example, "permission evangelism"), tell people about Jesus. Help differentiate his tender leadership from the misrepresentations promoted by white Christian nationalism, but do it from intimacy with the Prince of Peace rather than a sly motivation to one-up those whom you oppose.
• Cultivate good relationships with your legislators and local media. Take wise steps to become known as a reliable source of helpful quotations for journalists.
• Grieve with those who grieve, rejoice with those who rejoice; be kind to each other and to yourself. It's a race—an urgent one—but not a competition.

---

Pete Gamlen's cartoon really caught me in a deep place. Sometimes I've been feeling so far from either of the dual realities. And for some reason, around the time I found myself resisting this sense of alienation, I watched a couple of those smoking cityscape videos as Israeli bombs fell on Lebanon. I began meditating on the dead people lined up at Heaven's gate, and praying for them to be at peace.

"Rank Strangers" in our classroom in Elektrostal, Russia.

We Quakers are not known for speculating about life after death, or about what heaven is like. But I couldn't help wondering what was happening to those whose bodies and souls were being violently separated by high-tech munitions, some of which were paid for by our taxes. In this swirl of alienation and distress, I remembered a recording made by one of my favorite blues musicians, harpist Charlie Musselwhite. It was a track from his album One Night in America, "Rank Strangers to Me," originally created by the gospel writer Albert E. Brumley, Sr. It's a song we used as one of the gapfill exercises in our listening comprehension classes at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal.

I don't know many songs that combine grief and hope as well as this one:

I wandered alone to my home by the river
Where in youth's early dawn I was happy and free
I looked for my friends, but I never could find them
I found they were all rank strangers to me

Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad, not a friend could I see
They knew not my name and I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank strangers to me

"They've all moved away", said the voice of a stranger
"To a beautiful home by the bright, crystal sea"
Some beautiful day, I'll meet 'em in heaven
Where no one will be a stranger to me

Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad, not a friend could I see
They knew not my name and I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank strangers to me

Boredom for Dummies (and everyone)—partly a repost

Detail from Japanese Pearl Harbor attack plan. Source.

First, a few words about our latest war.

When I heard the first news bulletins about the 2026 Iran War, I couldn't help thinking about Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, that "dastardly" attack that happened while negotiations between Japan and the USA were still underway. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull expressed his sense of betrayal very plainly to the Japanese negotiators.

The U.S./Israeli opening attack on Iran also happened during a period of active negotiations, facilitated in good faith by Oman.

I'm sure you have as much access to good analysis and commentary on this war as I do, so today I don't plan to say more here. I'm just aware that there are people alive at this moment, in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, perhaps the Gulf states, and beyond, who will not see tomorrow. May God have mercy on them, and on us.

---

Wess Daniels (from Reedwood
Friends Weekly)

Last Sunday afternoon, Reedwood Friends Church here in Portland, Oregon, hosted C. Wess Daniels (biography) for a fascinating afternoon advertised as a session on "The Practice of Silence as Resistance in an Attention Economy."

It turns out that one of the themes that Wess has bravely connected to the topic of silence is boredom.

Boredom.

He's been thinking about how to attract more Guilford students to silence as a topic and as a practice ... and not just the Quaker students. Furthermore, he's certainly not hiding from the topic of boredom. He's not defining "boredom" as a danger for budding practitioners of silence, but boredom as a part of something good! Boredom as a superpower! 

Maybe it's best if I let  Wess explain it himself. Here are two of his blog posts that contain some savory hints of the content he shared so engagingly with us last Sunday:

Let’s Get Bored Together: The Practice of Silence and Resisting the Attention Economy. (February 26, 2023)

A Shot of Light - Getting My Head Above Water. (September 5, 2025)

By the time we met on Sunday, Wess had some other interesting stories to tell from his experiences with students—for example, when he asked them to interview trees.

All of this reminded me that I wrote about "boredom for dummies" back in October 2017, just after our final trip to the USA from Russia. Here it is:

---

The Amtrak Empire Builder.

... I don't have time for those who don't know what time is.

