(Re)learning my mother tongue

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My first passport.

For me, a former language teacher, there's nothing more humbling than studying a language I thought I already knew.

Family lore says that I spoke three languages before kindergarten: Norwegian, German, and English. In my birth home, Oslo, in my father's parents' home, I was surrounded by Norwegian. Then I lived with my German grandparents in Stuttgart, and German came naturally. During my English-speaking growing-up years in the Chicago area, I often returned to both sets of grandparents and the languages of my earliest years.

Roughly seven decades later, I don't have the same level of confidence at all with those first two languages. So now, long after my language-learning window has closed, neurologically speaking, I'm determined to get some of that confidence back. At least in Norwegian.

Well, I do have a head start, a passive knowledge of probably several hundred words. (Just for context, and humility ... according to Google, the average English speaker knows 20-40,000 words, and even a five-year old might know 5,000!)

Continuing the theme of head start and humility, a whole bunch of those several hundred words are cognates or near-cognates:

• a ball - en ball
• a bank - en bank
• a boat - en båt 
• a book - ei bok
• a bush - en busk 
• a cake - ei kake 
• a cat - ei katt 
• a clock - en klokke
• a cow - ei ku
• a daughter - ei datter 
• a day - en dag 
• a door - ei dør 
• a fish - en fisk
• a flag - et flagg
• a garage - et garasje 
• a glass - et glass 
• a goat - ei geit 
• a hammer - en hammer 
• a house - et hus  
• a night - en natt 
• a plant - en plante 
• a sea - en sjø 
• a ship - et skip
• a son - en sønn
• a tree - et tre 
• a window - et vindu 
• grass - gress 
• paper - papir

Almost as close:

• an airplane - et fly
• a brother - en bror
• a dog - en hund (compare English hound)
• an enemy - en fiende (compare English fiend)
• a father - en far
• a horse - en hest
• a place - et sted (as in English bedstead, homestead, instead of)
• a morning - en morgen
• a mother - ei mor
• a shirt - en skjorte
• a sister - ei søster
• a skirt - et skjørt
• a stone - en stein 
• a word - et ord
• environment - miljø (compare with milieu)
• food - mat (compare with English meat, which once meant food in general)
• hi! - hei!
• goodbye! - adjø! (compare French adieu!)

See how much Norwegian you and I already know?! And don't those words sound sort of like an echo of an ancient form of English? Thanks to Bnorsk.no for many of these examples and many other cognates (verbs, adjectives, etc.) you can find there.

My head start only goes so far; it disappears when I start dealing with a noun's gender. Some Norwegians divide all nouns into two genders, common and neuter. But others prefer to observe the division of common nouns into masculine with the indefinite article "en" (a son - en sønn) or feminine with the indefinite article "ei" (a book - ei bok). In any case, I need to learn the noun's article along with the noun.

To compensate, Norwegian verbs don't conjugate according to subject or pronoun. Whew!

I'm delicately skipping over the subjects of pronunciation and tonality.

I have two different ways of working with my remnant of passive Norwegian. I read textbooks of varying difficulty (such as the three pictured above) and Web sites such as ntnu.edu/now; I enjoy the little bursts of pleasure that I get when I realize that I understand the texts, either by knowing the full words or by recognizing the root words and the word-units in compound words, allowing me to guess their meanings. Context helps, too; I'm more likely to understand political and theological texts than, for example, poetry. It's fun to pick and choose among the various methods and levels of those different resources rather than just sticking to one of them.

This works for increasing my reading and vocabulary abilities. However, I need more help with listening comprehension (this is the area we focused on when we lived in Russia, teaching English) and much more help in speaking. For that, I abandon all pretense of being an advanced learner, and drill myself in the very basics, using Duolingo. I patiently work through exercise after exercise of speaking into the microphone when so instructed, patiently constructing sentences with the right word order, and reviewing my mistakes. Note to self: the word "my" comes after that noun that is mine.

My grandmother Gerd Jakobsen Maurer. Above her,
my great-great grandfather Johan Fredrik Maurer.

There's a practical side to this activity, aside from the alleged benefit in preventing or postponing Alzheimer's disease: in a month I plan to be attending the combined Nordic Yearly Meeting in Stavanger, Norway. It will serve as an exam of sorts, and already serves as powerful motivation. 

But the best part of these efforts is the way I feel reconnected to my fascinating and very literate grandmother, with whom I spent many hours in conversation from my first years until her death in 1988.

