The Spirit of Freedom

The online book launch of the new book by Mark Russ, The Spirit of Freedom: Quaker-shaped Christian Theology, takes place on Tuesday, November 26, 7:30 - 8:30 pm, UK time. More information on registering for this free program, and buying the book, is on Mark's blog. Again: November 26—see you "there."

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Usually I start a book review with a quotation from the book that (to me) expresses the heart of the author's message. In reviewing the places I've highlighted in The Spirit of Freedom, I see that I have marked 73 notable passages in a 99-page book. It's that rich!

In his preface, Mark Russ states that he is writing "unsystematic theology," in contrast with academic theologians who may spend a lifetime "seeking to fit all the pieces of the theological jigsaw puzzle into a neat and tidy pattern." However, his book is well-organized, starting with an exploration of the theology of British Quakers' Advices and Queries, especially those advices that concern our relationship with God, our devotional life, the constancy of our prayer, and the ways we live together with those whose experiences of God may differ from our own.

After these fertile chapters on the spiritual disciplines of British Friends, and the theological content and implications of those disciplines, Russ turns to a series of topics that are often awkward for contemporary Quakers, particularly in the liberal Quakerism of Britain Yearly Meeting: evil and sin. His treatment of the reality of evil is "both sobering and hopeful"—arguing for a view of evil and human freedom that does not charge God as the author of evil, but, instead, observing that evil is what happens when we (even in the pursuit of good things) turn from the Light and "become less freely our true selves."

Other challenges arise in our spiritual lives when we encounter times of spiritual coldness, or when we feel our hopes have been betrayed.

I said that God will not allow us to live in denial. Neither will God leave us to despair. The Light not only reveals our sin, it renews our courage to persevere. When we let go of reliance on our own strength, we can be filled with the strength of God. When we give up the need to be "good people," we can rest in the love of the Creator whose creation is fundamentally good. Out of the heart that trusts in God shall flow rivers of living, spiritual water (John 7.38), refreshing and rejuvenating. We may be able to find this spring alone, but the work is much easier when we undertake it together in a worshipping community.

The more power, wealth and privilege we have, the harder our hearts will become and the harder it is to let in the Light. We shouldn't expect change from the hard-hearted leaders of the nations any time soon. We need to show them how it's done.

Mark Russ often weaves together the individual's trials and discoveries and the life of the community. One very helpful chapter examines how that weaving of individual and corporate ministry can happen during our worship together. In a succeeding chapter, he describes how some communities can "squash" our ideas and initiatives—yes, even among Friends! I would like every such congregation to hear Mark's words: "Our job is not preservation but renewal. We are not curating a museum but messily making the artworks ourselves."

One source of disillusionment for many idealistic Quakers can come from our inability to convince our whole community—maybe our whole yearly meeting—to take up a cause that seems self-evidently urgent to us. Russ candidly discusses the actual hard work that it might take to give a concern sufficient visibility, but also points out that our leading to take a stand may be for you and me, and not our whole diverse community.

After I enthusiastically joined Quakers in my late teens, I gradually learned that the Quaker community can't give me everything I need. I've had to let the ideal Quaker community in my imagination die. What I can expect of my Quaker community is that they will offer me a space to seek the energizing presence of the Spirit, take my experience of the Spirit seriously, and give me the support and tools to test what I think the Spirit is leading me to do. Fellow Quaker Martin Kelley said to me on social media: "I think at its best, Quakerism gives individuals non-judgmental community support to try something unproven, risky, or just a bit odd. Sometimes this slowly coalesces into a group norm but in the meantime, it's the building of individual leadings that starts change." What matters is if the work is Spirit-led, not that the work is labeled as "Quaker."

The last chapters of The Spirit of Freedom are encounters with aspects of our human diversity that can enrich us, if (as the author demonstrates) we apply the tools of theology to expand and humanize them. Our Quaker resistance to "times and seasons" (the liturgical calendar, for example) is open to challenge: are we insisting on living in abstractions rather than acknowledging our human reality?

To say that all days are equal risks every day becoming dull and grey. A testimony against times and seasons that don't address the way we are creatures of time isn't a sustainable testimony

A further consideration for post-Christian British Quakers involves calendars rooted in the Christian year. Typically, Mark Russ doesn't prescribe an ideal resolution, but opens up a deeper conversation.

The next chapter, "Bear Theology," describes the spiritual blessings of open affection among gay men: "The more time I spend in the company of body-loving bears, who are not afraid to express their friendship through physical affection, the more my internalized homophobia is chipped away." His chapter on "A Quaker Theology of Trans Inclusion" includes a profound treatment of what it means to change our name, and the transformation (and continuity) involved with a new body.