These words from Boris Pasternak came back to me during the long, slow hours we spent on Amtrak's trains from New York City to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Portland, Oregon.

To tell you the truth, I really needed those long, slow hours of sitting by the train window and letting time carry me into my future. In my last weeks and days in Elektrostal, time went by with dizzying speed, and my mind struggled to keep up, storing up impressions and sensations against the uncertainties of that future. It's likely that we'll never live in Russia again. (Yes, we hope to visit, but even that is uncertain. In any case, I don't think we'll ever again be residents.)

We are learning about gravitational waves rippling through space and time, thanks to Albert Einstein and the recent LIGO observations. For most of us, it's not news that time also seems to be experienced in waves, now compressed and now just dragging along. I love living in the moment, but slow moments, and stretched-out periods where time nearly seems to stop, are equally precious to me.

In a moment of unguarded boastfulness, I once said that I was never bored. That claim didn't stop me from preparing for the transatlantic flight and the train trip by loading my Amazon Fire with episodes of Doctor Who and the Vietnam War series, along with two novels, two books of theology, a history of Protestant missions, and two autobiographies—by Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland and American astronaut Scott Kelly. But much of the time, day and night, I just watched the country scroll past the window. I felt no pressure to savor or memorize or store up—I just let the planet be the planet and me be me.

---

Boredom is not a problem to be solved. It is the last privilege of a free mind.

These words open Gayatri Devi's essay on boredom, published on the Guardian Web site about two years ago. Her essay seems to assume a definition of boredom as a state of discontent resulting from lack of external stimulation. (Dictionaries, on the other hand, often seem to focus on boredom as a state resulting from the wrong kind of stimulation—tedious, repetitive, uninteresting.) She rightly recommends not curing boredom by reaching for new sources of stimulus, such as the ever-handy smartphone. Instead, she recommends "metathinking"—in a sense, observing yourself as you slide into boredom, considering what makes you bored, "how your mind responds to boredom, what you feel and think when you get bored."

I would just add a couple of things that are, maybe, already implied in Gayatri Devi's advice:

• Learn to enjoy your own company. This doesn't mean to give yourself a free pass on everything that might appear on a Fourth Step AA inventory -- but look beyond your imperfections to the whole of yourself, the person whose God-given mind is capable of thought, reflection, observation, intention, reconciliation, synthesis of old and new ideas, and so much more. That apparently empty period of time, whether it's at on a slow train or in line at a bank, is just a golden opportunity to get to spend some time with your complicated self. (Learning to enjoy your own company is a good step toward confronting temptation and addiction. God loved you into being, as Anthony Bloom said, so it's time to look at yourself with God's loving intention in mind.)
• Reframe slow time as prayer time. You can ask God or your own memory banks for prayer concerns that you may have forgotten or just heard about or that simply beg for your attention. Devi mentions Wordsworth's daffodils; you might instead choose or form a short prayer along the lines of the prayers I mention here....

Make me an instrument of your peace.

Yes.

Lord Jesus, have mercy.

I want to dwell in you.

---

Back in 2011, I wrote about reading Pasternak's words about time as I sat waiting my turn at the bank branch in Elektrostal.

(End of repost. Original is here.)

---

John Kinney speaks to Spokane Friends on abundance and scarcity.

Elizabeth Glass Turner calmly considers American evangelicals and the Epstein files.

Luis Parrales: The raw experience of love restored writer Christopher Beha's faith, or at least the possibility of faith. "Beha’s response is to describe himself as 'a skeptical believer'; for him, moments of certainty commingle with moments of doubt." Such restorations have happened to other writers, too.

---

Also at Reedwood Friends Church: Last Wednesday we welcomed musician Dann Pell and his resonator guitars for a wonderful evening of music.

Some of his songs reminded me of the bard tradition in Russia, though in Dann Pell's case, there is an amazing balance between the poetry and spirituality of the lyrics and his intense and often intricate fingering.

Dann is from Exeter Friends Meeting of Caln Quarter in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. He's originally from Chester County, which, a lifetime ago, I knew well....

Don't miss a chance to hear him yourself, or invite him to your meeting or church. Here's a video that gives you a better sense than my words could.