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The photo of my grandmother comes from this post back in 2005. I still see her and my grandfather in my dreams ... where they're usually speaking English, which they both spoke very well.

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Another advantage of immersing myself in relearning a language: a respite from the day's news.

There's no respite in Ukraine.

Timothy Snyder on the reasons he moved to Toronto last year (and things that were not reasons).

Walter Brueggemann died today. The news and the legacy. Rest in peace!

Michael Marsh invites us to think about our deathbed prayer. (Not a morbid post at all.)

Britain Yearly Meeting's 2025 epistle ... "We are reminded that the central message of the New Testament is one of love." Good, I think so, too, but Mark Russ has a caution.

Three more days to register for the annual sessions of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends. Location: Reedwood Friends Church, across the street from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. (Online attendance is possible for the main sessions and some of the workshops.)

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Austin John, "Long Distance Call." (The whole set is excellent.)

Nancy French ... on not bearing false witness

Source.

Eiffel Tower, Paris, Tennessee Nancy French's home town. Source.

Nancy French, Instagram, 2024. Source.

This high praise for Nancy French's book Ghosted: An American Story from Christianity Today editor Russell Moore will save me a lot of words:

I didn't know writing could be this haunting and hilarious, heartbreaking and exhilarating all at the same time. I did not want it to end. This tour de force of storytelling and sense-making is one of the most gripping and beautiful memoirs in a generation.

Nancy French was born and raised in the Appalachian foothills, a grandchild of the mountain culture, and grew up in a church community that nurtured her faith and gave her love and care ... until the devastating day that it didn't. She attended a Church of Christ college ... until she couldn't stomach the chapel's lazy positivity and stopped attending, even though chapel attendance was compulsory.

As a result, at age twenty, "by now my affection for Rush Limbaugh and church had disappeared and I considered myself a feminist, atheist, liberal." That was the moment when she encountered David French, a Republican Christian law student, an encounter that resulted in a restoration of faith (well, not the exact same faith), a marriage that has lasted three decades and counting—and a career in ghostwriting for Republicans that didn't last quite as long.

Obviously, there's nothing terribly linear about French's story, with each swoop and dive reflecting something of the wrenching spiritual, political, and cultural turmoil of her country in those decades. Her story includes betrayal, giddy hope, predators protected by churches, miracles, allies lost and found—it's a good thing she's an excellent storyteller! Take a look at these reviews for more of what I mean:

• A secular review (Publisher's Weekly).
• A review from a Christian viewpoint (in the late lamented publication Current).
• A slightly more critical review ("But I complain too much") in the Englewood Review of Books.

Ghosted has many important messages, including powerful testimony against the shame of being a childhood target of sexual assault in the church. I hope everyone who needs these messages will read this book. But there's something else that intrigued me as a lifelong lefty: the passing references to the way conservatives see us. I'm not necessarily talking now about who is objectively more correct about policy and morality; it's the cultural assumptions and conclusions that seemingly entitle them to dismiss us (and us them).

For example, here French is commenting on the reactions to the book she co-authored with Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol:

I’d thought that people of both parties would rally around Bristol and show her compassion. That’s not what happened. It slowly dawned on me that when the Democrats loudly proclaimed “believe all women,” they really meant “the right kind of women”—meaning not “right” on the political spectrum at all. I shouldn’t have been surprised. They had embraced Ted Kennedy, even though he flipped his car, sent his female passenger careening into a pond, and left her there to die. They revered Bill Clinton, even though he was credibly accused of rape by multiple women.

Bristol was well spoken and the book was clear. However, a nuanced, trauma-informed conversation did not arise from her revelations. Bristol told the truth, and Democrats laughed. After seeing how people mocked this young mother, I was fully confident the Democrats were not only wrong on the issue of women, they were callously wrong. They harbored and protected abusers of women, and Republicans alone would stand against sexual injustice.

In spite of my certainty, the truth turned out to be much more complicated than I thought.

Soon a major turning point for French came: the acclamation Donald Trump received from the very people whose ostensible values she cherished and represented in her writing, and who, as it turned out, turned against her and her husband when they found that contradiction intolerable. As those contradictions mounted up with every Trumpian assault on rhetorical decency, she lost many clients, and kept the few that agreed to her condition that she would not write pieces in favor of Trump.

In my mind, however, I made a vow: I would not bear false witness against my liberal neighbor.

That one decision was the beginning of the end of my political ghostwriting career.

I hope that progressives, even in the shadow of Donald Trump's devastating attacks on political and ethical norms, are willing to make the same commitment against bearing false witness against their (our) opponents.