Few of us are who our parents expected us to be. All of us have much to learn about who we are. One day we will all see one another face to face, and I expect many of us will be surprised.

The final chapter, "Quaker Theology and Whiteness," represents, according to Mark Russ,  "... a new stage in my theological journey" ... one that will no doubt result in other helpful contributions from Mark Russ to Quaker theology in the future. He makes his motivation clear: "Whiteness has a long history of entanglement with theology." And not just theology in the abstract; through personal experiences, the author shows how even "good" Quakers can find themselves caught in that entanglement. He uses the concept of "sin" creatively to open up his topic, and explores both the insights and the limitations of early Quaker theologian Robert Barclay in confronting this particular embedded sin.

Although Mark Russ wrote the chapters of The Spirit of Freedom over a period of more than ten years, the book has a natural flow. It's coherent and compelling. His voice is always empowering, never shaming. He honors his own central query for doing theological work: "Does our God-talk help us to flourish, or does it diminish us?" I believe this book will help us flourish—and it makes the hard work that this will require seem very worthwhile.

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As in his previous book, Quaker Shaped Christianity, Mark Russ specifies that he's primarily addressing the Quaker culture he himself experiences—that of British Quakers today. However, he also welcomes conversations with the worldwide Quaker community. He is open about his own Christian orientation, which is a precious grounding for his many insights and commitments, but there's no hint of Christian territorialism or triumphalism in his writings.

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Friends Committee on National Legislation asks us (in the USA) to call our Senators as soon as possible in support of the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to block offensive weapons shipments to Israel. Floor votes are expected this next week. For FCNL's guidance and assistance on this campaign, follow this link.

Esau McCaulley on Threads: (... and see the comments, too.)

For us christians writing and thinking in the public square: What do we have to say that is not already being said by secular pundits and analysts on the right and the left? What is distinctively Christian about our witness in this moment and not a baptism of political ideas that come from elsewhere.

Two thoughtful articles in The Guardian on our recent U.S. election. Oliver Hall, a phone-bank volunteer; and Ben Davis, a democratic socialist who works in political data.

What do you think of Timothy Snyder's chain of submission?

"Rejecting the bargain": Kristin Kobes Du Mez cites Robert Jones's research showing how massively U.S. Christians supported the winners of our recent national elections. Then she goes on ...

For Christians who are deeply troubled by this strong show of support for a candidate and platform that seem to undermine core Christian teachings, the decision to attend church the Sunday after the election was a fraught one. Some pastors, too, wrestled with whether or how to address our political reality from the pulpit.

(What actually happened at her church? Keep reading.)

In the Russian Reader blog: Making Russia Great Again. (Don't draw hasty conclusions from the first item in this post... please keep reading.)

At some point I will stop hiding behind other people's links and attempt to write some first principles of my own concerning the outcome of November 5. I'm just not quite ready yet. Of course I'd love to hear from you.

The Daily Quaker: A daily devotional e-mail with Quaker quotations. 

Each email has three parts: a query to ground you; a message to inspire you; and an invitation to participate in a spiritual exercise. 

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I'm in the mood for some raw Charlie Musselwhite,who's a long, long way from home. (Part of a Mark Hummel blues harp blowout.)

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Saying goodbye

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Toward the end of her book Goodbye to Russia, Sarah Rainsford, BBC reporter who was expelled from Russia in 2021 as a "security threat," wrote:

Still in our kitchen.

When I got kicked out, people would tell me it was a 'badge of honour' and congratulate me for getting under the Kremlin's skin. At first that niggled, because I still felt the loss. The remnants of my many years in Russia as either student or reporter were all around me in London, as reminders of the enormous time and effort I'd invested. My bookshelves were loaded with Russian literature and history. I had crates full of notebooks from reporting trips across the country and a phone full of contacts and friends I'd probably never see. Even squeezing the last drop of shampoo from a bottle marked in Cyrillic script felt stupidly like the end of an era.

Six months later, the invasion of Ukraine killed that nostalgia dead. Reporting from the Donbas at first, and then places like Bucha, I was documenting what Russia was doing instead of being forced to hear its denials and distortions.

When I returned from Ukraine in March, I binned all the Putin mugs. For a long time I couldn't bear to see any of the Russia stuff. I couldn't bear even to continue writing this book.

The two books I'm recommending today both offer intense exposure to the realities of today's Russia. Sarah Rainsford's book hit me more personally: it reminded me of my own experiences in Russia on almost every page. She started studying Russian at the same age I did. Her first experiences in the country were at age 18 (in 1992); mine didn't happen until I was 22 (in 1975). I returned to Russia, often to attend board meetings of a Quaker organization, nearly every year between 1994 and 2007, the year we began our ten-year period of service in Elektrostal under Quaker sponsorship. Rainsford spent twenty years as a BBC reporter in Russia, many of those years overlapping with my visits or with our residency in Elektrostal.

