Honest prayer

Antonio Guillem via Getty. Source.

MSF field hospital in central Gaza. Source.

During a prayer meeting for peace this week, a Friend read this passage, ascribed to 'Anna', from the second chapter of Britain Yearly Meeting's Quaker Faith and Practice:

Prayer is an act of sharing with God, the Spirit, and not an attempt to prompt God to action. It is a promise that I will do my best, even if what I am able to do seems too insignificant to be worthwhile. When I pray for peace, and that the hearts of those in authority may be changed, it is a promise that I shall do such things as write to those in power, share in vigils, and above all lead my own life, as far as possible, in such a manner as to take away the occasion for strife between individuals and between peoples. When I pray for others who are in need, it is a promise to make my own contribution, perhaps by writing, by visiting, by a gift, by telling someone whom I know could help. When I pray for forgiveness, for strength and courage, I try to open my heart, making it possible for me humbly to receive.

(Link.)

I wish I were this mature! For me, prayer absolutely is full of my attempts, pathetic as they may be, to prompt God to action.

A few months ago I wrote about my prayers that God would send angel armies to the skies over Ukraine, fully conscious of my prayer's lack of logic or chances of being fulfilled. It's not that I believed that my tiny voice would push God over the edge, despite history's long evidence that, whatever God is doing, it doesn't apparently include restraining the hands of warmakers. It's more that, in the face of the constant stream of tragedies and agonies (for example, in Gaza) witnessed by the whole world, my relationship with God will suffer if I don't make this plea.

Consider the unnamed representative of God's people laying out their frustration in Psalm 44 (in Eugene Peterson's paraphrase, slightly adapted), starting with verse 8:

All day we parade God’s praise—
    we thank you by name over and over.

But now you’ve walked off and left us,
    you’ve disgraced us and won’t fight for us.

You made us turn tail and run;
    those who hate us have cleaned us out.

You delivered us as sheep to the butcher,
    you scattered us to the four winds.

You sold your people at a discount—
    you made nothing on the sale.

You made people on the street,
    people we know, poke fun and call us names.

You made us a joke among the godless,
    a cheap joke among the rabble.

Every day I’m up against it,
    my nose rubbed in my shame—

Gossip and ridicule fill the air,
   people out to get me crowd the street.

All this came down on us,
    and we’ve done nothing to deserve it.

We never betrayed your Covenant:
   our hearts were never false, our feet never left your path.

Do we deserve torture in a den of jackals?
    or lockup in a black hole?

If we had forgotten to pray to our God
    or made fools of ourselves with store-bought gods,

Wouldn’t you have figured this out?
    We can’t hide things from you.

No, you decided to make us martyrs,
    lambs assigned for sacrifice each day.

Get up, God! Are you going to sleep all day?
    Wake up! Don’t you care what happens to us?

Why do you bury your face in the pillow?
    Why pretend things are just fine with us?

And here we are—flat on our faces in the dirt,
    held down with a boot on our necks.

Get up and come to our rescue.
    If you love us so much, Help us!

Look at this comment in the New Interpreter's Study Bible:

Pledging innocence and faithfulness to the covenant, the people accuse, because of you we are being killed all day long (v. 22, cf. Rom. 8:36). There is no justice in God's crushing them. The text insists that there is no congruity whatever between the people's sin and the judgment that has befallen them. It is easy to understand why this text was so frequently on the lips of those facing death in the Shoah (Holocaust) of 1939-45.

And from today's Palestine, Munther Isaac of Bethlehem Bible College does not hold back, either:

We prayed. We prayed for their protection … and God did not answer us, not even in the “house of God” were church buildings able to protect them. Our children die before the silence of the world, and before the silence of God. How difficult is God’s silence!

'Anna' (of Quaker Faith and Practice) is right about the promises that we make, or could make, as we pray: promises to do what we can in the face of violence. But those promises are in the context of our plea to our God for justice. After we pray and lament and grieve before God in utter honesty, and confess our inability to match reality with God's own explicit promises, we face what it actually means for us, our limited and often discouraged selves, to be the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27, context). So, even as I stubbornly ask for angels over Ukraine (counting on God and you to overlook my naïve ways), what I also want and need is for guidance on how we can rise up, in all our diversity of gifts and temperaments and levels of maturity, and be that Body of Christ.