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On the "conservative" label.

A grievously neglected commandment.

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Here's a podcast in which Julie Roys, a Christian investigative journalist who often focuses on church-related corruption and abuse, interviews Nancy French.

Back on March 27, Medardo Gómez, Lutheran bishop of El Salvador, died. He made a deep impression on me during a visit back in the time of the civil war and death squads. Rest in peace!

Christine Patterson on the importance of cultural intelligence for service in a divided world.

A poll suggests that Israelis increasingly hold genocidal views concerning Palestinians. Not coincidentally, the Israeli government announces the creation or "legalization" of 22 new settlements on the West Bank. Britain Yearly Meeting minutes its discernment that genocide is occurring in Gaza.

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Sue Foley, the "Ice Queen" of blues guitarists, gives us an extended solo....

Patriotism revisited

A 2023 USA naturalization ceremony. Source.

It is my intention in good faith to become a citizen of the United States and to renounce absolutely and entirely all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which at this time I am a subject or citizen.

I am, and have been during all of the periods required by law, a person of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.

—Extracts from the naturalization petition form used at the time my parents became U.S. citizens.

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Last week I wrote about the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and how postwar migrations and displacements brought my parents to the USA, where they met as university students. About five years after their arrivals as students, they became U.S. citizens.

I've been thinking again about the theme of patriotism, which has fascinated me both as a patriot (at least to my mind!) and as a Christian political scientist and pacifist. I noted the language in the naturalization petitions submitted by both of my parents, renouncing all other allegiances and claiming to be "attached to the principles of the Constitution" and "well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States."

As a legal standard that would-be U.S. citizens must meet, these promises seem to me to form a defensible definition of patriotism. Note that there is no requirement to agree that the USA is a better, superior, grander, more perfect country than any other on the planet.

1953 Chevy. Screenshot from source.

General Motors begged to differ, in an advertising jingle I remember from childhood:

See the USA in your Chevrolet.
America is asking you to call.
Drive your Chevrolet through the USA.
America's the greatest land of all.

Of course the USA is not the only country in the world whose citizens, or at least some of them, believe they live in "the greatest land of all." And, they might even be able to explain why they believe this. In the case of the USA, my idealistic preferred explanation to justify claims of the USA's greatness is John Gunther's famous line that the USA is "a country deliberately founded on a good idea"—an idea whose most succinct expression might be the first three words of the U.S. Constitution: "We the people...."

As an aspiration it is powerful, and it's part of our notorious American exceptionalism, but in these fractious times, are "we" still "we"? And as for "the people," is our government still, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "of the people, by the people, for the people"?

One thing seems clear to me about American patriotism. If it becomes detached from that "good idea," then it degrades into cultish compulsory slogans, chiefly useful for attacking one's political enemies.

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Back in 2012, while I was reading Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, I wrote a blog post with this question: What can Christians do to inoculate our nations against murderous and cultish forms of patriotism?

To me, the only healthy patriotism is functional, not mythological or tribal or cultic or anything involving ultimate loyalties that only God can claim. Functional patriotism treasures the mutual obligations of a nation's citizens, and gives us an investment in each other's success—not our own private aggrandizement. Functional patriotism promotes intelligent statecraft on the international stage, and the building up of institutions that promote trade and communication and prevent war. Functional patriotism encourages young people and newcomers to cherish the languages and cultures that we have the honor to host within our borders. Functional patriotism asks leaders to be as patriotic in deeds and sacrifice as those leaders want the rest of us to be. And functional patriotism understand that nations and empires come and go; they learn to recognize the limits that sustainability imposes so that the good things we stand for can last, and so the planet will flourish under our stewardship, not shrug us off on account of our abuse.

I'd love to think that we Christians can counter the blasphemies of cultic patriotism with the ethics of biblical discipleship and a style of participation that proclaims God's grace rather than our demands for privilege.

Here are some of my other blog posts on these themes.

On the roots of the USA's "City on a Hill" exceptionalism, and John Winthrop's "biblical modesty": Exceptional pride.
On being a "grateful immigrant": An immigrant/patriot revisits January 6.
On safety ... for whom? Safety and "the nature of the world in which we live."

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The last chapter of Clarence White's new book, I Changed My Mind About..., has a thoughtful chapter on what Christians' relationship to their country should be. Excerpt (with Clarence's permission):

Most people in this country who attend a church never struggle with the question of what the relation of a Christian to their country should be. This is a rich area to think about, and has its own constellation of tributary issues.