Rainsford's book opens with her personal experience of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. At that moment she was in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, and she vividly describes the buildup of tensions just prior to those first hours of invasion, as well as the opening blows of the invasion itself. Her book is framed by those February events, and how it has influenced her relationship to a country into which she invested much of her life.

Much of the book is a well-organized succession of journalistic experiences accompanied by her candid personal reflections. Many events and tragedies of her years as a BBC reporter and producer in Russia may be familiar to you: the incompetent response to the sinking of the submarine Kursk in 2000; the mass tragedy of September 2004 among the students and parents of Beslan, and the death of Anna Politkovskaya, who had refused to give up her coverage of human rights abuses in Chechnya; later, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov; the poisoning of Vladimir Kara-Murza; the suicide of independent journalist Irina Slavina ("Blame the Russian Federation for my death"); the banning of the Memorial organizations.

Along the way, she introduces us to some of the unforgettable personalities who were caught up by these events—or who sparked them. Among them: opposition activist Anastasia Shevchenko in Rostov-on-Don, in 2019, who was arrested for her links with an "undesirable organization," and consequently unable to be with her daughter Alina, when Alina died in an intensive care ward. This incident of gratuitous cruelty sparked a "March of Mother's Fury" in Moscow, with one participant telling Rainsford that "the case proved you could now be arrested in Russia for nothing at all." Rainsford went on to say, "Russia had dozens of political prisoners by 2019, far too many to tell all their stories or attend all their trials. But for me, Anastasia always stood out." The personal tragedy of mother and daughter was one element, but it was also an example of a new category of political repression in the wake of Ukraine's independence movement: the suspicion of people with links, however tenuous, to "undesirable" foreign organizations.

Rainsford's book encompasses the last years of Alexei Navalny's activism in Russia, his poisoning in 2020, followed by treatment in Germany and his return to Russia and immediate arrest on January 17, 2021, and, eventually his death in prison in February of this year, and his burial in Moscow. 

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Navalny's own account of his life and activism, Patriot: A Memoir, also touched me at a personal level. I loved Sarah Rainsford's book in part because of something we share: a nearly lifelong interest in Russia, as students and then as visitors and residents. Both of us have had to wrestle with the realization that somehow Russia includes both a capacity for extraordinary humanity and self-sacrifice as well as a capacity for systemic cruelty on a mass scale, fueled by greed and assisted by centuries of dysfunctional relationships between those with power and everyone else.

At least that's what it looks like from the outside. Navalny, on the inside of this reality, seemed to have made a decision not to tolerate this contradiction. If Russia is to flourish, cruelty and arbitrary absolutism must be confronted and defeated. The first two-thirds of his book recounts how he came to this conclusion; the last part shows how he paid the price for his convictions, through his prison diaries and many of his Instagram posts right into this year.

The most attractive aspect of his book is also the most difficult: his own cheeky voice. It just seems so odd and delightful that one of Russia's most prominent opposition politicians could be the very opposite of the wooden-faced political operatives, drawing from a limited list of familiar cliches, who usually dominate the scene. Navalny almost died as a result of the Novichok poisoning in Tomsk, but his account of gradually coming out of his coma is sheer comedic genius. That's the joy and tragedy of this whole book: it's funny and refreshing and often very entertaining, even when he describes the remorseless and sadistic realities of maximum security prison life...

... But we already know how the story ends.

We can tell that he often took pride in his political accomplishments. Among the high points of the book is his account of running for mayor in Moscow in 2013; his use of street-level and door-to-door campaigning was traditional in democracies but unusual in Russia. Navalny attributed some of his campaign initiatives to his love of the American television drama The Wire.  "In one season there was a storyline about the hero running for mayor of Baltimore. I explained to our staff responsible for organizing meetings with the public that I wanted the same scenario: a stage, chairs for the elderly, groups of other people standing around. That is probably entirely typical in an American election campaign, but no one had done anything like it before in Russia."

In his attempted campaign for president in 2017, he took mass campaigning of this sort to a national level with thousands of volunteers and dozens of campaign offices. But he also often poked fun at himself, writing (for example) about his difficulties in front of the television camera.

A more caustic brand of humor comes out in his accounts of his trials. The material is very rich: in at least two prominent criminal trials, he is accused of "crimes" that are actually normal business practices. One of the trials ended with Alexei's brother Oleg being sentenced to prison for three and a half years, while Alexei himself was given a suspended sentence. For Alexei, seeing his brother in prison while he remained outside was worse than being in prison himself.