It's in that context that I understand Anna's encouragement (again, drawing on the Britain Yearly Meeting text), to "write to those in power, share in vigils, and above all lead my own life, as far as possible, in such a manner as to take away the occasion for strife between individuals and between peoples." As communities, we can join and support the letter-writers and those who participate in vigils. We might find other strategic ways of influencing events: becoming diplomats, or serving in the government, even seeking elective office! Others may be led to take riskier paths: withholding war taxes, serving in medical teams, becoming war correspondents, or providing pastoral care and accompaniment in the very places of violence, knowing that in the Body, others are praying and paying in support. As Paul says (my emphasis): "[God] has committed to us the message of reconciliation."

Alice Walker wrote, "We are the ones we have been waiting for." Maybe God, the sovereign Creator, has been waiting for us, too....

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Related: Anger. "Life is not a short story." "You can never learn that Christ is all you need...." What can love do?

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Coming later this month to Youtube, the film For Our Daughters ("stories of abuse, betrayal, and resistance in the evangelical church") is based on the final chapter of Kristin Kobes Du Mez's book Jesus and John Wayne. Kristin gives some context for the film on her substack blog.

A "Catholic feminist," Kristina Traina, explains her journey with Orthodox saints.

Jeremy Morris on the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk, why the invasion registers so minimally among Russians, and (once again) the challenges of measuring popular opinion.

 Exploring the spiritual significance of fasting: a webinar on September 30, presented by British Friends.

What are the specific challenges Friends face as we seek to embrace gifts of public ministry? Windy Cooler considers the results of Friends General Conference's survey on public ministry.

I'm delighted to see that Simon Barrow, long associated with Ekklesia, has just launched his substack column, Illuminations.

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"Mellow Down Easy"—a version of Willie Dixon's classic, made famous by Little Walter. Here are Steve Guyger and his band at the Mojo Music Club in Kleinstaasdorf, Austria. Enjoy!

Growth for growth's sake

Tree of discipleship. Source.

Q: "Should Friends seek to grow?"

A: "I don't believe in growth for growth's sake."

I've had (or overheard) exchanges of this sort several times among Quakers and other church people. I always have this perverse desire to say "Well, I do!"

To be fair, I think I know what those skeptics mean: they don't believe that a statistical increase in numbers, without attention to quality or ethics, is a goal worth chasing.

However, I doubt that anybody believes in pure statistical growth without regard for people. I'm eager to see people added to our numbers anytime that it's a result of those people hearing about our faith, coming to check whether we live by that faith, and gaining enough hope in our trustworthiness that they've decided to remain, at least for now.

That criticism of "growth for growth's sake" may be a polite way of saying, "I'd just as soon operate a chaplaincy for the people already among us, and those sufficiently like us to float into our orbit on their own steam." However, let's take the phrase at face value, and continue the conversation: "Then, what kind of growth would you favor?"

If I honestly believe (backed by experience) that ...

• Quaker faith and practice is a way of knowing and following God;
• Our communities are trustworthy, leadership is based on spiritual gifts rather than social distinctions, and the pathways for new people to become members and leaders are made clear;
• We have a message and a practice that is very different from the toxic agendas of white Christian nationalism and other distortions that have brought the word "Christian" into disrepute;
• I have found healing and hope in this faith and the community it has shaped...

... then, shouldn't I feel an obligation to care about growth? I believe so. It seems urgent to me to work toward ensuring that our faith and the communities formed by that faith are accessible to anyone who might need that kind of community.

There is nothing about this obligation that requires me to exaggerate Quakers' virtues, or to conceal our defects. I certainly don't need to claim that no other faith communities are equally trustworthy or equally capable of healing and giving hope.

By this logic, however, I could argue that we can continue to deny the importance of growth. Since we don't claim superiority (do we?), we can just assume that someone else will meet the needs of those who seek healing and hope. Instead, let's remember how important growth might be, not just for those who might find a place among us, but also for those of us already here.

The dangerous alternatives: we risk becoming stagnant; elitism and Quaker exceptionalism can creep in; we too often allow conflict to become personalized; we lose the urgency of paying attention to what God wants to say and do beyond our own tiny community, through us; we forget how to communicate our faith to those who don't understand our peculiar language; we reduce the chances of someone visiting to verify that our practice matches our faith.

Let's grow, for good growth's sake! (Or, let's at least continue the conversation.)

Related: Decline and persistence. Evangelism or proselytism? Adria Gulizia on spirit-led evangelism.

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Hello from Spokane, where Judy is speaking on Sunday morning at Spokane Friends Meeting. Here's a recent local article on Spokane Friends.

Rachel Lonas reviews The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience. Not yet sure I'll get the book, but I certainly enjoyed the review. Have you seen this book yourself?

Amalia Zatari (BBC) on the new far-right in Russia. (Russian original.)

Since books definitely helped me survive childhood, I was drawn to this article: "‘Books saved my life’; the founder of Semicolon Books wants to close the literacy gap."

"Christianity is not a notion but a way." Stuart Masters on "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6) and the various ways Friends have approached related questions of exclusivism, universalism, and interfaith dialogue.

Timothy Jones on the young botanist Emily Dickinson.

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Blues dessert: Canadian content! Jack de Keyzer, "I Can't Hold Out."

More thoughts on keeping hope sober

Sea of Okhotsk.

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Last week I wrote, "Our human capacity for chaos and cruelty still require worthy advocates of hope to remain very sober."

But not too sober!

I'm not the only one who realizes our hope must be deeper than the outcome of any particular contest, such as the 2024 U.S. presidential election (to choose a random example!).... Similarly, hope can't depend on one team in that contest being perfectly wonderful and the other team being uniformly villainous. Since my own family has people in both teams, that division breaks down right away.

Finally, hope for the future shouldn't keep us from seeing our neighbors who are suffering now, and whose suffering might well continue into the future even if our political dreams for 2024 come true.

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Back in 2008, I was definitely caught up in the euphoria generated by Barack Obama's fired-up presidential campaign. Part of that wild hope was the promise of relief from the cynicism generated by the USA's post-9/11 wars, and the Bush-era neocons' calculated program of lies that powered those wars and cost us $8 trillion and the lives of over 900,000 people.

In a moment of hopeful sobriety that year, I wrote that "I don't expect the dawning of the Age of Aquarius on Inauguration Day, January 20. I expect that if the people make the best choice for U.S. president, the result on a policy level might be 5% better, or 10% better, than if they make the 'wrong' choice." However, I remember feeling that even "5% better, or 10% better," would (judging by the previous administration) mean thousands of lives saved.

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Later that same year, 2008, Judy and I found out that we needed to move out of our original apartment in Elektrostal, Russia, and find a new apartment in a little over a week. 

I retold some of that story here. Here are some more details. When we found out that we needed to move, we went to a real estate office in Elektrostal and explained our situation. The agent said, "Well, it's a tight market right now, but we happen to have a place for rent in the new building across from where you're living now." He took us to see the place—it had two bedrooms, a big living room, a comparatively large kitchen, an enormous hallway; what more could we want?

Our living room was big enough for a Friends House
Moscow board meeting. (Photo Mary Morris.)

In fact, the layout was so nice and spacious that we worried that all our friends and colleagues would think we were living a posh "Euro" lifestyle, way beyond typical local standards. The agent looked at us as if we were nuts. He said, "The only other place I can show you now is in one of the old buildings downtown. If you'd like a bad-tempered landlady and a bunch of alcoholic neighbors, then ...."

He went on to say that if our friends and colleagues ever found out we'd turn down a nice apartment on account of their feelings, they would consider us crazy. In other words (in my interpretation), there's such a thing as excess sobriety. And if we had not chosen that new apartment, we would not have gotten to know the apartment's owners, who are among the loveliest human beings we met in Russia.

So, in responding with hope to the new energy in 2024's U.S. presidential race, we do well to stay sober, but not too sober. We should avoid going into denial about the world's persistent realities and their human toll, but we do not stand aside and withhold our own hopeful energy from that same world's new possibilities.

Realism is hope's ally, but cynicism is cheap wisdom—and spiritual poison.

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Suzanne Eller on Threads:

My soul hungers for civility. For human kindness. Are you there too?

Just this morning I saw a post from a guy who talks about Jesus, but his words were not only harsh, but gross. He used those words to “defend” our faith even as he tore down those who disagreed with him.

I wish I could make it go away, but I can’t. So I’m asking the Holy Spirit to examine my heart. I want to reflect Jesus who is strong, relentlessly tender, and who doesn’t care about one nation, but the world.

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I first linked to a David Gushee article during the major USA controversy over torture in 2005-2006, when Christianity Today published his article "Five Reasons Torture Is Always Wrong." He has another list for us this election season: "Regarding election 2024: Eight things I see."

Ars Technica continues its coverage of the hapless Starliner: The NASA decision to return Starliner's test pilots to earth on a Crew Dragon; and the possible implications for Boeing.

Pope Francis: working to drive away migrants in distress is "a grave sin."

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Derek Trucks, a true original, can reproduce B.B. King licks when he wants to:

Hope, four years later

Sognefjord.

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Michelle Obama. Screenshot from source.

You know what I'm talking about. It's the contagious power of hope ... The chance to vanquish the demons of fear, division, and hate that have consumed us....

America, hope is making a comeback.

—Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention, August 20, 2024.

During the U.S. presidential election campaign of four years ago, I wrote a blog post, "The mere sound of his name will signal hope." The real audience for that blog post was me. I was trying to convince myself that, whatever the outcome of that race (Biden vs Trump), hope had to be anchored in something deeper than election outcomes.

Maybe you remember those days. As I wrote then, "This uncertainty is incredibly stressful. I know people who are asking whether now is the time to begin planning emigration to some country that is on a less self-destructive path. Maybe I'm somewhere beyond naïve, but even as I work to keep us away from the edge, I also know I will keep hoping whatever the outcome."

In the event, Biden received 51.3% of the popular vote, compared to Trump's 46.85%. and prevailed in the Electoral College by a count of 306 to 232. Of course, election day itself was not the end of the stress; the vote totals weren't available until the fourth day after the election, and Trump wouldn't acknowledge the results for yet another eight days after that. Even then, he refused to concede, asserting that "the Election was Rigged" and went on to wage a campaign of election sabotage through January 6, 2021, and beyond.

It might seem that, at the time, hope was vindicated by the results of the 2020 U.S. election, but the COVID 19 crisis, its human costs and economic consequences, were still with us. Ahead were the debacle in Afghanistan, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli tragedies and the ruthless responses in Gaza and the West Bank. Our human capacity for chaos and cruelty still require worthy advocates of hope to remain very sober.

Here's one question about today's U.S. politics that also keeps me very sober: how can it be that the 2024 presidential election predictions still seem so close, when one of the two principal candidates continues to operate by standards so obviously unworthy of any serious contender for the nation's most responsible job: boast and blame and belittle.

At a press conference last week, Trump revealed the true cynicism of his approach: "All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist, or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country." Not that he limits himself to these charges; ugly comments on race, appearance, and intelligence are routine, and who can forget his obsessions with nicknames and crowd sizes? He is apparently confident that the right combination of lies and slurs will give him a winning hand, while we just wonder just how tens of millions of our fellow citizens could possibly agree, to the point that the results of polls still show a close contest!

(Do any of the core supporters of this man ever ask themselves, "What about his doomsday predictions last time, concerning the dangers of a Biden victory? Did any of those warnings actually come true?")

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When I stop to ask myself where my own hope comes from, I have a superficial answer and a deeper one:

First of all, right now, after four days of a happy (if endlessly repetitive and carefully filtered) Democratic National Convention, I have grounds for hope that our 2024 elections will select the sole presidential candidate who actually appears competent to serve as the head of our country's executive branch.

However, I remember Len Vander Zee's quotation from J.R.R. Tolkien: "I am a Christian….so I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat, though it contains…… some glimpse of final victory." (Context in this post.) As hard as we work for a specific outcome in any situation, nothing is guaranteed. Ultimately my hope rests in that promise of final victory.

To tell the truth, my hope doesn't depend on defining that victory with certainty. My best glimpses are in the Bible, but my understanding is rooted in trust, not in intellectual precision. I believe that, at the end, you and I will experience God's hospitality according to the promise Jesus made to his friends as he prepared to say goodbye to them—on his way to be executed as a political threat:

Don’t let this rattle you. You trust God, don’t you? Trust me. There is plenty of room for you in my Father’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live.

—John 14:1-3. (The Message.)

Another glimpse of victory comes a bit earlier in the same Gospel—and again I'm glimpsing through trust rather than claiming to understand exactly what it will look like. It will be good.

You need to know that I have other sheep in addition to those in this pen. I need to gather and bring them, too. They’ll also recognize my voice. Then it will be one flock, one Shepherd.

John 10:16. (The Message.)

Politicians of goodwill and integrity will always seek to serve their inclusive "one flock," and the forces of privilege may, for the foreseeable future, seek to keep us fearful and divided. We, and the generations to come, will still be required to choose hope and integrity each time the challenge presents itself, rarely knowing for sure what the outcome will be in any given struggle. I'm incredibly grateful for the ultimate vision of a room in God's home, and pray for insight in every season to reflect that vision in the ways we treat each other ... and the ways we choose our leaders.

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Looking back eight years; sixteen years.

Mark Russ on Quaker approaches to hope.

Keeping hope sober ... a case study of repression: the death of Russian pianist Pavel Kushnir (long, but maybe not long enough!).

A shadow on the Democratic National Convention: Palestinian voices are shut out.

The epistle issued by the Friends World Committee for Consultation's World Plenary, held August 5-12 near Johannesburg, South Africa, and online.

Dungeons, Dragons ... and Quakers. The experience of Mike Huber of West Hills Friends Church. (Russian translation.)

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Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials play a song written by Lil' Ed's uncle and one of my earliest favorites among Chicago blues musicians, J.B. Hutto. (Here's Hutto's version, audio only.)

Religion and boredom

Word of Life Church (phase two), Flowood, Mississippi, USA. Source.

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In her important commentary on the passing of old-school church culture and what might be replacing it, Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, Diana Butler Bass writes,

...[A]nger is not the only emotion people expess when talking about religion. Many people are just bored. They are bored with church-as-usual, church-as-club, church-as-entertainment, or church-as-work. Many of my friends, faithful churchoers for decades, are dropping out because religion is dull, the purview of folks who never want to change or always want to fight about somebody else's sex life....

In all of the fifty years since I started attending weekly services, this has not been my experience at all; quite the opposite. However, I cheerfully acknowledge that I am a peculiar case—peculiarly unqualified to comment on Diana Butler Bass's assessment.

Before I deal with my disqualifications, I should acknowledge that she backs up her comments with statistical evidence of alienation from established religion, and that the trends she pointed to twelve years ago, when her book was published, have more or less continued along the same lines. (However, "boredom" isn't an explicit category in any of those statistics!)

In my case, I didn't have any significant contact with organized religion until adulthood, and then it was in part a rebellion against my family, coupled with a personal mystical experience that no church could take credit for. I specifically looked for a church that reflected the raw experience of the first Christians—experiencing Jesus personally and forming a community around that experience—and that's how I fell into the lap of the Quakers of Ottawa, Canada.

In my flush of new-convert enthusiasm, I was not there to be entertained, and I had no prior experience of "church-as-usual" or "church-as-club," but simply wanted to hold onto that very basic expectation that we were there to meet with God, and I wanted to be with others who would understand that eagerness. I gradually understood that not everyone at Ottawa Meeting would describe their own participation in quite the same way, but their kindness and hospitality, and the weekly adventure of unprogrammed worship, gave me a precious start, and that powerful confirmation of my hopes has sustained me to this day.

My experiences of Friends in Ottawa Meeting, and Boston (Beacon Hill Meeting), and Charlottesville, and later in Moscow Friends Meeting, all involved these meetings' unprogrammed worship format, waiting in silence for God to make the first move. Meeting for worship always had that sense of adventure. (The time when an angry visitor burst into our meeting in Moscow and accused us of being a "sect" was probably more adventure than I had bargained for, but ultimately that was a wonderful and instructive incident.) However, I've spent most of my five decades among Friends in meetings and churches that don't use a strictly unprogrammed format. Most of them have simple forms of programming—sermons, music, and so on—along with a time set aside for direct listening for God. Those planned elements may sometimes seem full of inspiration, and at other times seem fairly rote and predictable, but among people who love being together and praying for each other, that programming doesn't seem to get in the way at all. I'm still there to meet with God in the company with others who have a similar hope and a similar need. Boredom is not an issue.

Practically all my Christian experience is among Friends, but I have no doubt that other traditions have equivalent elements that express God's invitation and grace. However, all of our religious institutions—Friends and others—have a whole other reality that may relate more directly to the alienation that Bass describes. What should I call it?—our organizational overhead? Drag? In my first years among Friends, I didn't have to worry about any of that; the arrangements had already been made, and I was carried along by the community's established patterns. Eventually it dawned on me that the sweet adventure of worship, the intimacy of asking for prayer, the insights of a timely sermon, and all the other things that are best experienced together, in community, inevitably require a tedious logistical checklist, and consequently a need for people to decide how to do those tasks in ways that are consistent with our values and priorities. Even a modest house church has to choose times to meet, some minimal plan for leadership and pastoral care, and ways to get the word out.

And as soon as decisions need to be made, we need trustworthy processes to discern the community's will rather than majority rule or the sway of individual personalities. And here's where we can see the increasing awkwardnesses of those imperatives amidst the competing claims on our time from the world around us. For many of us, maybe it's not the experience of community that is boring, but all the tasks that hosting the community requires, from facilities and staff and committees all the way to the most basic task: naming the times and places (and online channels?) we might meet.

Slowly but surely, voluntarily or involuntarily, willingness to undertake those tasks is being whittled away. For many years, I was a creature of that "overhead"—mostly as a denominational worker or committee member (Friends World Committee, Right Sharing of World Resources, Friends United Meeting, five yearly meetings, several ecumenical organizations, pastor, missionary),  but those overhead structures seem to be increasingly regarded as nice (maybe) but optional. Shrinking congregations find that old patterns of staffing, volunteering, and keeping up their facilities, aren't sustainable.

Is there a positive way to describe these realities? I'd love to hear from you. How do we learn to be light enough on our feet to continue providing that precious access to the adventures and consolations of meeting with God ... together?

And: are there ways that the "overhead" structures and associations, and their international and cross-cultural partnerships, can serve that learning process?

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Related:

The church is like ... an incubator, laboratory, observatory.

The church is like ... a lifeboat, portico, garden.

When bad news is good news.

One final word: We Christians are not called to meet together simply to enjoy those adventures and consolations of the devotional life for ourselves. Our faith's credibility, and the vulnerable people we care about, are under direct attack from white Christian nationalists and others claiming the Name of the Prince of Peace for their aggression. This is not the time to get too casual about our priorities, or to complain about boredom. We need to consult, discern, and act.

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Dmitry Biriukov: Why sobornost' (an aspect of Eastern Orthodox spirituality that reminds some of us of Quakers' "Gospel Order") is a double-edged sword.

Micah Bales: God asks Elijah at Mount Horeb, "Why are you here?" Good question.

Here's an interesting idea for a study Bible ... The NIV Upside-Down Kingdom Study Bible. Have you seen a copy? (Maybe not; Amazon says it is being published September 10. Take a look at the list of contributors.)

Today I visited Nancy Thomas's Life in an Old Growth Forest blog, one of my favorites. I had planned to choose a post to link here, but I found too many good ones to make a choice. My recommendation: go to the blog and just keep scrolling!

In Oslo, our family enjoyed our visit onboard the polar research ship, Fram, which went farther north (with Nansen) and farther south (with Amundsen) than any conventional ship. A few days ago, I learned about the Fram II mission, an upcoming space flight involving the SpaceX Crew Dragon craft known as Endurance. If all goes well, the journey will be the very first crewed spaceflight to fly over the North and South Poles.

In the meantime, we have not forgotten Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore.

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Italian blues band: the Blueaces, "Dust My Broom"...

Fifty years!

April 29, 1974: At first, Nixon offers transcripts rather than tapes. Source.

Source.

On Wednesday, August 7, 1974, impressionist Rich Little opened a four-day engagement in his home town, Ottawa, Ontario. I was there, among the audience members in the opera hall of the National Arts Centre.

In those moments of political high drama just across the border in the USA, I'm sure most of the audience was looking forward to Little's signature impression: U.S. President Richard Nixon. We were not disappointed.

The very next evening, August 8, fifty years ago today, Nixon announced his resignation. It took effect the following day at noon. I understand that Rich Little dropped that segment of his program for the rest of his engagement.

I was in Ottawa in those years as a student of the Russian language and Soviet area studies at Carleton University. But I was also very interested in the politics of my own country, the USA. Along with other USA citizens among my Carleton University friends, I followed the Watergate scandal closely.

In fact, the news of the Saturday Night Massacre (October 20, 1973) hit me so strongly that on the following day I got on the overnight train from Montreal to Washington, DC, where I found little knots of people in Union Station discussing the latest developments. Not having any definite idea of what to do, I felt led to walk to the White House, and there, along the White House fence, I met others who had felt a similar elemental pull to come to Washington and witness events for themselves.

I'm writing these notes in Raymond, Maine. I have my diaries from 1973 and 1974 back at home, and when I get back there, I may fill in some more details. But I don't need my diary to recall some of these Watergate anniversaries, including Rich Little's performance of August 7, and the resignation announcement the following day.

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Rich Little with impressions of Nixon and several Watergate personalities, on the Tonight Show, 1973.

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It is, of course, very sobering to realize that five whole decades have passed since Nixon's resignation, and even more sobering to think of how quickly those decades seem to have gone by. As we pass through another time of testing for our democracy, another campaign seeking to convince us that the USA would do better under authoritarian rule, I'm hoping that our younger friends and relatives, those who will still be around in 2074, will be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of this year's upcoming victory of freedom and compassion.

August 1974 has a more private significance to me as well: On August 11, I made my very first visit to a Quaker meeting—Ottawa Friends Meeting of Canadian Yearly Meeting. Since that day, Friends have shaped my understanding and practice of Christian discipleship and provided me with many precious mentors and companions in our worldwide faith family.

A year later, in August 1975, I made my first visit to Russia. I had no idea that eventually I'd spend nearly ten years of my life there.

Two years later, in August 1977, I first met Judy Van Wyck. In August 1980, we became husband and wife. Tomorrow we celebrate our 44th anniversary. August has become a very important month!

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We cannot let these days in August go by without another acknowledgment: August 6 and 9, 1945, the only times atomic bombs have been used as weapons. Here is a BBC History survey and debate on the justification for those bombings. My own skeptical (grumpy?) attitude toward Hiroshima-Nagasaki commemorations.

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Eric Berger (ars technica) on the lively discussions concerning when and how to bring the Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to earth. (Reminder: I first wrote about this spaceflight back on June 6!)

Viking Venus (a relatively small cruise ship, 930 passengers) at Flåm, pop. 500.

Starting in 2026, Norway's UNESCO Heritage fjord ports will no longer host cruise ships that don't meet certain ecological standards. This is part of a larger trend of cities banning cruise ships over ecological and sustainability concerns.

Since I'm the grandson of a cruise ship captain, I have mixed feelings. However, it helps to remember scale. Knut Maurer's last ship was about one-fifth of the length and about 1% of the displacement of today's typical cruise ships.

Here is a glimpse of the future of fjord-eligible cruise vessels. These solutions may work for destinations with appropriate tourism infrastructure on land, but don't meet some of the other concerns of cities and regions trying to cope with unsustainable numbers of visitors. (Is the Camino de Santiago a worthy case study?)

Related: Tourism. ("To feel superior to the ordinary tourist might just be another form of that primordial social poison, elitism.")

The opening line of "Reflections on Britain Yearly Meeting 2024" by Mark Russ: "Should I keep my membership of the Religious Society of Friends?" Keep reading!

Becky Ankeny on sacrifice and salvation.

When Jesus chose to allow himself to be arrested and crucified, he sacrificed himself despite all his human fear of pain, his ordinary desire for life and happiness. In the garden he sweated drops of blood as he contemplated his near future of torture and death, and on the cross he cried out his sense of abandonment by God. He protested against pain and death and aloneness, but he held fast to his intention because it brought and brings good for us. His ultimate act of agency was choosing to forgive his torturers.

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Lightnin' Hopkins in full storytelling mode. "Mr. Charlie's Rolling Mill." (Hopkins mentions John Lee Hooker's stuttering; more about that here.)