For most of my young life I did not question this either, until I went to seminary. As I learned to think theologically, my understanding of what is involved in this issue began to profoundly change. That change has made me an outlier among even my friends. Even people who respect me personally and theologically have trouble with my thinking in this area.

The shift in my thinking is connected to the change in my thinking about war, as I outlined in chapter 5 of this book. When I had the life-changing experience of having my eves opened about Christian non-violence as I sat in a Mexican restaurant with Professor Wil Cooper, it was probably a natural development from that experience that my thinking about how a Christian should relate to his or her nation would also evolve.

To me, the issue is the Lordship of Jesus Christ. When Wil Cooper told me our job is not to calculate contingencies of what may happen if we do or do not use force, but rather our task is to simply do what Jesus said to do in the Sermon on the Mount, I knew immediately in a profound way that Wil was right. As I have written, that shook me like nothing ever had in my life up to that point, and the vision of that has never waned in the subsequent 42 years. I was tremendously shaken, and 42 years later I have been completely unable to shake myself loose from the impact of this imperative.

For the rest of the chapter, see Clarence's blog, Ramblings of a Retired Theologian. The full book will be published June 1; the Kindle version is already available.

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Director Robin Truesdale has made her excellent film Sweet Home Monteverde (my review here) available on YouTube:

The Russian Federation's "root causes" for the invasion of Ukraine.

For Putin and his regime, Ukraine’s democracy, its aspirations for EU and NATO membership, and its cultural independence represent an existential threat to the authoritarian model they have constructed. Ukraine’s success would demonstrate to Russians that a different, more democratic future is also possible for them, a prospect the Kremlin finds intolerable.

Two recent posts from the Daily Quaker Message: Ukrainian Quakers React to the War and Conscientious Objectors in Japan.

A useful overview of Friends Peace Teams, prepared for the annual meeting of Friends World Committee for Consultation, Europe and Middle East Section. (I serve on the Europe and Middle East team of Friends Peace Teams.)

Nathan Perrin on community and legacy vs isolation and chaos.

One of the valuable lessons we can take from both Mennonites and Sámi is that legacies that go on are the ones that are communal in nature. The communities that survive are the ones that dare to remember and, even more surprising, dare to celebrate. They have both lived through centuries of persecution through intentional love and service.

U.S. democracy continues to decompose daily before our eyes. Heather Cox Richardson. The Contrarian.

Wess Daniels on empires, good shepherds, refugees, and the Gospel of John, chapter ten.

Has the "Global Aid Industry," for better or worse, come to an end? 

Nancy Thomas and a harvest of poems from Psalm 119.

“Open my eyes that I may see….” Psalm 119:18, GIMEL

Open my eyes, Lord,
when the Bible gets boring.
When familiarity stiffens my brain cells
and my heart feels paralyzed;
when legality repulses
and the light grows dim,
open my eyes, Lord.

I am a stranger on earth,
an alien among ordinary people,
an imposter in church—
unsanctified, blind
and mostly silent.
How will your commands bind my wounds?
Will they bring me
to the place where I can say,
Your statutes are my delight!?

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A great place to be: Nathan James and the late James Harman at the Blues City Deli.

80 years ago

Peace doves, Catherine Park, Moscow. Victory Day 2015

WWII in 24 minutes, from origins to aftermath. Screenshot from video World War II Summary on a Map.

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Last week we observed the 80th anniversary of V-E Day.

Ten years ago, Russia's version of Victory in Europe Day, May 9, occurred on the day Moscow Friends met for our weekly worship. We met that day in a theater not far from Moscow's Dostoevsky Museum, and afterwards we visited the Victory Day celebrations in progress at nearby Catherine Park. That's where we saw those peace doves, pictured above.

Victory Day in Elektrostal, Russia, 2010.

A lot can be said about Russia's Victory Day observances—both the enduring importance of remembering the human cost of that victory for practically every family in the former USSR ... and also the exploitation of Victory Day by Russia's current leadership, particularly as they now portray the war in Ukraine as a continuation of that sacred struggle against Nazi forces.

World War II has a deep fascination for me, too. My mother lived in Japan from her birth in 1929 to her family's expulsion to West Germany in 1948, the result of a U.S. policy that expelled all resident Germans from Japan. As I found out during our visit to Japan in 2018, her father joined the Nazi party in 1934.

In what became West Germany, my mother began her university studies in Heidelberg, but then went as an exchange student to Northwestern University in the Chicago area, where she met my father, who was an exchange student as well. He came from the University of Oslo. His father had been an officer in Norway's resistance army, fighting the German occupiers, so his parents' surprise at their son's choice of bride was understandable. (Their other child, my father's sister, married an American soldier in Oslo.)

It's just about impossible to take in the total human cost of that war—the cost in lives and limbs, the grief among survivors, the destruction of housing and workplaces in many places, and the displacement of whole populations. My own peculiar origin story is part of that sweeping narrative: my parents might never have met if my mother and her family had not been evicted from their adopted homeland.

One of the questions I can never answer satisfactorily is what lessons our species has learned from that war. The postwar international institutions that the WWII victors set up have seemingly prevented wars of a similar scale since 1945, although a tacit part of the deal was that the USA took over much of the imperial role that the UK was forced to relinquish. As a country, we've had a hard time accepting criticism for our less-than-perfect stewardship of global power. Even so, there was an undeniable portion of idealism in those postwar arrangements, much to the apparent distaste of the USA's current leadership.

I've also meditated on the micro scale: what must it have been like for my mother to grow up as a child and teenager in the Nazi sphere of influence and then in total warfare? On this last Mother's Day, I gave a sermon at Silverton Friends Church, in which I mentioned the importance of these meditations for my slowly growing capacity to "honor my father and mother" despite the violence and "master race" mentality that we children witnessed in our family's life. When I was comforted by those who told me that "your parents did the best they could," I used to get irritated. Why did alcohol seem so much more important than us kids? Now I am learning to allow for factors in my parent's lives that I've never had to experience personally: total dictatorship and total war, starting in childhood. I owe it to them—and myself—to consider their own share of World War II's global tragedy, and grow accordingly in compassion. If they had not made certain decisions in favor of life, I would not exist.

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Some of my other posts on World War II and related themes:

• The Storm of War
• Other people's patriotism
• Over fifty million
• Bloodlands, part one
• How the Grinch stole Hiroshima
• Idealism and reality, part two
• Your obedient servant

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Kristin Du Mez: For certain Christian followers of the U.S. president, there is no corruption.

Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian: new rules for travelers entering the USA.

A lifeblood of Quaker community: Brian Drayton on Friends traveling in the ministry.

Scot Loyd: "Jesus didn't die for our country—he died because of it."

Jeremy Morris (commenting on recent research on Russians' sense of stability and satisfaction): on being happy in a Mercedes and on "the ludicrous optimism of minimal expectations."

The socially galvanizing effect of war short of rally-round-the-flag is what I call ‘defensive consolidation’. Fears and foreboding are real and remain massively underacknowledged in research, but the sense of ‘the world is against us, so we have to find sources of satisfaction in the now’ in consumption, in leisure, in socially meaningful work, in geopolitical resentment even, is also palpable.

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My tiny rebellion as a high school student: in TV production class, making a video on a risky subject, using a track from an album I wasn't allowed to play at home:

I went down on 31st Street just to buy me a drink of alcohol.
I went down on 31st Street, buy me a drink of alcohol.
Told the man to put in some water but he wouldn't put in a drop at all.

Then I was drinking my straight alcohol, went wobbling on down the street.
Drinking my, drinking my straight alcohol, went wobbling on down the street.
Yeah, but my head got so heavy, my eyes couldn't take a peek.

Yeah, but my baby said, "J.B., J.B., you ain't no good at all."
My baby said, "Hey, J.B., J.B., you ain't no good at all.
She said, "You ran around on the West Side, and then drank too much alcohol."

Speaking of speaking

Source.  

My heart is pounding, words are lining up impatiently at the tip of my tongue, the silent room suddenly feels as if it's holding its breath, I'm starting to tremble.... Should I speak? 

The first time I had this experience in a Quaker meeting for worship was around Christmas 1974, at Uwchlan Meeting in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. I knew the theoretical answer to my urgent question. In the words of Ruth M. Pitman in the Canadian Friend magazine (later published as "On the Vocal Ministry"): 

It is understood in such a Meeting that any messages that are spoken strive to be God’s word for these people at this time; that is, no one will speak unless he has prayerfully considered two questions: whether the message is God’s or his own, and whether it should be given to these people now, or is for the individual alone.

But I had been among Friends for only a few months, and furthermore, this particular group was not my home meeting.  Who was I to say whether God was the source of my thoughts in this time and place? What business did I have interrupting this peaceful assembly?

I did overcome my self-doubts, and spoke a message on spiritual power in the context of the recent oil embargo. I make no claims as to the merits of this first message, but the experience felt like a sort of baptism.