In his final post-Novichok prison years, Navalny occasionally confessed to discouragement, but usually his droll voice quickly returned. For example, he gave four reasons for wanting to complete this book, which he had started before returning to Russia from Germany. First, he simply wanted to. Second, he had promised his agents. And then ...

Reasons three and four for writing this book might sound overly dramatic, and if everything ends badly, this will be the point at which my more emotional readers may shed a tear. (Oh, my God, he could see it all coming; imagine how that must have felt!) On the other hand, if everything works out for the best, this could be the most pathetic part. It could be tidied up with a bit of editing or simply omitted, but I have promised myself that this is to be a very honest book.

Reason three, then, is that if they do finally whack me, the book will be my memorial.

Reason four is that, again, if they whack me, my family will get the advance and royalties that, I hope, there will be. Let's face it, if a murky assassination attempt using a chemical weapon, followed by a demise in prison, can't move a book, it is hard to imagine what would. The book's author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?

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This is Russia, too.... I'm taking the opportunity to re-run a slideshow that I posted here in 2013. It's the pages of a booklet presented to me by one of my former students on the occasion of my 60th birthday. (I added translations, and the second slide to explain the title reference to Shurik.)

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Ken White's "Thoughts the Day After." Thanks to Tina for the link.

Jeremy Morris considers decolonizing area studies. Russian version/на русском языке.

Greg Morgan on "Safe Passage" at the end of life.

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J.B. Lenoir, "Eisenhower Blues."

A song of quiet trust

It's been about 25 years since I gave a series of messages at the annual sessions of Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends. The messages were linked to this psalm:

Psalm 131 (New English Bible)

1 O LORD, my heart is not proud,
  nor are my eyes haughty;
  I do not busy myself with great matters
or things too marvellous for me.
2 No; I submit myself, I account myself lowly,
  as a weaned child clinging to its mother.
3 O Israel, look for the LORD
  now and evermore.

For the last three years, I've been giving sermons once a month at Spokane Friends Meeting, in Washington state, USA. Several of my sermons have been encouragements to enter into a conversation with the Holy Spirit on what the Bible is showing us through texts that seem to contain a lot under the surface. Last month, partly in response to the feverish political climate in the USA these days, I wanted to offer something that could bring the fever down a bit—and this psalm came back to me from that series I wrote a quarter century ago. It seemed to meet the need.

I had no memory of what I actually said in those long-ago messages. I hope they were suitable at the time, but now I had no choice but to take a fresh look at the text. 

At first I assumed that I would use the New English Bible translation, because that was the first Bible I ever owned and the first place I got to know this psalm. But in preparing for my Spokane message, I looked up the psalm in the New Interpreter's Study Bible. The commentary there said that verse two seems to suggest that the psalm might have been written by a woman. So I looked again at the translation included in that Bible, the New Revised Standard Version, and look what I found:

Psalm 131 (New Revised Standard Version)

1 O LORD, my heart is not lifted up,
    my eyes are not raised too high;
  I do not occupy myself with things
    too great and too marvelous for me.
2 but I have calmed and quieted my soul,
    like a weaned child with its mother;
    my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. [see note]
3 O Israel, hope in the LORD
    for this time on and forevermore.

[Note: Or my soul within me is like a weaned child]

Not sure which version to choose for this message, and further intrigued by that note with its alternate reading, I went to a Hebrew-English interlinear Bible to see if that second reference to the “weaned child that is with me” was in that resource ... and indeed it is.

One of the reasons I am so fond of this psalm, especially in the context of preaching, is that it reminds me that, when I speak in meeting for worship, my job is to be faithful, not clever. My task is confined to two things: first, to point toward trustworthy sources of inspiration and vision, and, second, to suggest some implications of those sources as a way of encouraging you to do the same, to consider the implications for yourselves. It is not my purpose to do your work for you, to show off my own cleverness (as obvious as it is), or to one-up someone else, or to even hint that I’ve covered all the possibilities.

From what I’ve just said, you can see why I loved the way John Kinney began his message to Spokane Friends the previous week—and here I’m quoting from his online text:

When I give a message, it is presumptuous of me and you to think that I know what I am talking about. I am groping in the dark. What I say makes sense to me but I am confident that there are theologically and spiritually astute people that could poke holes in most of what I say so always take my message with a grain of salt.

Exactly! The same caveat goes for everything that I say when I visit you.

John Kinney talked about some of the realities we encounter when we do intercessory prayer for others. When our prayers don’t result in healing, is it because we were two prayers short? John’s message reminded us of some important Scriptures that illuminate this picture: in Romans, Paul says that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us through wordless groans; and in Matthew, God causes the son “to rise on the bad as well as the good, and sends down rain to fall on the upright and the wicked alike.” We are to pray continually, but not babble on as if God didn’t already know what we need. In light of God’s promises and the Bible’s teachings on prayer, the temptation to overthink all these questions becomes unbearable, at least for some of us. 

