Continuing the work

Maison Quaker à Congénies / The Quaker Centre in Congénies, France. Source.

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There's a Russian phrase, both precise and vague at the same time, that translates to English as "in times like these...."

In times like these, we write about Friends' service in Russia with love and enthusiasm tempered with discretion. We don't give names of people and partner organizations. We do emphasize our nonviolent and truthful principles, just as we "harmless and innocent people of God" did in earlier turbulent times—the years of our movement's origin.

As a former member of the board of Friends House Moscow, I appreciated receiving this report on the meeting held this autumn in southern France. I'm grateful for the permission to use it here, with one or two edits. Links were added by me.

— Johan

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Maison Quaker Congénies warm embrace of FHM

Seventeen Friends travelled from far and wide to be in Congénies in Languedoc-Roussillon in southern France during the weekend of the 24­-27th October, 2025, coming from as far away as Berlin, California and Moscow. For some, the journey took several days to complete, which made it all the more gratifying when we were offered a warm welcome on arrival at Maison Quaker by the resident staff, Eli and Miranda. Their generous hospitality extended over the entire weekend.

Asked about the massive amount of work the FHM meeting entailed for them, both Miranda and Eli responded in the same manner: “It is lovely to see Maison Quaker so full. It is rare to have such a large group of Friends present all at one time. This makes it really special for us.”

Even the weather seemed to make an extra effort, sharing the last warmth of summer, while much of the rest of France suffered downpours in the wake of Storm Benjamin. In the beauty of Congénies, war felt a very long way away. Heavily laden persimmon trees in the garden sagged under the weight of their late-summer abundance; butterflies, including two-tailed pashas and fritillaries, flitted among the flowering bushes; the balmy nights were punctuated by the hooting of tawny owls. Congénies was a fine place to be: a place of quiet and peace, ideal for discernment of difficult and pressing questions.

The task of the board was to discern the future strategy of Friends House Moscow. This was no easy challenge. Given that the war in Ukraine shows no signs of ending any day soon—astonishingly, there has already been nearly four years of fighting, rather than the three or four days many commentators had predicted—nothing about the work of FHM can be taken for granted. The board thus needed to answer tough questions. Should we continue the work? And if we should, how do we do so practically, given all the challenges it now faces?

Our deliberations started with a look back in time through the lens of Sergei Nikitin’s history of Quaker relief in early twentieth century Russia, noting that there has been constant Quaker interaction with Russia for more than a century. We then examined how our personal motivations for this work live into the Quaker Testimonies of Peace, Simplicity, Integrity and Equality, before pivoting to look at the current political environment in Russia. We considered how these changes have affected the relationships of Friends to Friends House Moscow, asking whether or not there was continuing support from local and yearly meetings in Europe and the U.S. We agreed that there is still support.

Tight finances mean that FHM cannot do all it would like to, nor meet all the needs of those approaching it for help. Three days of discernment led us to the conclusion that we should continue to support the refugee centre, bolster our publishing work, and maintain our support for the language club.

Three priorities

The refugee centre continues to help the socialisation and education of children whose families have come to Russia in search of a better life and greater security. We have been supporting the Centre since the mid-1990s. The refugees and other migrants come from a wide variety of countries. Once in Russia, they face many challenges, and often need to keep a very low profile, which makes the centre so critical for them.

Richard Foster's
Celebration of Discipline.
Source. Online version.

Our publishing efforts remain central. We have published 22 titles in Moscow, following translation into Russian. “Best sellers” include Plague, Pestilence and Famine by Muriel Payne, The Fruits of Solitude by William Penn, and Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster.

We will continue to support the language club. Over the past year we have conducted hundreds of language lessons for students who wish to develop confidence is speaking in public in another language. We view it as a sign of hope that students wish to continue learning another language and that cultural contact with other European countries has not stopped completely.

The way opens

By the time Friends gathered for meeting for worship on Sunday, which included members of the local meeting, board of Friends House Moscow had already spent two days in contemplation and debate, chewing over the difficult issues facing the organisation. There was still a further day to go, but by the time of meeting for worship, we were feeling positive about the future of FHM.

Around thirty, including partners and Friends from Congénies local meeting, shared lunch on Sunday. Like every meal in Maison Quaker, it was graced by excellent food. Each day’s breakfast were notable for being laden with pastries and croissants from the local boulangerie, L’ Amandine, which also supplied the cake for Sunday evening when we celebrated Pat’s birthday. Lunch and dinner were prepared by a local cook, so no one went hungry!

The final day was something of a threshing meeting, as we needed to match our finances to our priorities. Sterling efforts by those of us who understand spreadsheets and IT gave us all a clear understanding that, whichever way up we looked at things, they did not square—there simply was not enough money in the pot to do all we wished FHM to do. We the leading to continue the work, we concluded the three days by committing ourselves both to the budget and to urgent need to raise additional support.

