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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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

"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.

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We managed to fit 11 people into our Elektrostal kitchen.

Sign in an Elektrostal transport minibus: "A few minutes of TERROR, and you're home"

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.]

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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.

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

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."