These were the memories that came back to me as as I began to read Rhiannon Grant's new book in the "Quaker Quicks" series: Speaking in Quaker Meeting for Worship: what, when, how, and why? I wish a guide like hers had been available to me five decades ago!

Confession: I approached the book with some initial skepticism, which may say more about my prejudices than anything about the book or author. First of all, Rhiannon Grant's Quaker community is Britain Yearly Meeting, which despite its variety is typically described as liberal. Its meetings for worship are, except for special occasions, unprogrammed (see this post for a bit about "programmed" and "unprogrammed"). Although I spent my first eight years as a Friend in similar cultures in Canadian, New England, and Baltimore Yearly Meetings, the rest of my Quaker experience of forty-plus years have mainly been among programmed Friends served by pastors. Would any of her observations apply where I live?

My second apprehension: would a book-length (even a Quaker Quicks-length) treatment come across as an attempt to groom the aesthetically perfect unprogrammed meeting, pitched to the comfort level of Atlantic-culture demographics in terms of class, education, verbal fluency, and long attention spans, or would there be room for Holy Spirit spontaneity, of grief, ecstasy, confession, prophecy, song, all that potentially attaches to Quakers quaking? 

My apprehensions were unfounded.

First of all, Rhiannon Grant is clear about her own Quaker context, but is aware of the range of worship styles among Friends, including programmed worship. More importantly, her practical guidance on speaking in worship seems to me to apply to any Friends meeting in which time is set aside for what programmed Friends often call "open worship." As she says early on, "The understanding of this book is that when we are open and willing in the stillness of meeting for worship, any of us can be moved to speak." That's why "any of us" can benefit from her observations.

She doesn't address the specific situation of a Friends pastor or regular speaker preparing a sermon, but even here many of her suggestions would be useful. It's clear that in her culture, advance preparation of a message is usually inappropriate—but there is no hint of taboo. (My own belief is that the work of worship-planning and sermon-writing should be surrounded by the same level of sensitivity that we expect in meeting for worship. I'm sometimes startled by how similar sermon-writing can be to giving spontaneous messages in unprogrammed worship.)

Another feature of Grant's book: its kind, unpretentious, open-ended tone, often grounded in personal experience, with touches of humor. Examples:

Contrasting ordinary speech with ministry during worship: (Link added.)

In ministry, by contrast, the majority of the source is inspiration: even if I have done a little bit of planning, like being asked to read from Advices & Queries, I wait to be led to speak and to feel what would be right to read. Usually, I don't speak at all unless that strong inspiration arrives. There will still be a little bit of me in there—including whatever I feel about having to speak in front of others—but ego is in the minority and the promptings of love and truth are in the lead.

There can be times when it is hard to tell which element is strongest. Am I really inspired to say this, or do I want to say it? Am I sharing this story about having a wonderful spiritual experience on holiday because it's brought me insight, or because I want other people to know about my holiday and my spirituality?

When you have finished saying what you have been given to say:

After giving ministry, there can be a sense of relief. If you experience physical sensations like shaking, they might either stop or briefly get worse. Sometimes I experience a wave of anxiety about the mundane social side of the situation—in my discernment process, I focussed on the message, and it's only afterwards that I ask myself whether I said something ridiculous and whether everyone hates me now.

What about theology? Rhiannon Grant explicitly says that theology is a secondary concern for this book, and refers readers to her books that focus more directly on theology. As a self-described evangelical Quaker (sometimes in despair that the word "evangelical" doesn't communicate what I stubbornly think it ought to!), I'm guessing that she and I are probably not in the exact same place. This book, however, communicates a warm theological hospitality that enhances rather than weakens the practical guidance she gives for speaking in worship.

One of her book's great virtues is that it simultaneously honors and demythologizes the ministry of speaking in worship. Grant recognizes its high value as a way God shapes us as a community and guides us toward other ways of ministering to our world. At the same time, she considers all the various temperaments we find among us, including those who speak too readily, and those who feel totally unready to speak at all. She describes various ways that spoken ministry can derail a meeting for worship—and how Friends might respond—but also points out that disruption might at times be God's actual intent! She holds up the precious service of elders or other experienced Friends who can encourage the budding minister or help those whose ministry can be unhelpful. She considers the practice of "afterword" or "afterwords," a time after the end of the worship when thoughts that did not seem to rise to the level of ministry during worship—perhaps less than prophecy but more than casual discussion—can be shared with the group. She describes a variety of ways to organize this supplementary opportunity, and outlines their advantages and disadvantages.

Grant's book is well-organized. Her first few chapters define her terms and concepts, and would be helpful to anyone mystified by how we Friends use terms that mean different things among us than they do in the wider world. After some basic observations on worship among Friends, she describes the ways that speaking contributes to the depth and power of worship, and the general patterns that often prevail when things are going well.

Then: when things are not going so well, what might be happening, and how might we respond? Her list of possible dysfunctions is telling...

• Popcorn ministry (too many messages too quickly, without enough time in between to absorb them or to discern one's own participation)
• A message is too long
• Predictable ministry
• Absent ministry
• Inappropriate ministry, and
• Is it really wrong?

On that last point, it's worth quoting her directly:

It isn't always clear about how to draw a boundary about what's acceptable or not, and being told to trust your discernment might only make things worse if discernment is not already a strong and regular practice in your life. Add in issues of politeness, status, insecurity about belonging to the community, challenges around the role of authority without hierarchy, along with some questions about theology, which touch on very personal religious matters, and the situation is undoubtedly sometimes very difficult.

...

If my community is also a body, I have to expect that the painful will come with the pleasurable and that things I don't notice and can't control will be happening alongside the things where I have some choice. It's part of the gift of being together.

The following sections of the book help us apply all these insights to ourselves, our own discernment on whether or not to speak, how we speak, and how we then return to the quiet center from which our ministry arose. Finally, Grant addresses questions of assistive technology, online and hybrid worship, and the sometimes awkward questions arising from these newer modes of worship. She ends her book with a list of print and online resources.

If your Friends meeting or church uses this book in a discussion group or a class for newcomers, I think you'll be delighted with its scope. Rhiannon Grant succeeds in linking her central topic—speaking in meeting for worship—with just about all aspects of our life as a worshipping community. Her approach is grounded but not rigid, and should lead to many fertile conversations.

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Here is an older guide to "Open Worship" including whether and when to speak during worship. It was adapted from a pamphlet written by the late Stan Thornburg, who served Friends churches in Mid-America and Northwest Yearly Meetings. His chart has been used and adapted to various formats in several Friends meetings and churches.

And here again is the link to Ruth M. Pitman's "On the Vocal Ministry." Ruth Pitman identifies with Conservative Friends and has been a frequent contributor to Quaker Religious Thought. In this post from 2017, I said more about Pitman's tract and my first experience of speaking in meeting.

Patrick Nugent's article (1996) "On Speaking in Meeting for Worship" appeared in this issue of Friends Journal, starting on page seven.

Here are Friends' opinions on the use of queries as framing for open worship, part one, part two.

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Mass Observation, May 12. Are you in the UK? Are you planning to participate in this national diary? (With thanks to Rebecca Rosewarne for the link.) Does your country have a similar archive project?

Revoking international students' visas "makes America smaller, not stronger." I have a Palestinian friend, a young doctor who is scheduled to arrive soon for a residency in the USA, so these days I'm very alert to this concern.

Mondoweiss on Gaza: Israeli forces are working toward making Gaza uninhabitable for its current population, but they are running low on soldiers.

May's theme at the Daily Quaker Message is peace and nonviolence. I continue to appreciate these daily posts. Here's Tuesday's post, with a quote from Duncan Wood.

Sarah Thomas Baldwin: When we "spiritually amphibious creatures" can't quite find our souls.

Beth Woolsey's Irrational Joy Project. (Also: "...wallowing is an underrated stage of grief.")

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Here (audio only) is the late Joe Louis Walker's version of "Wade in the Water." Rest in peace.

Love, theoretically

Source.  

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FCNL via Facebook

friendsincubator.org

fwcc.world

Three of the gospels tell the story of the rich man who asked Jesus what he (the questioner) needed to do to get eternal life. Jesus sums up the commandments, and the man says that he's been observing them all his life. Jesus says that he lacks just one thing: he needs to sell all he has, give the proceeds to people in poverty, and follow Jesus.

Matthew. Mark. Luke.

I remember one particular sermon on this passage. Judy and I were on Boston Common on a rainy day in October 1979, on the first day of Pope John Paul II's visit that fall to the USA. In his sermon, the Pope pointed out a detail that only Mark's version has: namely, "...what the young man in the Gospel experienced : 'Jesus looked at him with love' (Mark 10:21)," before explaining what the cost of his hopes would be.

The love of Christ is unconditional; it precedes our response. The response that Jesus gave the wealthy man was not just theoretical, saying "yes" to a doctrine; it was practical. And if the first part of the advice to the man seemed difficult (and Jesus says it will be, for it's harder for a rich person to enter heaven than for a camel to go through a needle's eye), the second part of the advice is more than compensation: "Then come, follow me." In other words, you won't be alone.

With a certain bit of irony, Jesus expands on this compensation:

... No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.

The way Jesus looked at the inquirer—with love—is the way he looks at each of us. No exceptions, as the Friends Committee on National Legislation campaign puts it. And as I've mentioned before, we are to "regard" each other the same way.

At least, that's the theory. The important thing in my life was that, having decided to trust Jesus, I did not have to work out the practical implications alone! The nuclear family that didn't understand or like my conversion receded into the background (not entirely, of course) and my earliest emotional support came from my Canadian relatives, with whom I was living as I went through all the stages of grief at losing one sister to murder and another because of being asked to leave my home. Then Ottawa Friends, and wider circles of Canadian Friends, came alongside me. They decided to make this utter newbie a representative to the Friends World Committee's triennial sessions in Hamilton, Ontario, and I soon realized I had a global family. A couple of years later, I was serving that extended Quaker family in Boston, Massachusetts, and there I met my life companion, Judy.

Now many of us are in a season of persecutions. The values that are precious to us, particularly equality and nonviolence, are under sustained attack. On a more doctrinal level, the gospel is being grievously misrepresented by Christian nationalists and their toxic enmeshment with state power—and not just in the USA.

Again: we don't have to work out the implications alone! Our Quaker and ecumenical and interfaith networks are alongside us. Our traveling Friends ministers and community-building events (see posters above) can give us ideas and spiritual refreshment from far and near. The gift-based division of labor means that we equally treasure our mystics and our activists, our evangelists and tax refusers, our street theater organizers and our potluck dinner organizers. They are all part of the "hundreds of times as much in this present age...."

There are three particular gifts that I want to hold up, and they're closely related. First: how do we extend the blessing of no exceptions to those who seem to be spreading counterfeit gospels at the expense of immigrants and other marginalized people, not to mention the reputation of the gospel itself? After we get good and angry (speaking personally, here!), then what? I love the idea of the "Truth Brigade" Judy mentioned in this post, and hope that those of us who are suited to, and called to, this kind of ministry of fierce love will find encouragement for their work.

Second: we need evangelists who understand that all our theories of love will atrophy if our communities are closed to new people, and when we subconsciously assume that all marginalized people are external beneficiaries rather than being among us as equal participants. So ... to the gifted evangelists still among us: please forgive us when we seem to pretend that you don't even exist; and help us identify the barriers and filters that too often result in welcoming only people who match our prevailing demographics.

Third: we need pastors and elders who understand the rhythms of enthusiasm and discouragement, help us when we get on each other's nerves, and know how to help us spell each other as needed.

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"Love Your Neighbour" is not just a Friends Committee on National Legislation campaign, it is also the theme of this year's World Quaker Day, October 5.

Another occasion of mutual care in the global family: the Africa Section of the Friends World Committee for Consultation is hosting the next FWCC global online meeting for worship on June 8, 4:00 p.m. Nairobi time.

"Love in Motion: Friends Traveling in Ministry" (see graphic above): Brian Drayton will help us consider the specific role of traveling in the ministry, which I see as part of the ways we can be each other's encouragement in challenging times. This online presentation and discussion is scheduled for May 21, 8:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Eastern U.S. time. (By the way, Brian Drayton signed Judy's and my certificate of marriage for the registry of vital records in Boston, nearly 45 years ago.)

"Dear Pope Francis": Diana Hadjiyane writes about Francis, community, and ecumenism from her Eastern Orthodox perspective.

Speaking of love, Levi Gaytán's "wildest dreams" came true. 

Elderchaplain Greg Morgan:

.... Death sometimes arrives with no forewarning: a massive heart attack, a brain aneurysm, an accident. Past a certain age, though, we are more likely to die from conditions that progress relatively slowly: cancer, congestive heart failure, or simply old age. This is largely a blessing, I think, as it gives both the dying person and their loved ones time to prepare, and to share conversations that can be among the most intimate and meaningful of their lives.

But this blessing brings with it a challenge....

The monthly gathering of the Bremerton (Washington) Friends worship group is happening again this Sunday at 4 p.m.

The latest United Nations humanitarian situation reports on Palestine: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

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Another global family, Playing for Change, presents their version of "Crossroads."