… And it’s at that moment Psalm 131 becomes the healing song of quiet trust that I need.

Maybe some of you have seen this cartoon:

Maybe this isn't exactly theology, but it's an example of the tangents we can go on when we overthink something. God is both deeper and more direct, but we don’t become aware of it until we, like the dog in the third frame, are in an attitude of acceptance rather than reaction.

Does this mean that the good dog was wrong to contemplate the meaning of “good”? I honestly don’t think so. I don’t think God gave us our brains to torture us when we encounter something we don’t understand. I remember Paul saying in 1 Corinthians 14:15 “...I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also.” His point is that our participation in worship should be in language that is understandable to others, but in this cause he honors the role of the mind. Back in the same letter, chapter two, Paul says, “‘For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”

Going back to Psalm 131, “...My eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” I don’t interpret this as a way of telling us that piety equals dumb passivity, but that when we encounter Godly mysteries in Scripture and in life, we simply acknowledge our limitations, and don’t make our intellects a sort of limitation beyond which we won’t allow God to go. We don’t stand above those mysteries in some sort of detached or superior position, the way the citizens of the Snarky District live:

(By permission of cartoonstock.com.)

Instead of overthinking, or resorting to irony or intellectual distancing, we can enter into dialogue with the text. Even comparing translations might be part of that dialogue. I think it is entirely consistent with Psalm 131 to ask God to help us discern what the implications of the Scripture are for us.

For example, the question that really touches my heart is the meaning of the weaned child. How do I apply this image? Quoting, “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.” In this scene, my soul is not trapped by my arrogance or skepticism or the temptation to react on my own terms, but what is my soul’s relation to God in this receptive place? Is God my mother in this image? Having been weaned, am I now in the world as God’s creation, in some way separate from my Creator? But in any case, I’m not far off; my soul is like the weaned child, still with its mother but now vulnerable to the world’s hazards, just like every other person in God’s creation.

As it happens, this image recalls a very specific memory from my early childhood. When I was about three or four years old, my beloved German grandma, my Oma, was teaching me how to tie my shoes. I was living with her and my Opa in their house in Stuttgart, Germany, before I went to Chicago to be reunited with my parents. As my grandmother helped me with my shoelaces, she told me about the Good Shepherd who loved me. Those memories came back to me years later, even as I was living in a family where faith was a taboo subject. It’s like my soul was never cut off from the silver thread that led back to my grandmother’s care.

(Here’s a picture of my Oma holding me, alongside my mom and my Opa. I included this picture so you can maybe glimpse some of the care that gave me that silver thread that never broke.)

Back to Psalm 131. This is my reality: my soul can relax, stop obsessing, and enjoy companionship with God, but at the same time, it remains true that I’m as vulnerable as any other creature. My hope isn’t in any physical shield or force, but in remembering, as Israel is exhorted to do in the third verse, to “hope in the Lord, now and forevermore.”

At Spokane Friends meeting for worship, I ended my sermon and we went into open worship. For that period of quiet, I offered these queries for those who wanted to continue to reflect on the psalm:

• Is there comfort or discomfort for you in Psalm 131, or perhaps both?
• In either case, can your questions open up a place of dialogue?
• Are there people in your life or past who personify God’s ongoing love for you? Are there other ways you’ve experienced this love? Do you feel free to ask for more?

Another set of queries that comes to me now, as election day in the USA draws ever closer:

• In this moment, is there a tension between "calming and quieting" our souls, and being conscientious and persistent participants in a nation's civic life?

The hope I have for today is not a denial of reality, but a deeper perspective, "now and forevermore." In another election season, eight years ago, I mentioned another psalm that I also keep before me these days: (Psalm 119:45-46, NIV; context)

I will walk about in freedom,
     for I have sought out your precepts.
I will speak of your statutes before kings
     and will not be put to shame...

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Heather Cox Richardson comments on the Madison Square Garden spectacle of a few days ago.

We're just back from another four-week visit to London. I continue to be fascinated by the two (at least two) Englishes we experience in these visits, and how they influence each other. As Ben Yagoda says, it's a two-way street.

Sarah Thomas Baldwin on the subversive spiritual quality of "lingering." (With references to the events of February 2023 at Asbury University.)

A serious look at an influential periodical of my teenage years. Were you also a loyal reader of MAD?

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Sarah Quintana, "Rolling and Tumbling" in French.

Sober hope and November 5

To tell you the truth, I'm a bit embarrassed to wear my campaign tee shirt for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

I'm not embarrassed about my support for these candidates for the USA's highest offices, and my intention to vote for them on (or, rather, before) election day, November 5. Choosing them has been part of my observance of "sober hope," as I'm about to explain.