Perhaps the most important support that Friends House needs is the energy and vision of people who may have never heard of this program, and might not speak Russian, but who recognize the need for Friends House and its potential for healing, reconciliation, and encouragement in times like these. If you have follow-up questions or ideas, write to me, and if I don't know the answer, I'll find someone who does. Also see the related link below.

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In The Friend: some context for the board meeting described above.

Two appreciations of filmmakers Rob and Michele Reiner: Andrew Pulver. Kristin Du Mez.

Homeland Security (USA) is proposing to require certain tourists coming to the USA to make available their social network posts for the last five years and all e-mail addresses, personal and business, over the last ten years. Here's the form to read the details and make your comments. In the list of "newly proposed changes" to the data required from travelers, see especially (3) "Mandatory Social Media"; and (4) "High Value Data Elements," requiring data from family members as well as travelers themselves. Deadline for comments: February 8.

Mattea Kramer (TomDispatch) on antisemitism and freedom of speech.

Bradley Bell (Upstream Collective) on racial reconciliation in cross-cultural ministry.

The promise of Genesis 3–4 is that despite our best intentions we will inevitably cause ruptures (such as on my second to last day on the field when in a wave of cultural exhaustion I exploded on my closest friends because they asked for money). The aim of cross-cultural service is not solely to avoid such things, though it’s worth our best effort. It is to be sent as ambassadors of the entire Ephesians 2 gospel, true ministers of reconciliation who abide the often mortifying work of repair—the costly reweaving of trust.

Cherice Bock was co-editor for a special issue of Quaker Studies. (That page has links to the individual articles, including Cherice's on “Quakers and Ecospirituality: Spiritual Grounding for Climate Action.”)

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Sergey Kadyrov's music, and his scenes and holiday decorations from the cities of Noginsk and Elektrostal. Instant nostalgia, of course. Thank you, Sergey! (The cafe at our former workplace, the New Humanities Institute, appears briefly starting at 1:12; three views altogether.)

Could we end up on the same page?

Kevin Camp. Photo: Chris Stewart.

Kevin Camp on Quakers' "wildly diverging views."

Reposted, with permission, from Kevin's post on the Facebook group Christian Quakers. The titles above are mine.

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This past First Day I felt a leading, as I often do, to invoke the memory of Abraham Lincoln in my vocal ministry. Lincoln is a hero of mine, and he steered the United States through the worst crisis in its existence up until that point, and arguably its most dire state ever in our nearly 250 years of existence.

Christians find themselves increasingly divided into factions these days. I'm speaking primarily about American Friends in this post. Quakers on the right adhere to their own strongly held beliefs and the same is true with Quakers on the left.

Friends are called by different names. Some are Evangelicals. Some are conservative, in the Quaker sense, meaning they seek to conserve the old way of doing things. Some are Hicksite Friends, usually closely allied with FGC—and are by in large liberal unprogrammed Quakers, who may or may not consider themselves Christian.

And who can say which of us has the correct answer, the correct verse of Scripture to invoke in debate, the most accurate usage of the Quakerese we know so well and love so much. I adhere to my own interpretation, but so does someone else who, while we might share the moniker "Quaker", we don't share very much besides that. Lincoln observed a similar dynamic in his own time, a country torn asunder by Civil War. And he was struck by the many ironies. Thinking of what North and South had in common, Lincoln spoke,

"Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other...The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.'"

The passage of Scripture with which Lincoln concludes the above passage with is pulled from the King James Version of the Bible. Put into more contemporary language, it states that suffering is inevitable. Some will always lead others astray. And though that suffering is inevitable, how terrible it will be for the person or persons who create it. They will experience harsh punishment.

We live in an era where many seek to lead others astray. Some through ignorance. Some through misguided zeal. Some with an agenda to advance. And I can't determine the complete truth in any source I consult. It all seems slanted to suit someone's self-interest.

Lincoln took a radical view about the American Civil War. A pox on both your houses! Both sides were equally at fault, in his reckoning. Though the South's plantation owners kept enslaved people, and maintained the system that kept it profitable, the North indirectly made money from the products produced by slave labor.

Maybe levying fault isn't as important as changing the status quo. I don't pretend that people with such wildly divergent views will ever come together under a common purpose. For example, the only thing an Evangelical Friend and I will likely ever have in common is the fact that we are a product of the hard work of George Fox. Beyond that, we are as different as chalk and cheese.

So rather than let this demoralize us, I suggest we work within the people who will hear our message and strive to push past the propaganda that passes for news, not just on the right and left, but everywhere. Provided that those who disagree with me don't deny my right to worship as I please and what I please, I have no grievance with them.

But wouldn't it be wonderful if we ended up on the same page, eventually. That's an idealistic goal and one that seems increasingly unlikely the older I get, but it is a solution for us, not just as Friends, but also as Americans.

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Kevin Camp (they/them), a member of Birmingham (Alabama) Friends Meeting and Camas (Washington) Friends Church, published an excellent book of short stories last year, Thanksgiving on Meth Mountain. Fuller biography on their Amazon page here.

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Kevin's post gave me a lot to think about.

First of all, their quotation from Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address once again reminded me of how unusual it is for a politician not to refer to God as 100% WITH US. Elton Trueblood referred to Lincoln as the "theologian of American anguish," and this speech makes the case. In the U.S. Civil War, the North prevailed, as Trueblood pointed out, not "as a consequence of the supreme wisdom or righteousness of the citizens of the North." When Lincoln spoke of "all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil", the settler colonial beneficiaries of that toil were in both North and South. 

In one of the most sublime passages in English-language political speech, Lincoln yearned and prayed for reconciliation: 

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

What was always clear to some of us, and has now become glaringly obvious as racism makes a roaring comeback in today's USA: the nation's wounds have not been bound up, a just and lasting peace has not been achieved. All the more reason to recall Lincoln's words and remind ourselves of this vision, stubbornly not giving it up for lost.

We Quakers haven't exactly gone through a civil war, but we have had a number of severe divisions, as a result of which (as Kevin pointed out) we're often appealing to the same history and the same Quaker language and drawing very different conclusions. Kevin's post urges us not to let divisions demoralize us, and I agree.

In two periods of my service with international Friends organizations—ten years with Friends World Committee for Consultation and seven with Friends United Meeting—I visited hundreds of Friends communities, and I found among them many Friends who, with varying degrees of stubbornness, would fit Kevin's descriptions of people as different as chalk and cheese according to their preferred interpretations of core Quakerism. But over all those years, I caught glimpses of progress as well. Maybe we won't be reading from the exact same page anytime soon, but there are many Friends who are at least looking at each other's favorite pages....

• Some of us in our tight categories simply haven't heard that there are other ways of being Quaker. Among other important accomplishments, Friends World Committee for Consultation consistently offers Quakers opportunities to meet and consult across the traditional lines that Kevin's post cited, but how many of us are even aware of these opportunities? Looking at our theological divisions from my home on the Christian side of things (dare I even say "evangelical"?), I've run into many so-called liberal or universalist Friends who haven't deliberately rejected a Christian Quaker testimony, but simply haven't even had a decent chance to encounter and consider it. (Let's face it: authoritarian religiosity, toxic biblical malpractice and Christian nationalist heresies have not helped.) If we get to know each other better, you might still not agree with my spiritual priorities, nor I with yours, but at least it won't be from ignorance...
• ... and there is no reason we can't work for peace and justice together along the priorities we do share, which is important in a world with so much pain and bondage. Friends in Portland, Oregon, for example, are crossing categories in advocating and acting for refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers.
• When I was at Friends United Meeting, I remember being startled at how often the occasions when liberal and evangelical Friends were irritating each other actually boiled down to differences between urban and rural communication styles, and not just theology. Learning to accommodate these differences in styles won't overcome every theological gap, but at least we can clear away some of the misunderstandings.
• Few divisions are absolute. Some of us live in the overlaps. I began my life as a Friend in the unprogrammed side of the Quaker world, among predominantly liberal Friends (though my mentors in that community were deeply Christian), but now I've spent most of my fifty years as a Friend in pastoral, programmed meetings. I'm not alone in my dislike of being defined by conventional categories. Over the last 21 years I've been writing this blog, I've seen more and more bloggers, traveling Friends, retreat and workshop leaders, authors, and others helping expand opportunities for lively Quaker conversations and new understandings of leadership, community, and calling. (Emily Provance and Windy Cooler, just for starters, and, as always, Martin Kelley helping us stay up to date.)
• Are genuine seekers, waiting on the Holy Spirit (whether in quiet receptivity or in total desperation!), ever all that far from God and each other, regardless of their worship styles? When we resort to faking it for the sake of conformity, and either start hiding in the silence or retreating behind our Sunday routines, the differences in style and language are most obvious—and matter the least.
• We share other significant challenges. Liberals and evangelicals alike suffer from widespread ignorance about our spiritual and intellectual roots in the "hard work of George Fox" mentioned by Kevin. Sometimes we prefer to stick with a few selected sound bites if we know even that much. We allow our internal conceits and conflicts to obscure our most important audience: those who have never heard of us. We sometimes tolerate lazy mediocrity in our administrative systems and communications, a mediocrity we would not accept in our secular lives. Sometimes our Quaker exceptionalism makes us unaware of other faith communities that have pulled ahead of us in addressing our signature concerns. Saddest of all, too often we can describe Quaker ideals eloquently but can't point to a church or meeting nearby that actually lives them out.

What do you think? Will we continue to drift apart, or will the overlaps increase? Tell us about meetings and churches where newcomers and long-timers say "I'm so glad I'm here!"

Some related posts:

• Signs, part three
• Open hearts (scroll down to "radical hospitality")
• Quakerism of the future
• The Quaker voice
• Barriers revisited

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Our courtyard, August 6, 2010.

Here's an item that takes me back fifteen years, to the summer of 2010. That was the year I stayed in Elektrostal, Russia, the whole summer, not attending the Northwest Yearly Meeting sessions in the USA, and thereby able to experience the smog caused by that summer's fires in the region's neglected peat fields. The item: "How Peat Elektrified the USSR."

Jemar Tisby asks, "What's going on with white men?" 

... When a single demographic consistently diverges from every other group—across race, education, and gender—it’s worth asking why.

The UN's latest humanitarian situation reports for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Trump's plan is now in the open, says Peter Wehner. "It’s getting ever harder to avoid connecting the authoritarian dots."

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In honor of Christone "Kingfish" Ingram's visit to the UK this month, here's a recent video, "The Thrill Is Gone."

From Scott Wagoner: Quakerism reimagined (a kind of open letter)

George Fox's pocket Bible. Photo by Judy Maurer.

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Originally posted on Facebook (June 11) by Scott Wagoner. Used by permission.

Scott in front of the North Church Venue, 
Muncie, Indiana. Photo courtesy of Scott Wagoner.

QUAKERISM REIMAGINED (a kind of open letter) 

Tomorrow afternoon I'm having a coffee with a friend who wants to have a conversation around the future of Friends. Now, I've had many conversations in my Quaker journey around the "future of Friends", and they can seem the same and sometimes tiring. The gist of those conversations usually goes like this, "Quakers are outdated and no one understands us, so we need to get out from underneath the weight of our traditions and just be the church!" This is often code for "Let's just be a community church and not worry about our Quaker peculiarities." And often it's the last desperate move of a struggling Quaker meeting trying to find which magic level to pull or turn. 

But I've yet to be convinced that becoming a "community church" or generic is the way forward. And I'm not saying that because I'm in my early 60's and I'm opposed to innovation (at least I hope not). I'm not convinced of the "community church" or "generic" model mainly because I still feel—and am convinced—our world needs and hungers for the unique gifts we have to offer—peacebuilding, waiting worship and silence, equality, seeking a sense of the meeting (in other words, no voting), women and men in ministry, simplicity, and a faith that isn't cluttered with ceremony as well as pomp and circumstance. In fact, I'm even more convinced that when someone seeks out Quakers and attends a Quaker meeting and doesn't find any of these qualities present, they are a bit confused and often disappointed. It's a bit like false advertising—why have the "Quaker" sign out front if the product inside doesn't match what's advertised.

Having said all that, I'm also not convinced that a fascination with our history is also the way forward. The late Quaker Thomas Kelly challenged folks when he referred to present day Quakers as "paled-out remnants" of the original movement of the mid-1600s. He writes that we are, "...for the most part respectable, complacent, comfortable, with a respectable past, proud of our birthright membership in the Society of Friends which guarantees us entrance, if not into heaven, at least into a very earthly society." In other words, being a Quaker is more than about good networking or being a lifetime member of a respectable group with an equally respectable history. I'm pretty certain that our early Quaker forefathers and foremothers lived a faithful witness through persecution and sometimes death for more than just respectability.

The way forward, it seems (and this is what my friend and I will talk about) is reimagining this vital Quaker witness (and even our Quaker history) towards an inviting, energizing, alive, courageous, and faithful Quaker witness. It means taking the best of our Quaker history and it's inspiring narratives and imagining what that might look like today in a world suffering from conflict, violence, war, and division. It means taking our living tradition and throwing it forward into the future and imagining what it looks like to offer places of silence and quiet in a very noise and chaotic world. It means taking our awareness of equality and justice and reimagining what that can look like in a world desperately in need of a people and witness that sees that of God in everyone and discrimination is nonexistent.

In his book [Future Shock], Alvin Toffler wrote, "In dealing with the future...it is more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be one hundred percent 'right'". For the most part, Quakers have spent the last decade or so trying to prove each other wrong while maintaining their own group's "rightness" either theologically or doctrinally, and what we've ended up with is mainly smaller meetings, split Yearly Meetings, and a fractured Quaker witness. Along the way, we forgot how to dream and imagine and reimagine what Quakerism could look like in real time and in real life.

It's time to reimagine Quakerism for our world today. I'll have my conversation tomorrow. If this is a conversation you would like to also have, let me know 🙂 Coffee is on me.

Now to God who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish far more than all we can ask or imagine, to God be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

(Ephesians 3:20-21)

With Gratitude for All the Faithful Witnesses Before Me,

Scott

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Note from Johan: See Scott's original post on the Facebook site to read the many comments posted there. Scott and I would like the conversation to continue. Feel free to comment here or on whatever platform you found the link to this post. If it seems useful, I'll try to gather up your comments for a follow-up post.

According to my calculations, next year Scott Wagoner and I will have known each other for four decades! He is presently the Pastoral Minister at High Point Friends Meeting (Friends United Meeting) in High Point, North Carolina. Scott also serves as the Assistant Clerk of Friends United Meeting and also on the Board of School of the Spirit ( a Quaker Contemplative Prayer ministry) Along with his Quaker activities, Scott serves on the Board of his local Rotary Club and chairs the Peacebuilding Committee. Through his LLC, Growing Edge Resources, he offers coaching, congregational coaching, and leading/facilitating of retreats. He is married to Lynda and they have two adult children (Erin and Chad) and a granddaughter (Maisie). Scott can be reached at scottwagoner62@gmail.com.

Scott is a contributor to one of my favorite devotional resources, the quarterly Barclay Press periodical Fruit of the Vine, which is also available in the form of a daily e-mail.

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Related posts:

Valiant for the Truth

Growth for growth's sake

Barriers revisited

Silence, freedom, and trust

A great people to be gathered?

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José y María. Source.

Daniel the Hispanophile: How Everett Patterson's image of "José y María" invites us to rethink the meaning of Christmas.

When Hal and Nancy Thomas spent Christmas under arrest.

Micah Bales at Berkeley Friends Church: Thomas Kelly's call to faith amid darkness.

When people asked John [the Baptist] what they were to do to get ready for the coming kingdom of God, John’s answer was consistent: Stop trying to win at the games of the current system. Be content with what you have. Share your wealth with others. Become part of a community that no longer has a stake in the current system, but which instead is ready to hear the good news when it arrives.

Joel Looper in First Things: Bonhoeffer is not your cipher.

Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic (gift link): Why the last ten years of American life have been uniquely stupid.

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More blues music next week, but this evening I'm indulging in nostalgia for our home during the years 2007-2017 through this video by our friend Sergey Kadyrov, "December."

If Jesus only knew (Thanksgiving repost)

Happy Thanksgiving! Today I'm reposting my Thanksgiving post for 2015 (below). At that time we were still living in Elektrostal, Russia. Much of our Thanksgiving Day activities revolved around the holiday meal we offered our colleagues at the New Humanities Institute.

It was a custom we began in 2008 and repeated each year we lived there. A store not far from our apartment supplied turkey. Only once did we order a whole turkey; usually Judy took turkey legs and made a delicious filling for turkey cardamom braid loaves. She also made cranberry sauce, pumpkin bread with a layer of tvorog, wild rice, pomegranate jello salad, and an apple-cranberry-raisin crumble. All in the service of love and wonderful conversation.

My own role was not exactly heroic. I chopped and diced and provided extra hands when necessary, arranged packaging and transport, and took photos (below, all from 2012).

We would serve the meal in the faculty break room at 11:10 a.m., during the first long break of the academic day. Every seat was taken. All day long, our colleagues would come to the buffet and help themselves; there was even a bit left for the evening school instructors.

After the first one or two occasions, everyone had caught on. Sometime in early November, we would start getting asked, "Are you going to do your American Thanksgiving meal again this year?" or "Isn't it about time for that thing you do each November?" How I miss hearing that question!

Judy hard at work the evening before; ready to start packing; awaiting transport to the Institute.

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If Jesus only knew (2015)

Christ and the Sinful Woman,
by Elena Cherkasova

Recently we went to the Cosmas and Damian Church near the Kremlin to buy some books. In the church bookstore, Judy was struck by this icon of the scene in Luke where the sinful woman kisses and anoints the feet of Jesus. This fascinating image now hangs near the door to our kitchen.

Here's the story from Luke, chapter 7, verses 36 through 50.

When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner."

Jesus answered him, "Simon, I have something to tell you."

"Tell me, teacher," he said.

"Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?"

Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven."

 "You have judged correctly," Jesus said.

Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little."

Then Jesus said to her, "Your sins are forgiven." The other guests began to say among themselves, "Who is this who even forgives sins?" Jesus said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."

I love this story for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it manages to convey both grace and realism at the same time. The grace is unconditional: "Your faith has saved you; go in peace." Period.

But at the same time Jesus presents Simon with a very unsentimental comparison between the two debtors. It's another reminder of Jesus' upside-down kingdom where the first will be last, and the last first.

Two other points struck me on this Thanksgiving Day.

First, I tried (and will continue trying) to put myself in the woman's place in this scene. I've been forgiven, and I would like to wash Jesus' feet with my tears and wipe them with my hair. No, not literally, but I can work on this question: what prayer and what action would be an equally worthy thanksgiving for the grace that turned my life around and gave it meaning? How can I thank God sufficiently for my new family? ... by which I mean all the people in the world who are also figuring out how to live with God at the center. And, if "sufficiently" is not possible, can I at least abandon all pretenses and all worries about the rest of the audience as I pour out my honest tears?

The second point is more or less the reverse: I put myself in Simon's place. Whom have I examined and found wanting? I don't think I have been so arrogant that I questioned Jesus' ability to see people for who they really are, but how often have I taken one small aspect of a person and used that small aspect to minimize them? Maybe this person is on his or her way to a fateful meeting with God, and my attitude should, at the very least, not get in the way! When Jesus points at the sinful woman and resets my perspective, am I ready to repent and experience the same uninhibited joy that she shows? Or will I keep grumbling with the crowd, just as I used to do? ... "Who is this who even forgives sins?"

The icon today (Portland, 2024).

The central paradox of this amazing scene for me is that salvation is free but it isn't cheap. Look what that woman did! In a society that set a huge store on social position and reputation, this woman must have realized that as soon as she set foot in that company, people would be thinking about "what kind of a woman" she was. Sustained by her faith, she crashed through barriers too numerous to list, all in order to express her love. That sounds very costly to me. However, Jesus not only tells her that her sins are forgiven, but that her own faith (not his magic, nor his decree) has saved her. That's it! No doctrinal tests, no bait-and-switch, just immediate and radical affirmation.

I like to think of her as my sister.

Comments on the original post are here.

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Back to 2024.

I'm repeating a link from two weeks ago, because this resource, the Daily Quaker Message, has been even more helpful than I had hoped. Here's today's post.

And in the last month, British Friend Craig Barnett has started a substack-style blog, Quaker Renewal. Among his early posts, I especially appreciated "What is spoken ministry for?"

Russia's human rights and media project OVD-Info unveils a new Web resource devoted to criminal repression for anti-war stance in Russia. In other difficult news stories from Russia, the last major museum devoted to Stalinist-era repression, Moscow's GULag museum, has been closed. And some of the rehabilitations of WWII-era convictions are being reversed. (Article from BBC Russian service is here.)

Open Culture introduces us to the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual, originally published by the Office of Strategic Services, based on simple methods to sabotage enemy organizations by making them stupid. Fascinating! The manual itself is here on the CIA Web site.

Micah Bales on political power and the true kingdom of Christ.

Sarah Thomas Baldwin on suffering and the deeper life.

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This lovely song from Big Daddy Wilson, originally included with the November 2015 post, reflects my gratitude still today.

"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."

More thoughts on keeping hope sober

Sea of Okhotsk.

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

But not too sober!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Suzanne Eller on Threads:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time (Elektrostal, shameless nostalgia, and repost)

Sergey Kadyrov's "Elektrostal City" video with his own composition. (All of his Elektrostal videos; his YouTube channel.)

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In the fall of 2004, I found out that McDonald's had established their first restaurant in Elektrostal, Russia. I confess that I had mixed reactions, as I recorded in Cures for homesickness:

McDonalds from my window (2004).

Although I'd heard rumors for years, I found myself unprepared for the mixed feelings I had when I saw, right from my eighth-floor $8/night hostel window, a McDonald's restaurant right there on Yalagin Street, "my" street in Elektrostal. On the one hand, I had to smile—leave it to McDonald's to find even this out-of-the-way industrial town. I knew that I would be welcome within its golden precincts, I would get polite service and predictable food, I could close my eyes, inhale the french-fry incense, and the miles (er, kilometers) separating me from home might briefly melt away.

There was another feeling, too. "They" had found "my" safe little city, "they" had violated its innocence, "they" were out to Americanize even this stolid, utilitarian, brick and cinderblock outpost of Soviet planning. I was no longer solely responsible for defining to the Elektrostal people what "American" meant.

Two weeks later, I felt that my description of this "stolid, utilitarian, brick and cinderblock outpost of Soviet planning" gave a somewhat inadequate picture of the city, so I filled in some details. (P.S. no. 2 in this blog post.)

Three years later, I began serving as an instructor at the Moscow region's first privately-owned linguistics college, a post that didn't end until November 2017. Judy and I and two cats lived happily in a warm apartment that became an extension of our educational work, a place where we fed and entertained students and offered our guest room to many wonderful visitors over the years. We were familiar figures at the local libraries, art exhibitions, poetry readings, not to mention the grocery stores, coffee houses, pizza and sushi restaurants, post office, computer parts stores, the fitness center, branch banks, the sports clinic, the immigration office ... and McDonald's. We knew many of the bus routes and stops by heart. In short, Elektrostal became a home for us.

It's a complicated time to express nostalgia for Russia. For me, Russia has been a massive paradox—encompassing what I called in this post "the warm heart of Orthodox heritage" with "centuries of relentless violence, conspiracy, invasion, aggression, suspicion, and mass-scale cruelty." And those negatives have been on blatant display since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

It's no comfort to me to say, correctly, that every nation, including the USA, has its ratio of high ideals vs cruel betrayals. As a patriotic American, I have a responsibility to defend our own high ideals in this particular season of danger. However, as a Christian I feel bound to challenge any time, any place, where "Christian civilization" serves as a justification for outright cruelty. Modesty, grace, and deep listening must be part of any such challenge, but blind denial and whataboutism are not options.

Given today's realities, I find it understandable that many people want to "cancel" Russian language and culture. (See Canceling Russia.) But I can't join them. The reason in some grand sense is my long acquaintance with Russia, starting with my first Russian class in high school, my first visit in 1975, and my travels to many parts of the country. But more concretely, my reason is: Elektrostal, period. This is the city whose artists and educators, students and grocers, doctors and bus drivers (and even the immigration office, usually!) welcomed us and gave us a home.

Tevosyan Square, Elektrostal. Celebrating the first day of school, 2016. The Sberbank branch bank mentioned below is just beyond the left edge of this picture.

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I began this post with one of Sergey Kadyrov's videos that feature views of Elektrostal. This video includes a segment recorded from a bus driving along Mir Street, passing Park Plaza, the Crystal sports stadium, the Kazantsev School (at 2:20) where we taught, and City Hall. The memories flood back.

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Stories are better than sentimental generalities. Here's one on life in Elektrostal (and a nice helping of Boris Pasternak), originally published April 7, 2011.

Sberbank branch where I read Pasternak.

Time.

The day before yesterday I went to the bank for a routine transaction, arriving about forty minutes before my appointment at the nearby hair cutting place.

I brought a book with me, knowing there might be a wait. As I entered, I took a number and glanced at the electronic signboard showing which number was being served. Number 37 was at window 6; I was number 83. Well, there was a chance, I thought.

Half an hour later, they were still twenty places away from serving me, and I knew I had to face reality. Off to the haircutter without finishing my banking. I took another number (117) on my way out, although I figured that, with my luck, they'd get to that number long before I was able to get back to the bank.

Well, no, they hadn't. They'd simply gone a little past my first number. So, no longer having a close deadline, I settled in for a wait. All the seats along the wall facing the bank tellers were taken; I folded myself into a child's seat next to the ATM. 

"It's a good thing to bring a book," said a woman a little older than me, sitting on the other side of the children's table and looking at my thick paperback of Pasternak's family correspondence. "Yes," I agreed, "and it's a good thing that this seat will hold 83 kilograms." A little further away, I heard a typical exchange among the elderly pensioners who make up the majority of the bank's midday customers. "What kind of transaction could be taking 45 minutes over at window 7?" "I have no idea. But that teller has been sitting at window 2 for most of the morning without taking any customers."

Meanwhile, an elderly man was trying to figure out the number system—another customer was patiently explaining that he had to push the machine's button for a number and then watch the signboard to know which window would be serving that number when it came up. Not every arriving person even bothered to find out the system—occasionally someone would walk into the branch and assertively step up to a window, standing just to the right of the customer being served. They were almost always noticed and reprimanded by other customers: "Wait a minute. You have to wait in line just like the rest of us."

On the other hand, those same customers, as I've seen more than once, might rise to the defense of an elderly man who's already been sitting a while, and who shuffles over unsteadily to a window and quietly asks whether the wait would be much longer. The crowd knows when to bend the rules and demand that someone be allowed to slip in.

Source.  

I was interested that, while I waited for the signboard to creep from number 88 to number 117, I came across this passage in the Pasternak book, in a letter to Boris Pasternak's parents and sister Lydia:

The house doesn't terrorize me, and I'm not scared of work or bother, although I have enough and to spare of all that. The reason I have no time is something entirely different.  As with money, and with objects I don't know how to value and am always glad to give away, I would probably be glad to share the most precious treasure that I know, which is: free time (perhaps that's the very thing that all religions have deified under the name of God). I mean the pure interval in which one can see the boundless fullness of real life, as real as the life of trees and animals. And incredible as it may seem, I would be able to find enough free time to share with anyone you like, because everyone always manages to get hold of and store up the thing he values most highly. But, more than anything else in the world, this is something reserved for the connoisseur. An understanding of art, however rare it may be, is much more widely distributed than a feeling for and understanding of free time. I'm talking about something that's far greater than mere 'leisure'. I'm talking about living time, in freedom.

This is something that I would be willing to share (as I have done on occasion), but only with someone who knew the meaning of the word 'an instant'. Why is there so much beauty in a thunderstorm?—Because it piles space upon space, making them flash, in other words it shows how fathomless the instant is, and what immense distances it can absorb and give forth again. But since there aren't many who know how inexhaustible and capacious an instant is, there's almost no-one to share it with—yet an instant is all that free time is. It's in this sense that I never have time—I don't have time for those who don't know what time is. [pp. 113-114]

There is beauty in a thunderstorm, and immense beauty in the moment people stick up for an elderly client, even though they will be "delayed" as a result.

On the one hand, I've never been bored at the bank.

On the other hand, I see on the bank's Web site that—contrary to what I was told when I opened my account—debit cards, usable at ATMs, are available to foreigners. I think I'll check into it again. [Indeed, I soon had a debit card, which saved many hours, and deprived me of time to spend reading in the warm company of other bank clients.]

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[Continuing from 2011....] Having just observed another birthday, I was caught short by this passage to Pasternak's sister Josephine, written in 1927, more than thirty years before his death:

I haven't aged, and yet I've more than aged. I don't think I'm going to live as long as I should like. But there are other reasons too—I'll explain them below—why I've started behaving and feeling—in my consciousness, in my spiritual being, without reference to my biological self—as if I were in the final stage of my life. The main reason is this: that it's the only way to live in Russia at the present time without being a hypocrite, or wasting effort to no purpose,—or worse, provoking horrible catastrophes while achieving nothing whatsoever—wasting the explosively personal creative fire of mature middle age, these years so utterly and deservedly devoted to the love of freedom. I don't want to let myself go on this subject. I'll leave it at that. [p. 82]

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Related: Boredom for dummies.

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The Roys Report on the "Flashpoint" roster of Pentecostal prophets hitting the road for Donald Trump.

The Authoritarian Playbook, 2025 edition.

Christopher Harding on Alan Watts, for all his faults ... 

"Quakerism in Illinois Yearly Meeting will die in our generation, unless we as a Society stop saying, 'Ain't it awful'." From the late Mariellen Gilpin—one of the series of memorial posts in the online periodical What Canst Thou Say.

A frighteningly up-to-date quote (1845!) from Frederick Douglass on genuine Christianity and its peculiarly American counterfeit. (Thanks to Jim Fussell for the link.)

Clare Flourish on The Zone of Interest (film version). I consider myself warned.

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Another helping of vivid memories: In December 1969, B.B. King made his break onto the Top 40 radio charts with this song, which he performs here not long after he received his first Grammy for that hit.

"No longer will I be hungry...

Headline: "Vulnerable, powerful and
pure." Irish Daily Mail, July 27.
Source.

... for the bread of life is mine."

— Shuhada' Sadaqat (Sinéad O'Connor), 1966-2023, from the song "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got."

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"Vulnerable, powerful"—these words from the Irish Daily Mail headline following Shuhada' Sadaqat's death seem right to me. I wonder whether she herself might dispute the word "pure," but if you interpret it as "transparent," this word, too, seems right. As consistent as she was in some ways, and impulsive and self-contradictory in others, I never got the idea that she was withholding something from us.

It's hard to explain exactly why I found her work so engaging over these last three decades. Maybe it was her modesty, her ability not to be overawed by her own celebrity status, and even to risk that status altogether in service to her convictions.

Her anger (particularly in the notorious photo-ripping episode) also seemed right to me, given my own first-hand and second-hand exposure to abuse. For all these reasons, I loved listening to her voice, which seemed to ring out strong and pure at some moments, and trembled hesitantly at others, but was always believable.

I couldn't help wondering whether there was a tiny thread of Quaker influence in O'Connor's life, along with her love-hate relationship with the Catholic church, its institutions and its rebels, and along with her eventual decision to identify with Islam. She went to Newtown School in Waterford, Ireland ("Educating for life in the Quaker tradition since 1798," says their Web site) for part of her teenage years. However, with one major exception, her few passages about the school in her autobiography are not very positive. After trying more than once to get expelled, she finally left on her own without graduating.

That one major exception was her music teacher, Joe Falvey of Waterford Friends, "a glorious black-bearded music loving man" who had a friend with a recording studio. Apparently the appreciation was mutual—see his comments about his former student.

Most of the music I love is in two categories, blues and classical, and neither category exactly fits O'Connor's music. It simply made a space for itself in my brain. And I made a space for it in our classes in Russia. 

Those classes, especially my high school supplementary classes, often ended with a gap-fill exercise like this one. Often the choice of song was mine, but students were welcome to suggest songs, too, as long as the words could be heard clearly and wouldn't scandalize parents. For most of the years we were there, I included two songs by Sinéad O'Connor in the rotation. In both songs (but especially the first), I appreciated the severe clarity of her words. The contents of both songs also invited thoughtful discussion, in class and afterwards. Here they are embedded in posts published for our students:

"I Don't Want What I Haven't Got"

"Reason With Me"

As different as my life has been from hers, both of these songs evoke many of my own growing-up memories. And in my head I have a running fantasy dialogue with her about the reality of God and the unreality of so much of the religion industry. To sum up, I'm grateful to her for her amazing voice, her rough edges, her costly honesty, and her fertile provocations. I echo the words of actor Russell Crowe: "Peace be with your courageous heart Sinéad."

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Given O'Connor's complicated relationship with Catholicism, here's a wonderful review of her autobiography Rememberings in the Catholic magazine America.

Two interesting recent items from the University of Chicago's Martin E. Marty Center: "Redefining Redlining on Chicago's South Side"; and "Sightings and Sorrows of Religion: While religion should motivate efforts to alleviate hatred and dehumanization, it often finds itself wrapped up in these social evils."

Lessons from Jonathan Watts and Eliane Brum and their "tiny reforestation scheme in the Amazon."

Julika Luisa Enbergs interviews Greg Yudin on how Russians perceive the war.

With these [generational and income] disparities in mind, how fragile is the Russian Empire?

It's certainly a dying empire. You can see that because it basically offers nothing to the areas it wants to control. The only thing that is offers is the idea of bringing back the Soviet Union, which is basically a fantasy. There are no civilizational projects. That's what makes it totally unattractive for Ukrainians, and for other countries. And that's what makes it believe solely in force.

Micah Bales:  We seek an earth restored.

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Another of my favorite songs as performed by Sinéad O'Connor: