Here is a letter to all Friends, sent out by North Seattle Friends Church, and dated July 20, 2024:
Dear friends!
Sunday, before worship, an attender wondered if all the Quakers across the country could pray at a designated time for political peace and election violence prevention. She could see the spiritual power that would flow from a gathered, focused channel of Divine Presence across our country. And as she wondered aloud, she was sure that if her friends of other denominations and faiths knew that Quakers were praying, they would also want to join in.
As this vision was shared, it was suggested that we begin immediately. Every noon we, at North Seattle Friends, will pray to interrupt the spirit/energy of violence with whatever mode of Spirit is natural to us — prayer, imagery, meditation, silence, etc. We will seek to replace the energy of violence with the energy of Love, Goodness, and Holy Illumination. Our focused time will be as short or long as we are Led and have space for, whether it is a moment between chores or the spaciousness of a dedicated time. We will know that these are not just our singular prayers, but the kindling of a greater, gathered community.
And so it is our joy to invite you and your Meeting/Church to join us in prayer at noon each day. We encourage you to send on this invitation to anyone and everyone, across denominations and faiths. We are not alone in our yearning for peace and hope you and many others will join us. We invite you to take up the challenge not with fear for the future, but with joyous expectation and hope!
With visions of compassion and peace dancing in our hearts, we look forward to hearing from you!
Related link: Emily Provance brought her concern and perspectives on election violence prevention to Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends at our last annual gathering. Here is a link to her Web page on this concern.
As the letter from North Seattle Friends has been circulating, I've been reading Erik Larson's The Demon of Unrest. Larson's book is a vivid and detailed account of the five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the USA and the start of the slaughter that we know as the U.S. Civil War.
As the author himself relates in his opening pages, he was already hard at work researching this period of history when the events of January 6, 2021, happened. (He writes, "As I watched the Capitol assault unfold on camera I had the eerie feeling that present and past had merged.") The absolutist rhetoric of many on both sides of the impending Civil War reminds me of similar polarizations in our current situation.
(I'm not claiming that the actual arguments on both sides, then and now, were equally just.)
I'm very aware that Emily Provance began circulating her concern about election violence prevention long before the recent attack on candidate Donald Trump. I'm grateful for her work, for North Seattle Friends' prayer initiative, and for the illumination provided by Erik Larson's reconstruction of an earlier period of rhetorical violence that exploded into actual war.
My only experiences learning to sail have been in the calm waters of Panther Pond in Maine, not exactly the open ocean. But my grandfather made a life on the sea, following a classical path—running away from home to join a ship's crew, then rising up the ranks, going to the Maritime School at Ekeberg, Oslo, eventually becoming skipper of a passenger ship.
My father also went to sea as a young man, making a round trip from Norway to the USA and back on the school ship Christian Radich. The first movie I ever saw as a child was Windjammer, filmed on and around that ship.
All my own childhood transatlantic travels were by sea. When I'm not on the open ocean, I'm often dreaming about the next time it might happen. In the meantime, I love a well-told story about the adventures of others. And those stories don't get better than this ... Close to the Surface: A Family Journey at Sea, by Bethany Lee.
For years, Bethany and Bryan Lee of Lafayette, Oregon, and their two daughters, Hannah and Meira, had been learning to sail, gaining serious experience handling their 32-foot Islander sloop LiLo, gathering information and equipment, constructing their own dinghy, and learning to work as a team in good weather and bad, in the various and sometimes unpredictable situations the ocean might offer. They were daring to dream that the time might be coming for them to put their land-lives on hold, leave their home port in the Columbia River, and make a serious Pacific coastal voyage that could easily take the best part of a year....
December 2012. Bethany Lee gets a phone call from her husband Bryan at work:
"They want to renew my contract for eighteen months. If I sign, we'll be stuck here until Hannah's in high school. I may have just told my boss we're leaving this summer. Are we really ready to do this?"
What, exactly, was "this"? As departure day drew near, one friend asked Bethany what seemed like a very reasonable question: "What's your itinerary?"
"South," I said.
"That's not an itinerary," she said. 'That's just a direction!"
I explained that we didn't know how fast we'd end up traveling or how long our savings would last. We had no idea which ports we'd stop at or where we'd want to spend extra time exploring.
"Schedules kill sailors," I said, echoing wise advice we'd been given from more experienced mariners. "If we set a firm itinerary, we'll risk making bad decisions to follow it. We can't just go out in any weather. We have to adjust to conditions as they arise."
She shook her head. "I couldn't handle leaving without a plan."
"We're not unprepared," I said. We have charts stashed in the V-berth for the coastline from here to Panama, although we don't think we'll make it that far. And we're not sure what the return journey will look like.... Whatever we end up doing, we'll have to figure it out on the way."
These words are a wonderful preview of the riveting paradox that drives this book: careful planning, training, and stockpiling on the one hand, but also a readiness to shift to whatever the wind and waves and tides and underwater reefs require in the moment, sometimes with zero warning. Above all, what is required is constant alertness. Especially in the fog, especially in the busy shipping lanes, especially....
Bethany Lee's superb writing conveys this intensity. She knows just when to include log-worthy details and the specific features of their boat and the demands of weather and navigation, when to give us glimpses of family life in the confines of 150 square feet, and when to acknowledge inner moments of joy, crashing doubt, and sudden crisis. Among the most fascinating dimensions of their ten months at sea are the friendships the family developed with other sailors and with the people living in many of the communities they visited. Just as Judy and I found in Russia, there were angels among the people they encountered in those communities—in the USA and in Mexico. The map of their voyage turns out to be a trail of mutual goodwill.
I've known Bethany Lee for several years as a musician and a fellow Quaker minister. I've also been aware of her and her family as sailors, having followed her blog at the time of the voyage. What I'd like to say after reading her new book, Close to the Surface: A Family Journey at Sea, is that I now also know her as a master chronicler with a sure pen and an irresistible command of pacing. I hope you will get this book and enter the new spaces she opens for us, and be encouraged to dream courageously.
LiLo. (Source: Bethany Lee.)
The sailors. (Source: Bethany Lee.)
The voyage. (Source: Close to the Surface, pages 6-7. The book also includes helpful diagrams of the boat and a glossary of nautical terms. A reader's guide for the book is available here.)
A 54-foot sloop (a bit larger than the LiLo, and with 52 souls on board) left Stavanger, Norway, on July 4, 1825, bound for New York. Many of the passengers were Quakers, and this little ship, the Restauration (Restoration) carried the beginning of the Quaker migration from Norway to the USA. In fact, it started an enormous stream of Norwegian immigration to the United States over the next decades, a stream that eventually included me.
My first passport.
A replica of that historic vessel will sail from Stavanger on July 4, 2025, precisely on the 200th anniversary of its predecessor's departure. It plans to time its arrival in New York for October 9, 2025, again observing the 200th anniversary. Plans are underway to coordinate its arrival with Friends in New York Yearly Meeting. We expect that the official welcome the first Restauration got on its arrival (arrest of the captain and confiscation of the boat and its cargo, and a stiff fine, for exceeding the passenger load limit for a ship of its size, thankfully commuted by President John Quincy Adams!) will not be repeated.
There's a lot of good background material on this 200th-anniversary event at restauration.no. Norwegian Quakers are very involved in this inspiring project. (Stavanger Friends met for worship aboard the ship on this past Pentecost.) I have no idea at the moment whether I will be able to witness either the departure or arrival of the new Restauration, but I can dream ... and mark my calendar!
For the AMOC [Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation] and other climate tipping points, the only action we can take to minimize the risk is to phase out fossil fuel use and stop deforestation as fast as possible. If we can reach zero emissions, further global warming will stop within years, and the sooner this happens the smaller the risk of passing devastating tipping points. It would also minimize many other losses, damages, and human suffering from “regular” global warming impacts (e.g., heatwaves, floods, droughts, harvest failures, wildfires, sea level rise), which are already happening all around us even without the passing of major climate tipping points.
A Conversation with Joel Jackson of Kake, Alaska, and through him, with his community. (An interview by Judy Maurer in the Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends newsletter.)
Bonnie Raitt receives Kennedy Center honors this year. Congratulations to a wonderful singer and guitarist! I used some of her songs in our classes in Elektrostal; for example, this song, with its gap-fill version on our Institute chalkboard, and (below) possibly one of the cheesiest videos ever.
We used exercises like these as a part of our listening comprehension lessons.
Quaker Exceptionalism. We touched on this phenomenon several times in Mark Russ's excellent Woodbrooke course on "Quaker theology and whiteness," just concluded. (If you're intrigued by the course title, ask Woodbrooke and Mark whether it might be presented again!)
I'm glad to see some new attention to this exceptionalism and its spiritual hazards. I do have one mild caution: please let's not use this problem as just another way to shame and one-up each other for being insufficiently spiritual or progressive or anti-racist compared to ourselves in our own eyes! Yes, there is arrogance and ignorance and elitism in this exceptionalism, but it's also fueled by genuine idealism (a beautiful quality I see in Quakers everywhere across our divisions), a desire to do better than the religion industry whose oppressive structures and conceits we originally rose up to oppose.
As an old London Yearly Meeting poster once proclaimed, as nearly as I can remember, "Tired of organized religion? Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater." Let's just watch out for that exceptionalist temptation, whatever our corner of the Quaker world—to replace the Baby with our own bathwater, whether that be the subtle rose-scented water of liberal Quakerism or the soggy cliches of imported evangelicalism.
One more word on the course on Quaker theology and whiteness that Mark Russ presented: within a couple of years it should be emerging in book form. I can't wait! In the meantime, I'm looking forward to Mark's The Spirit of Freedom: Quaker-Shaped Christian Theology, coming this autumn.
This past spring, via Zoom, Mark gave a sermon on the good news of sin (!!) at our Camas Friends Church.
Scandinavian Exceptionalism. I'm supposedly a global citizen. I've claimed not to have a bucket list. (I already live on my favorite planet.) However, I admit that inside me there is a vein of Norwegian patriotism, with its mixture of justifiable pride and unjustifiable smugness. It's usually well hidden (at least I hope so), but it wakes up every now and then, at Winter Olympics time and whenever I see a new survey showing Norway's high standard of living, its generous international aid policies, and its unrivaled $1.6 trillion sovereign wealth fund.
My late cousin Johan Fredrik Heyerdahl and I used to discuss some of the complexities and contradictions of Norwegian identity. My visit to Norway later this year will be my first since his death, and I'll intensely miss his wonderful company. I'm sure I'll have some good conversations with relatives and friends, but in the meantime I've started my preparations by reading Michael Booth's The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia.
Some of this territory was well covered by Robert Ferguson's excellent Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North, which I briefly described in this post: "Shame is what turns societies around." What I like about Michael Booth's book is his undisguised irritation at the exaggerated admiration that the Scandinavian countries sometimes bask in. It's the sort of admiration of these "almost nearly perfect" countries that doesn't take into account national patterns of conformism (see Janteloven), troubling attitudes toward immigrants, and unresolved dilemmas about national wealth and productivity, among many other shadow factors.
Despite the utopian "myth" of his book's title, Booth isn't relentlessly snarky or negative, not at all. He gives credit wherever he thinks it is due, and cheerfully owns up to his prejudices. His discussion of Norway's gigantic "oil fund" is a good example: his interviews and reflections touch on the blessings of all that money for Norway's quality of life and governance, and he acknowledges the amazingly careful stewardship of that money. At the same time, he points out the contradictions of Norway's internal culture of ecological sensitivity vs the source of all that fabulous national wealth (sales of carbon-based fuels), as well as the apparent impact of that wealth on Norwegians' work ethic.
In any case, I'm eager to gather some fresh impressions of my own, in the land of my birth.
Tim Alberta, author of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, writes in The Atlantic: "Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win. (And his campaign is all but praying Joe Biden doesn’t drop out.)" (14-day gift link.)
Biden quitting the race would necessitate a dramatic reset—not just for the Democratic Party, but for Trump’s campaign. Wiles and LaCivita told me that any Democratic replacement would inherit the president’s deficiencies; that whether it’s Vice President Kamala Harris or California Governor Gavin Newsom or anyone else, Trump’s blueprint for victory would remain essentially unchanged. But they know that’s not true. They know their campaign has been engineered in every way—from the voters they target to the viral memes they create—to defeat Biden. And privately, they are all but praying that he remains their opponent.
I was struck by the irony. The two people who had done so much to eliminate the havoc and guesswork that defined Trump’s previous two campaigns for the presidency could now do little but hope that their opponent got his act together.
That’s what’s changed. These ideas aren’t new, but the tone and tenor of rhetoric has shifted perceptably in the past few months, even weeks. Growing numbers of Christians are not even trying to hide their nativism, misogyny, anti-semitism, and authoritarianism.
And where are the moderate voices? Where are the principled conservative leaders, organizations, and institutions? Where are individual conservative Christians digging in their heels, defending our Constitutional government, religious liberty for all, and democratic pluralism?
They are few and far between.
All of this should be cause for alarm, even if you aren’t looking at the poll numbers.
Diana Butler Bass on talking about politics in church, and the intellectual grounding her childhood church gave her to do just that.... (And, fast-forwarding to now: "Who's Reinhold Niebuhr?")
It isn’t that Reinhold Niebuhr had all the answers. He didn’t. I now disagree with much of what he wrote. I draw from a much wider range of theo-political options.
But Niebuhr represented a tradition — part of that long Christian argument that shaped the imagination of an elementary school girl in a Methodist church in Baltimore. From him, and from those others, I learned that it was good to argue about faith and politics in church. Indeed, it was our birthright.
Paul Anderson: John as the universalist gospel and as the "only way to the Father."
July 4, day one of this year's Waterfront Blues Festival.
A few weeks ago I celebrated the twentieth birthday of this blog. I wanted to add a few more statistics in that post, but I ran out of time, so I thought I'd squeeze them in here.
You'd think that with today being election day in the UK, and repercussions from the first U.S. presidential election debate all over my news and opinion feeds, I'd have something less self-focused to write about! However, I'm quite sure that you're as closely in touch with all those developments as you want to be, and don't need me to fill you in. I, on the other hand, have taken most of today off to enjoy day one of Portland's Waterfront Blues Festival. I'm too exhausted (happily so!) to think very deeply, so sharing some blog statistics seems a safe choice.
Since the current count started on June 30, 2010, I've had 1,758,175 visits. I'm pretty sure that 95% or more of those visits were accounted for by visitors landing as a result of a search that had little to do with my content. For example, five of the six most popular individual pages have the word "repost" in the title. How many hundreds or thousands of search engine users included the word "repost" in their searches and found ... me?
This list includes the twenty most popular posts for the whole history of my blog, by raw count. Probably some posts from before 2010 are undercounted here, but I still find the list interesting. Totals for the posts are in the third column, and the fifth column ("adjusted view count") divides those totals by the number of weeks that have passed since the count started on each post. This was my way of evening out the ranking, so the old posts don't have an unfair advantage.
The result, in that adjusted order, is in the table above. I'm using Chrome to edit and read this post, with data imported from a Google spreadsheet; I hope it works with your browser.
This particular set of twenty higher-scoring posts touches on most of my favorite themes: faith, discipleship, and religious rhetoric; faith and politics; Russia, where I spent almost ten of those twenty years; and, finally, thoughts and stories about human relationships. (I'm still working on the grief that "just won't come.")
Stats by country since 2010. The last few lines are cut off (screenshot).
Most of my blog posts since about 2007 have come with blues videos at the end, but as with all links, some of those clips vanish from the Internet. Pictures on the older posts, especially those dating back to my use of Photobucket, also have a tendency to vanish, but I still have my Photobucket archives, and I'm slowly trying to restore those pictures. Links to interesting sites and blogs frequently get changed or abandoned, and I'm gradually replacing them, when possible, with links found on the Wayback Machine. Let me know if you find a post that might be worth refurbishing.
One important theme that didn't show up on this list was the story of my sister Ellen. Last Sunday would have been her 69th birthday. I posted some photos on Facebook to remind the world that she was once among us, and added a link to this post I wrote when she (would have) turned 60.
OK, no more self-referential blog posts until the next worthwhile anniversary! See you again after the blues festival.
Hank Shreve played his harmonica this evening at Kim Field's Harmonica Blow-Off, an annual feature of our blues festival. Here's a relatively recent video of Hank and his band.
The Convocation Unscripted S1E3. Screenshot from source. Top: Robert Jones, Diana Butler Bass. Bottom: Kristin Du Mez, Jemar Tisby.
Last week, in part one, I was thinking about how to pray honestly when considering the "butcher's bench" of history and the persistence of sin—by which I mostly mean the ways we mistreat each other and Creation generally.
Concerning that persistence, I linked to Kristin Du Mez's blog post in which she mentioned Tolkien's "long defeat" as quoted by one of the ministers at her church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She went on say how important it is, in our service on behalf of justice and truth, not to grow dependent on victorious outcomes.
Last week Du Mez published another post, "Peace where there is no peace," with what struck me as a case study for not depending on victorious outcomes—and the case was one which I immediately identified with. Here's a clue from the title of the podcast episode embedded in her post: "When Your Religion Cancels You."
(The podcast, The Convocation Unscripted, features conversations among three historians and one sociologist, all of whom "write about religion and its intersection with culture, history, and politics in America"—Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Du Mez, Robert P. Jones, and Jemar Tisby.)
Kristen Du Mez's denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, is tightening up its discipline regarding churches (and possibly faculty members of its associated educational institutions, such as Du Mez's Calvin University) who dissent from the church's "confessional" teachings on sexuality and marriage. For a brief and seemingly evenhanded summary of the situation, see this Religion News Service article.
Going back to Du Mez's newer post, written shortly before the Synod meeting described in the RNS article:
When your Religion Cancels You.
That was the topic selected for our second podcast episode over at The Convocation: Unscripted. Little did my fellow podcasters know, that’s a sensitive topic for me this week. As I write, my denomination is dictating the terms that will require my home church and many others to leave the denomination over a new interpretation of what is now deemed “confessional,” one that requires condemnation of same-sex relationships.
In terms of getting “cancelled,” my case isn’t like many others’ in that I’m staying with my congregation. We’re all leaving together, along with many other congregations in the US and Canada. Still, it’s a lot to process.
I shared just a bit here [in the podcast], and you can hear Robby, Jemar, and Diana talk about their own experiences leaving the faith communities they once called home. I’m guessing that many of you may find points of connection.
So, dear Friends ... when did "our religion" cancel us? Here's the blog post from 2017 that sums up the story from my personal point of view—our involuntary separation from a body of believers that I loved and appreciated, Northwest Yearly Meeting. One similarity to the process being experienced by the Christian Reformed Church and ours, is the length of time the process of enforcement is taking. In each case, it feels like an experience of the long defeat. Each time our little band of exiles meets, we do get a "some glimpse of final victory," but my heart aches for what might have been.
I'm going to stop here. I don't want to reduce the amount of time you might spend checking some of the links and videos above, particularly the Kristin Du Mez post.
Kent Hendricks: Observations on patterns of division and departure in the Christian Reformed Church. It makes for an interesting comparison with what we experienced in Northwest Yearly Meeting.
Still more sobering reading, this time on Russia and Ukraine. Both of the next two items are from the Meduza service:
First, Dmitry Kartsev interviews Jonathan Littell, author of the book An Inconvenient Place (with photographer Antoine d'Agata), reckoning with Nazi and Russian atrocities in Ukraine "from Babi Yar to Bucha." The book is available in French and Russian now, and an English-language edition is scheduled for publication in September.
Second, an interview (Russian original; machine-translated English) with Tatiana Kasatkina, wife of imprisoned human rights activist Oleg Orlov, former co-chair of the now-liquidated Memorial organization.
The Internet Archive (on which I depend constantly!) is forced to delete half a million books from its online library; 19,000 supporters write an open letter to publishers.
Top: Kristin Kobes Du Mez (source). Bottom: Len Vander Zee (source).
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.(Romans 8:22, context.)
“Together through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.”(from J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.)
Credit where credit is due: what follows was sparked by a message, "Growing Pains," given on Pentecost by our Camas Friends Church's pastor Matt Boswell. Not for the first time, his thoughtful message led me on some trails of my own, which I then put together as a sermon at Spokane Friends Meeting, later in May.
As I told Spokane Friends, Matt had spoken about the passage in Romans chapter eight that refers to all Creation groaning and awaiting its liberation. The passage continues (Romans 8:24-27; full chapter):
For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
Matt invited us to consider how we’ve dealt with pain and growth, and how we’ve experienced the Spirit interceding for us. As often happens these days, my thoughts went in a direction that you may have already predicted: how some very specific parts of Creation are groaning, namely Ukraine and the Gaza Strip.
Although I'm not normally shy about connecting prayer with political implications, I have a different purpose here today. I want to consider how God’s Spirit intercedes for us when we run out of ways to pray.
It was almost five years ago that I applied to Christian Peacemaker Teams, as they were still called at the time, to serve on their team in Hebron, Palestine. Somewhat to my surprise, I was accepted. I served there the last quarter of 2019. Somehow, even during the most violent episodes of those three months, I didn’t fear for my own safety. By the way, I’m not a total idiot; later on, and even now when I look at pictures from those months, I get retroactively scared, if you know what I mean. In any case, while I was there, I realized that the purpose of my service in Palestine was not to be some sort of hero of nonviolent accompaniment, but to learn what it means to pray without ceasing.
All the same, I’m not claiming to be a very effective practitioner of nonstop prayer, because no matter how hard I prayed during those three months in Palestine, lives kept getting lost, houses kept getting knocked down, and different groups of people, all equally loved by God according to my own theology, kept insisting on seeing each other as implacable enemies.
Father Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, a Catholic lawyer and theologian, gave a sermon back in the late 1970's whose theme was, “Apathy in the face of preventable suffering is radical evil.” (I’m pretty sure I’ve quoted him on this subject before.) In that sermon he used this vivid phrase: “History is a butcher’s bench.” Among the people McCarthy has counseled over the years is Father Zabelka, the chaplain of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomber crew. Father Zabelka’s conversion to Christian nonviolence a quarter century later was a powerful witness, but the reality is that those bombing crews made it to their targets. As did the Japanese crews that flew to Pearl Harbor. And the chain of violence and retribution stretches back to Cain and Abel.
God loves us but does not necessarily restrain our violent hand.
Of course it is true that we don’t necessarily know when God’s intervention did happen, only when it apparently didn’t. So God didn’t restrain the hands of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, though we have to wonder what happened in the minds and hearts of the thousands of soldiers who have apparently deserted since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And God didn’t prevent the loss of thousands of innocent children in the Gaza Strip since the Hamas attack. It just doesn’t seem right to me to say that all of us who prayed our little heads off for peace and reconciliation just weren’t using the right words, or we failed to mobilize enough people to pray enough times day and night to finally persuade God to act. Ever since we ate those apples in the Garden of Eden, too many of us humans think we know better than God how to fix conflicts by eliminating our enemies, and God hasn’t seen fit to set us all straight.
So: Creation continues to groan. And we continue to search for the words of authentic prayer, and the assurance that, even if we fail, the Spirit will intercede for us.
On the day I gave this message at Spokane Friends, that morning I had read a remarkable substack post by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, reporting on a sermon she had recently heard from Len Vander Zee of the Church of the Servant in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Some of you probably recognize Kristin Du Mez’s name as the author of the book Jesus and John Wayne. Her post was very helpful to me as I prepared myself to speak about the ways we as the Church respond in prayer and in honesty to a creation in pain.
Her substack post quotes Vander Zee as saying,
What is the calling of the church? You know what that is. Take up your cross and follow me. The church is called to follow its king in self-sacrificing love.
Somehow the church tends to pick up the idea that we’re supposed to win. That our place in the world is not one of suffering love, but victorious power….
It’s so easy for the church to forget that Christ did not call us to rule but to serve. He called us, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, to come and die. The church’s role in history is to live the way of the King, the way of the cross, the way of self-giving love.
Now, Kristin du Mez lets us know that she had some other things going on in her mind as Vander Zee continued with his sermon. Here’s what she says about that:
As I listened to the sermon, I was thinking about steeling myself for the months ahead. I thought of the organizations and networks I was involved with, of the posts I had planned here, of the traveling I would be doing, of the projects (some yet to be unveiled) that I’d be dedicating my time and energy to. My mind was wandering, but I was still following along with the sermon. And then I heard the words that jarred me. Len was quoting Celeborn and Galadriel in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, saying: “together through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.” Tolkien expanded on this in a letter to a friend: “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.”
“A long defeat.” Sounds pretty dismal, doesn’t it?
Yet, on some level, doesn't it match the actual record? Despite all evidence that power and violence never work in the long run, the myth of redemptive violence keeps chugging along, generation after generation, raining bullets on the just and unjust alike. Here’s how Du Mez interprets this “long defeat” for herself, in the context of the campaign she sees herself waging, against the heresies of white Christian nationalism:
We all think our cause is righteous. And when you refuse to allow for the possibility of losing, it changes what you’re fighting for. It changes how you fight. And it changes who you are. …
As much as I want my side to win this next round, it’s not a given. The cause is urgent, and (I think) good. But we are not called to win, nor should we necessarily expect to.
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t work diligently to protect the good of our nation and our fellow citizens, and, for those of us who are Christians, to fight against what we see as a dangerous distortion of our faith. I’m planning on spending the next several months working to this end. But it also means that we need to be grounded in something deeper than winning the next battle. If we are, I think we’ll find the resilience to grapple with whatever the outcome of the next battle might be.
I began this message intending to address how we pray when we see Creation groaning beyond our apparent ability to intercede. First of all, I do trust that the Holy Spirit intercedes for God’s people, as Paul says in Romans 8. But I’m a verbal person; that’s how I express my faith, however clueless I may be at times. Here’s where another passage from Paul, 2 Corinthians 1:19-20 (context), helps me:
For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us—by me and Silas and Timothy—was not “Yes” and “No,” but in him it has always been “Yes.” For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.
Here, Paul is explaining why he changed his itinerary on his way to meet with his audience, and that he did so not for trivial reasons, as if there were no difference between “yes” and “no.” When I first read this passage as a new Christian, a freshly minted Quaker in Ottawa Meeting, it struck me deeply, and as a result, the word “yes” became my lifelong one-word prayer. To put it another way, I see Jesus as the “yes” to God’s promises. The most important promise, in my view, is that God never abandons us. The world is not in a position to guarantee our safety, but the world doesn’t get to separate us from God.
For me, the word “yes” implies another one-word prayer, “no.” (More about "no" from Yakov Krotov.) We don’t have magical powers against violence, racism, greed, cruelty, elitism, and the demand that we see others as “enemies,” but when we have said “yes” to the Prince of Peace, we have the right to say “no” in his name to any force that seeks to harm those he loves.
I am not pleading for this list of one-word prayers or against that. I love the three one-word prayers that Anne Lamott suggests: “thanks,” “help,” and “wow.” When all is said and said and said, I want and need to fall back on Paul’s promise that the Spirit will intercede for us through wordless groans, as if the Spirit, too, knows and understands this “long defeat” that the Spirit is equipping us to endure.
Nor am I saying that wordless prayer, or one-word prayer, is superior. Our prayers reflect our temperaments—some of us are severely practical, some of us are mystical and live in constant awareness of God’s presence, some of us are verbal, some visual, and so on. For many of us, the Lord’s Prayer keeps us well-rooted in God’s promises. Anthony Bloom, in his Conversations on Prayer, says that our prayer life should be as transparent and intimate as we are with our wives, husbands, our best friends. Douglas Steere, the Quaker philosopher, wrote in Dimensions of Prayer, that when we begin a time of prayer, it may help to pause at the threshold and consider whom you’re about to meet.
There is no hurry, however, about plunging into prayer. We may well linger in the portico to be awakened, to remember into Whose Presence we are about to come. If one of us were to be ushered into the presence of one of the great spirits of our time—Albert Schweitzer, or Alan Paton, Vinoba Bhave, or Helen Keller—we should be glad for a little time in the portico to collect ourselves, to adjust, not our clothing, but our spirits, for meeting this one whose reputation we cherish. During this waiting period, we might well think of how this person had lived, of how he or she had spared nothing to give of himself to some great human cause, and of how drawn we were to have the blessing of conversing with him. If this time of recollection is precious preceding a visit to a contemporary, how much suitable and necessary it is before coming into the presence of God.
This kind of pausing is, I think, already prayer, a prayer of relationship and reverence.
Finally, I’m also not saying that we must never pray for miracles. I’ve prayed for many people to heal from terminal diagnoses, and I will keep doing so. I’ve told you before that, when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began and the missiles began flying, I would pray that God would send legions of angels into the skies over Ukraine. I still sometimes find myself praying for those angels to be sent. No matter how often my prayers seem foolish even to myself, I have a standing testimony against cynicism. But, however you and I pray, the Holy Spirit knows how to intercede for us. I’m just grateful to God for this. It means, after all, that we don’t have to adopt a piety that pretends that a good outcome will happen in this hurting world just because we finally find the right words.
When I gave my earlier version of this message at Spokane Friends, I ended with these queries:
Is the idea of history as a “long defeat” helpful or unhelpful to you? Do you sometimes see, with Tolkien, a “glimpse of final victory”?
What would it be like for you to pause at the threshold and contemplate the wordless communion or the conversation you’re about to enter?
When (or if) you say “yes” to God, what else might that lead you to say “yes” to? What might that lead you to say “no” to?
In the Woodbrooke course on "Quaker theology and whiteness," which is halfway through its six-week term, Mark Russ has just given us some glimpses of how Eastern religious cultures and practices were selected, categorized, and commodified for Western audiences. I had that class in mind when I read Jackie Bailey in The Guardian: "Yes, praying and posing can bring joy – but true spirituality demands something more of us."
Seraphim Sigrist reaches into his files for a beautiful reflection by Karina Chernyak on the power of a seeking, yearning, celebrating community—such as Karina herself wanted to help create in the early post-Soviet years in Moscow.