Instead, I cannot help being sad that, among their campaign's several tag lines ("We're not going back," "we're turning the page") is this stark set of three words: TRUTH HOPE DECENCY.

That last word refers to the direct contrast between their candidacy and that of their principal opponent. Over the years, I've said enough about him in this blog (for example, last week) and I don't plan to say any more today. If I can't convince my own beloved relative, quoted last week, to change her mind, then I doubt very much that this modest blog post will change any other minds. But it's a sad commentary that a low-bar word such as "decency" even needs to appear in a presidential campaign tagline.

So this week I'm simply going to explain my endorsement of Harris and Walz as an expression of sober hope. There's more to it than simply opposing the alternative.

• Yes, both Harris and Walz seem "decent." They're not perfect, but they're also not likely to embarrass themselves or their country with blatant corruption or petty cruelty.
• I have enjoyed watching the enthusiastic crowds drawn by Harris and Walz in their campaign stops. But star quality, which both Harris and Walz seem to have (based on their own personalities and merits as well as a contrast with hardworking but uncharismatic Joe Biden), is not enough to earn our votes. And the other team is also capable of bringing out crowds of cheering people. However, I will not discount the evidence that millions of donors and potential voters seem to have shaken off their political passivity and found hope in the Harris/Walz message.
• I would not expect instant miracles from a Democratic victory. It's true that both Harris and Walz have executive and legislative experience, and have been able to attract good teams to help run their organizations and implement their programs. As I've said before, if the winners of an election were merely five or ten percent more competent than the losers would have been, that could still save or improve the lives of many thousands of people worldwide. And this year, the competence gap seems very large.
• I expect that the priorities of Harris and Walz, who are both Christians, would align as much with the values of capitalism and USA-style imperialism as they would with the Gospel. Regardless of her private beliefs, Kamala Harris would have little room to maneuver with respect to Israel and Palestine, for example. (Oh, I hope I'm wrong!) The Pentagon will still account for nearly half the military expenditures of the whole planet. And even where Harris's heart is in the right place, our dysfunctional Congress and our compromised Supreme Court may frustrate some or all of her best plans.
  
  Making a choice among imperfect candidates in a presidential election is not placing U.S. citizenship above the claims of Christian discipleship. Making the best selection I can is an attempt at faithful stewardship and care for neighbors, in hope but not illusion.

If you are a voter in the USA, and are undecided about this year's presidential race, I hope you will prayerfully consider voting for the Democratic candidates, even if you then spend four years protesting their inadequacies. Given the level of polarization and mistrust in our country, they would need our prayers as well as our protests, our support as well as our vigilance. No outcome of this year's election would guarantee national healing, but a public commitment to TRUTH HOPE DECENCY would be a good place to start.

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Hope, four years later.

More thoughts on keeping hope sober.

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Why Billy Graham's granddaughter Jerushah Duford is voting for Kamala Harris.

My copy of Alexei Navalny's autobiography Patriot just arrived. Here's talk-show host Stephen Colbert interviewing Yulia Navalnaya on her late husband and his book. I plan to post a review of Patriot as well as Sarah Rainsford's Goodbye to Russia in the next few weeks. [UPDATE: Here it is.]

Cheyenne McNeill in The Guardian writes about American evangelicals deconstructing their religion. You probably already know most or all of what the author covers, but I rarely see a treatment as thoughtful as this in a secular newspaper.

Raúl E. Zegarra remembers his friend Gustavo Gutiérrez.

"The City Gent" writes about the place where we go to meeting when we're in London, and the immediate neighborhood. And a few weeks earlier, he wrote about the nearby Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, which we pass through on our way to meeting.

If you'd like a guide to London's Quaker historical sites, this map on the Bunhill Fields Friends' Web site may serve well.

Here's a repeat announcement: In November, Friends Peace Teams are celebrating their 30th anniversary with an online Global Gathering 2024 with a staggered schedule to accommodate diverse time zones. Theme of the gathering: "Justice and peace are possible! What sustains our faith in justice and peace in the face of violence and war?"

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Imelda May, "When It's My Time."

Avos' and politics, part four

Russiapedia. (Source.)

"It might [avos'] all come out OK..." / "It might not! Let's get to work!" (Promotion for a mediation firm; source.)

Russian avos' and American politics (2016)

Russian avos' and American politics, part two (2019)

Russia's performance in Ukraine: Is avos' to blame? (2022)

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The Fox network's Bret Baier, interviewing U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris, questions her about her strong criticisms of rival candidate Donald Trump:

Why, if he's as bad as you say, that half the country is now supporting this person who could be the 47th president of the United States? Why is that happening?

Good question! Many of us who see Trump's candidacy as something close to an extinction-level danger to the USA's democracy are asking ourselves the same thing. 

(We may not agree that his support throughout the whole electorate is actually 50%, but we are astounded by the undoubted tens of millions supporting him in the face of his constant lies, cruelty, blatant exploitation of gullible Christians, and inability to communicate actual ideas.)

David Gerlach, a retired Episcopal priest, has one suggestion. He says that people don't necessarily love Trump because of Trump's personality or policies, and goes on to ask:

... So what can it be? And the place that it leads me to is, is it simply because he gives people permission to be awful?—to look down upon those who are "less than" in some people's eyes....

Permission to be awful. Is it that simple? 

I got a clue from a conversation I had back in 2020 with a Russian immigrant in Portland, Oregon. He was planning to vote for Trump in the November 2020 election because, in his view, Trump was good for business. As I talked further with him about his experiences as an entrepreneur during Trump's term, I understood that it wasn't just about profits. My conversation partner loved the permission he felt from Trump to be aggressive, to cut corners, to sabotage the competition, to dislike regulations and despise political correctness. It's not exactly that he wanted to be "awful"; he just wanted to keep pursuing wealth on his new hunting grounds and felt that, in this desire, Trump was a kindred spirit.

Here are some articles from 2021 that may still help explain Trump's popularity among recent Russian immigrants: Anastassiya Gliadkovskaya, "Us and them: how Soviet-era thinking divided immigrants over Trump." Elizaveta Gaufman, "Socialist trauma and American politics: why many Russians vote Republican."

Trump has support among my own relatives. One wrote to me, "I'm still voting for Trump /Vance due to Trumps last stint as president and the results of debates. That is what my gut tells me." This preference for "gut" over dispassionate analysis, and over the conventional wisdom of the perceived elites who normally run things, may be a common thread among those Russian immigrants and disaffected Americans who've turned to Trump. 

In my original avos' post, Natalia Antonova drew on David Frum to help explain this alienation:

Perhaps one of the most telling lines about Trump supporters was recently published by conservative writer David Frum, who quoted this line from his discussions with fellow Republicans who are set to vote for Trump: "You believe in institutions because they work for you… But our people don’t believe in institutions any more."

People who have lost faith in institutions have lost faith in institutional change. This makes them especially vulnerable to promises made by firebrand demagogues. And it places them further beyond the reach of facts or logic.

But maybe this is overcomplicated. I think some of those attracted to Trump never had faith in institutions. They may never have asked themselves, "What would it take for me to trust the Congress, elections, government in general, or civil society?" Now Trump tells them that it's all a swamp, and his cult choir shares a powerful insight with them: just as they suspected, nothing is trustworthy but Trump alone. Go with your gut and support the man who elevates his own instinct above all that so-called "information."

Some of Trump's most committed supporters believe that his triumph will surely be theirs as well. Others may simply believe that, as Trump tells them, things are such a catastrophic mess that they really have nothing to lose. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained," or in other words, pure avos'. In most cases, neither facts nor mockery will break open this allegiance to the one who legitimizes mistrust of that swamp. I can only advise holding up a Gospel vision of genuine hope, one that envisions universal blessing rather than tribal triumphs, over the fake hope and momentary thrill of avos'.

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James K.A. Smith finds wisdom from Augustine in an election year.

Perhaps a fifth-century African doctor of the church can help us engage with the constructive relationship between Christianity and liberal democracy as we attempt to survive this election year. Augustine of Hippo’s sprawling masterpiece The City of God, written in the early 400s, has enduring relevance for us today. I believe that its wisdom can teach us to inhabit the fractious, polarized time in which we live.
...
Augustine counsels a kind of holy impatience. On the one hand, we pray and labor for a world that looks more like the just, flourishing kingdom we long for. The waiting of Christian eschatology is not the same as what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” which uses waiting as a code for enshrining the status quo. On the other hand, even a properly prophetic desire and hunger must avoid the hubris of thinking we could socially engineer our way out of the world’s brokenness by our own ingenuity. As Immanuel Kant would put it centuries after Augustine: all of our human political constructions are built with the crooked timber of human beings.

Heather Cox Richardson: Mark Milley, Eric Hoffer, ... and Donald Trump.

In a pivotal U.S. election season, what are Friends called to do? You're invited to an online conversation on "Friends Witness and Action for Our Democracy," scheduled for October 30 at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time, with Emily Provance and Diane Randall.

Qassam Muaddi's Palestine letter: the fresh face of the Nakba, and Palestine at the heart of a new world.

A segment on Democracy Now's devoted to Israeli and Palestinian peace activists. (This clip was recommended by one of the participants in the weekly online meeting for prayer for peace, organized by the European and Middle East Section of Friends World Committee for Consultation. Please join us!)

Mehdi Hasan challenges us: if Israel's leaders hate the United Nations so much, both in words and in actions, should Israel be allowed to remain a member?

Facing the mixed agendas of cross-cultural outreach: When the evangelistic tables are turned.

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Kitty, Daisy and Lewis in Japan.

Prayer and place, twelve years later

Underground prayer cell, Transfiguration
Monastery, near Buzuluk, Russia.

I wrote my first post on prayer and place in the context of the Pussy Riot controversy twelve years ago in Russia, when the dissident rock band of that name managed to get into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, near the Kremlin, and performed their musical prayer against Vladimir Putin.

In the post, I confessed my "mixed feelings about the very concept of sacred space." In my final post about the controversy, I wrote, "I have grown to have a lot of respect for them [the dissident musicians], but it's a complicated respect." I also wondered whether we Westerners with our diminished sense of reverence (is this fair?), were qualified to comment.

On reverence (freely expressed or compulsory), I also wrote a separate post.

All of these related themes came back to me when I read Mark Russ (Jolly Quaker) posting about Thicc places: a Quaker on pilgrimage. My best service to you now would be to reduce my own verbiage in favor of persuading you to read Mark's post. I'll just add a couple of thoughts:

First: I utterly agree with Mark that both the journey and the destination are important, for the reasons he expresses so well. I also want to take into account our varying temperaments. For some of us, the regular pilgrimage, perhaps every week, to our usual places of worship, and the anticipation and fulfillment of the worship itself, are all that we need. Those who go on pilgrimage to a more remote or special location might anticipate a more immersive experience than they experience in that regular cycle; are those of us who find no such need in ourselves qualified to deny them?

My red flags would go up only if those pilgrims inform us on their return that they're now superior to the rest of us. That's never happened in my experience; what actually happens is that they're eager to share the riches they've gained with the rest of us, and we listen eagerly, to everyone's benefit. It was wonderful to hear my cousin Johan Fredrik Heyerdahl talk about walking the Camino de Santiago when he was about the age I am now. I experienced a somewhat similar pilgrimage without leaving home when I read Timothy Egan's marvelous book A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith.

In my experience, this last century of Russian history, with religious repression followed by Orthodox triumphalism and state-church enmeshment, has intensified and complicated all concepts of sacred space.

Second: Might it be true that those who argue for a flat and fastidious Quakerism, one that denies any forms of specialness, are often perfectly happy to go on holiday to interesting and, to them, exotic destinations? Maybe they would be willing to consider that traveling with a spiritual intention or hope would be equally legitimate? This line of questioning does have its own complication: the cost of such travel, whether or not it is for spiritual gain, surely puts some forms of pilgrimage beyond the reach of many people.

I'm reminded of my dislike of the way spiritual books are sometimes marketed. See my comments on Richard Foster's Sanctuary of the Soul—go to this post and scroll down past the movie stuff.

If I'm making unfair correlations, let me know!

We Quakers generally downplay sacred actions as well as sacred places, but maybe you'll see why I loved this Threads post from Karen Swallow Prior, which I present not to one-up anyone, but simply as a reminder to remain tender:

My parents love their church immensely. For health reasons, however, they’ve had to join the service online for some time now.

Yesterday, I was taking them lunch and unintentionally arrived before the service had ended. It was communion Sunday.

When I saw the two tiny cups of juice and two tiny crackers my father had set on the kitchen table, I felt like I had entered some of the holiest, most sacred ground I’d ever been honored to enter.

Now, please go to the post that provoked these thoughts, from Mark Russ.

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While we're enjoying Mark's good company, here's more to think about: Dirty religion.

Other related items from my own blog: To see light more clearly. Memories of Buzuluk. Quaker communion.

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Helen Benedict on Israelis, Palestinians, and ending the cycle of revenge.

Issa Amro: "It's a miracle that I even exist." His organization, Youth Against Settlements, has just won the Right Livelihood Award, one of the prizes sometimes known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize."

Forum 18 reports that a wide range of religiously-oriented Web sites have been blocked to Russian audiences. (Also: the Discord messaging platform is now being blocked in Russia.)

If you would like to join Friends United Meeting's "Living Letters" group, visiting Cuba in January 2025, the registration deadline is November 10.

Becky Ankeny finds comfort and consolation in the blunt words of Micah chapter 3.

The Washington Post's guide to helping people in distress owing to hurricanes Helene and Milton.

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This afternoon at St Olave's Church and its free concert series every Wednesday and Thursday, we heard a wonderful piano concert by Kanae Furomoto, including the famous "Raindrop" prelude by Chopin. Here it is performed by Alice Sara Ott: