Can you believe?

26 September 2024

What I've learned about living 'centered in Christ'

My attempt at a brief spiritual biography:

“Love your enemies, and pray for your persecutors….”

Reading these words, from Matthew 5:44, was the turning point of my life. The year was 1974. I was 21 years old, a university student in Canada. I felt like an exile from the USA, disillusioned by the war in Viet Nam and by President Nixon’s Watergate scandal. I had fled my violent and alcoholic family, but in leaving them I had abandoned my ten-year-old sister to their care, if that’s the right word.

How I came to be reading the Bible that day is a long story for another time, but those specific words from Matthew opened me up in an unexpected and unprecedented way. Underneath the printed words I could feel a voice saying, “You can trust me.”

From that moment forward, that promise of Jesus shaped my life in at least three ways. First, after the disillusionments that had shaken my life to that point, both in the world and in my own family, I desperately needed healing for my ability to trust. Bitterness and cynicism seemed very inviting alternatives. Instead, I had a new goal for my life: to relearn how to trust and to be trustworthy. I’m aware of my failures, but that’s still my daily goal.

Second, I wanted others to have access to that voice, especially those who’d also experienced disillusionment and betrayal. Some might discover it in the Bible, as I did, but I thought others might be reached through trustworthy communities, and the people that those communities empowered and sent out into the world. That‘s why the ideal and goal of “building a trustworthy church” became so important to me.

Finally, here’s the Quaker part. My path to Jesus began in an unlikely place: growing up in an anti-church family in which any mention of religion or mortality was forbidden. I felt blessed to hear his promise directly, cutting through the blanket skepticism I’d inherited from my parents. I knew right away that I wanted to find out more among people who would understand my hunger for that direct confirmation without unnecessary ceremonies or gatekeepers. I had heard about Quakers, and it seemed to me as a young seeker that maybe these were people who would offer that understanding.

On August 11, 1974, I decided to test this hope. I went to a Quaker meeting for the first time, and hope became reality. I joined the movement that took George Fox at his word, “Christ has come to teach his people himself,” and will be forever grateful that I found you.

My story would be very incomplete if I did not mention the role of my marriage in “what I’ve learned….” Judy has gifts of spiritual sensitivity that I lack. I’ve learned that our gifts supplement each other, and I’ve grown to rely on that.

I don’t want to be interpreted as saying that marriage is a superior state. I’m grateful for this partnership in my own case, but complementary gifts and partnerships are not confined to any particular relationship model.

Our healthiest meetings and churches recognize and liberate the gifts of all of us, so that our prophets and teachers, our helpers and treasurers, our evangelists and poets, our pastors and clerks, all encourage each other, and even our conflicts can become fertile and redemptive.

I originally wrote the text above as an exercise for our yearly meeting's Faith and Practice Committee. If I were asked to provide a spiritual biography of reasonable length, what could I come up with? This was my answer, for now.

Have you written anything along similar lines? If you're willing to share it, I'd be very grateful!

The title of my attempt comes from the opening paragraph for our slowly-emerging book of Faith and Practice—a preamble approved by our yearly meeting last June:

The Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends is a voluntary association of Quaker meetings, churches, and individuals whose worship, ministry, and service are centered in Christ, guided by Quaker testimonies and experience, and committed to the full participation of LGBTQ+ people in all aspects of the life and leadership of the Yearly Meeting....

The full preamble is in this post.

Related: What differentiates Quakers from other Christians?
What does "that of God" mean? (with lots of comments)
Why conversion?
The most important question.

This morning I attended an online meeting of the European and Middle East regional team of Friends Peace Teams. Among other important agenda items, we had a vivid and distressing direct report of conditions in the Gaza Strip as of today. If the text of the report becomes available for circulation, I'll add a link here. In the meantime, we already know the urgency of a ceasefire.

In the meantime, here is the most recent newsletter of Friends Peace Teams, covering much of the range of the work of FPT and its partners.

And ... Friends Peace Teams is hosting an Online Global Gathering, November 13-16, 2024. The gathering is for newcomers and long-timers, for justice and peace workers, facilitators, supporters, donors, inquirers, members of Quaker meetings and churches and their friends, to get to know and learn from each other, celebrate our work, and deepen our connections. Join us to celebrate and discuss our theme: Justice and peace are possible! What sustains our faith in justice and peace in the face of violence and war? Check out the program for information and registration.

Finally, the Europe and Middle East team is looking for a Volunteer Treasurer to manage our slowly growing funds as we work to build our regional efforts. The Treasurer works with our accountant and other regional treasurers to coordinate donations, spending, and our annual budget. For more information about joining our team, composed of Ukrainians, Iraqis, Palestinians, British and Americans, or about other aspects of these reports and plans, please contact Ann J. Ward, Northern Yearly Meeting representative and clerk of Friends Peace Teams - Europe and Middle East, or contact me, Sierra-Cascades' representative. (Or leave a comment on this post.)

British Friends call for the UK government to review its trade agreement with Israel.

Fordham University's Orthodox Christian Study Center is hosting an online panel presentation, The Plight of Gaza's Christians, this coming Sunday, Sept 29. More information at this page.

Source: Fernwood Press

A Ukrainian Vision of Peace: a statement adopted by the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement on the International Day of Peace.

For Our Daughters: The Story of Abuse, Betrayal and Resistance in the Evangelical Church—the full version of this film became available on Youtube today. Here's a link to the study guide for viewers. Producer Kristin Du Mez explains the context of the film in this video.

John Kinney speaks to Spokane Friends about intercessory prayer.

Thanks to Jim Fussell (Quaker Theology Group on Facebook) for drawing our attention to this article on flowers at Quaker meetings. And here's Nancy Thomas on late bloomers. Nancy's newest poetry collection, The Language of Light, is on sale now.

A Steve Guyger rerun: Sonny Boy Williamson II's "Mighty Long Time." (Here's a Youtube audio clip of Williamson performing his song.)

19 September 2024

"Foreigners for the rest of our lives"

Asya, the narrator of the novel The Anthropologists, by Ayşegül Savaş, and Asya's husband Manu, are from two different countries and live in a third country:

We were scholarship students in a foreign country, which is to say that we recognized something in each other. We'd been raised by similar types of people—their worries, their discipline, their affection, their means—even though we had grown up on opposite ends of the world. We accepted, children that we were, that we would remain foreigners for the rest of our lives, wherever we lived, and we were delighted by the prospect. Back then, it didn't seem to us that we'd ever need anyone else, in our small world that was also a universe.

I don't intend to write a full review of this endearing novel; others have done a good job...

Sana Goyal in The Guardian: "The novel exists in the liminalities, distances and tensions between two states or stages of life, and traces the discrepancies between the kinds of adults the characters are and the kinds of adults they were expected to be."
Kayla D. Walker in Electric Lit (including a conversation with the author): "... a breathtaking excavation of the wonders and intricacies involved in making a modern life in a new city, of feeling both young and adult, and of growing up while settling down."

... I just wanted to give you some idea of why I loved this quiet novel so much. Its structure is a series of Asya's observations on their life together, with insertions from the interviews she conducts in a city park as she films a documentary about the life of that park. The task the young couple have set for themselves is to find a new, more "sturdy" place to live in that unnamed city, something better than the small, dark apartment they had found "in an unremarkable part of town" which they'd chosen "without much thought. Back then, we were only playing out our adulthoods rather than committing to them."

In the meantime, daily life goes on:

Manu left home early to go to work at the nonprofit organization on the other side of the city. While he made breakfast, I made a pot of coffee and sat with him at the table in pajamas. It was a ritual of sorts, sitting across from each other, face-to-face. There were few rituals to our lives, certainly none that carried any history, at least not the history of traditions, of nations and faiths. So these small things mattered. I would make sure to sit with him at the table.
Before he left, we kissed in the hallway.
Okay, Manu said, back in my shoes.

Another ritual: their periodic online conversations with family members in their respective homelands, revealing the anxieties of parents and grandparents, and their variable ability to understand what their kids are doing. And part of the progression of the book is their establishment of new, lightweight but significant, rituals of their own.

Most of their acquaintances are also expats, who vary in their comfort with the city that unites them and the culture they may or may not be adapting to. When do friends really say what they're anxious about? How do you know when someone is avoiding you ... or are you misinterpreting their signals?

The book is full of tiny but telling details—what objects they choose, for example, to decorate their apartment, and the hints of long-term intimacy in their nicknames for themselves as a couple, and their ritual catch-phrases. Some reviewers mentioned that they inhaled this novel in one or two sittings, but I found myself needing to take frequent breaks to savor and ponder what I'd just read.

We managed to fit 11 people into our Elektrostal kitchen.

Judy and I have lived something like expats at times, particularly during our years in Elektrostal. We were not from "opposite ends of the world" (although Cave Creek, Arizona, and Oslo, Norway, have some notable differences), but, in establishing ourselves in a new place, we often could not be sure we heard people correctly, or understood what they really meant; and we had to develop our own mix of familiar rituals and new patterns of behavior. I mentioned a bit of this reality in my post entitled "I ain't no stranger."

Some parts of The Anthropologists also reminded me of my years in "exile" from the USA—that is, my university years in Ottawa, Ontario, during the war in Viet Nam.

The other comparison that the humane, steady, affectionate voice of Ayşegül Savaş brought to my mind was Jim Jarmusch's film Paterson. There are major differences, of course; for example, Paterson doesn't have an explicit "foreigner" context, although it's hard to forget in today's world that Golshifteh Farahani, who plays Paterson's wife Laura, is from Iran. But there are parallels, too, in the quiet portrayal of long-term intimacy and the little rituals that accompany it, the yearning to create art (Laura is a designer always seeking new media, and wants to become a country music star; husband Paterson, a bus driver, observes his passengers and writes poetry on his breaks). In both the novel and the movie, conflicts do arise, and are mostly resolved, but kindness rules.

Laura: I was dreaming that we were in ancient Persia. And... you were riding on an elephant. A big, silver elephant.

Paterson: A silver elephant?

Laura: Yeah. You looked so beautiful.

Paterson: Do they have elephants in ancient Persia?

Laura: [laughs] I don't think so. Not silver ones, anyway.

[Source.]

From The Anthropologists' author Ayşegül Savaş on creating her story's clock.

Friends Committee on National Legislation advocates restoring USA humanitarian funding for Gaza.

Conversation, conversion, and "faithful betrayal"—part of what it has meant to Wess Daniels to find and be found by God.

Epistle from the Young Adult Friends' gathering at Jordans meetinghouse and a related article by Matt Rosen.

Sierra-Cascades Friends make a visit to Kake, Alaska. Reflections from Joel Jackson, tribal council president, and Juulie Downs of Camas Friends Church.

More Canadian content: Blues guitarist Sue Foley, "Come to Me."

12 September 2024

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....

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.

"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!

05 September 2024

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.)

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.

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

29 August 2024

More thoughts on keeping hope sober

Sea of Okhotsk.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

22 August 2024

Hope, four years later

Sognefjord.

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?")

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.

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.)

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.)