Solborg Folkehøgskole (sometimes translated as "Folk High School"), Stavanger, site of the 2025 Nordic Yearly Meeting. Photo taken at 10:15 p.m.
About a year ago I wrote about the 54-foot sloop Restauration, whose 21st-century version is set to leave Stavanger's harbor tomorrow on a transatlantic voyage. By this voyage it will be commemorating the 200th anniversary of the start of the organized migration of Norwegians to the USA.
Among those aboard that original ship were several Quaker members and attenders, as well as participants in the Haugean renewal movement in the Lutheran Church in Norway. Their Atlantic crossing took over three months, during which a child was born.
Now, 200 years later, among those planning to be at the departure of the new Restauration are Norway's king and queen, and Liv Ullmann ... and a crowd of Quakers from the Nordic yearly meeting that began today.
They won't just be commemorating a peculiar event of Norwegian and Quaker history. As the restauration.no Web site points out, the commemorative voyage is intended "to honor, among others, those who left in 1825 in search of a better life. History must not be forgotten, and is highly relevant in light of the current situation in the world."
Usually, the Quakers of the Scandinavian countries meet in their separate yearly meetings, but every third year they have a combined gathering like the one that started today. I have never been at a combined Nordic Yearly Meeting. The only time that I was at Norway Yearly Meeting was 29 years ago. All that plus tomorrow's departure of the sloop—I've been looking forward to this visit for a long time.
This evening's sessions were a wonderful start. I brought greetings from Camas Friends Church and Moscow Friends Meeting; other greetings came from Friends from meetings and Friends organizations in at least seven countries beyond Scandinavia and Finland. The evening program included some singing: specifically some Scandinavian and Finnish lullabies. Just what your jet-lagged blogger needed.
I'm going to stop here and get some sleep.
FRIDAY UPDATE: Here is my video of the Restauration's departure. The scene starts with the royal party returning to the royal yacht Norge, and then pans to catch the Restauration entering the frame from the right.
I proposed—and he [Bruce] agreed—that we engage in a dialog I called “Hard Earned Wisdom,” an open conversation regarding his experience with ALS and the insights and realizations this has afforded him. No one would choose this path to wisdom....
One witness is not enough to convict anyone accused of any crime or offense they may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. —The Bible
We do it every day, every time I find one of these lunatics. —Marco Rubio on cancellation of student visa of Rumeysa Ozturk, arrested Tuesday morning.
Evidence is ever more abundant that, among decisionmakers at the top of the current U.S. government, the law is seen as irrelevant, or even a nuisance, and the emphasis is on aggressive, swift, ruthless, secretive action.
The video of Ozturk's arrest published today in the Washington Post is shocking. A group of men in plain clothes, some hiding their faces, leave an unmarked car, grab her, and whisk her away handcuffed. Her phone has been seized. Before we (or a judge) know it, she is in Louisiana. Her student visa is cancelled. I thought maybe I was growing accustomed to the Trump-era eradication of normal due process, but I guess not, thank God—we should never get used to this. But it's a crushing disenchantment to see this happening in the "Land of Liberty."
It appears that official outrage against international students and green card holders is directed especially at people defending Palestinian human rights. Questioning U.S. support for Israel's treatment of the Gaza Strip (population 2.14 million) has been casually classified as aiding Hamas (membership 20,000?), but there seems to be no interest in making this distinction, or, indeed, proving anything at all. We are supposed to accept whatever Trump, Rubio, and their operatives tell us concerning the alleged misdeeds of the people they grab.
This is the administration for which 82% of the USA's evangelical or born-again Christians voted. For them, I dedicate a brief Bible study:
The qualities many of us usually associate with God are grace and mercy. Grace is God's goodwill to us and the whole creation—it's something we don't have to earn, in fact can't earn, but we can pass it on in the way we treat others. And when we fall short, this grace is expressed as mercy—compassion and restoration instead of punishment.
“But if a wicked person turns away from all the sins they have committed and keeps all my decrees and does what is just and right, that person will surely live; they will not die. None of the offenses they have committed will be remembered against them. Because of the righteous things they have done, they will live. Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked?” declares the Sovereign Lord. “Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?” —Ezekiel 18:21-23
The Lord is not slow in keeping this promise, as some understand slowness. Instead the Lord is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. —2 Peter 3:9
As with grace, God is the source of mercy, but also as with grace, we are to pass that mercy on.
For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings. —Hosea 6:6
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. —Matthew 5:7
There is one specific aspect of mercy that we and our leaders are not at liberty to ignore. We know this aspect as due process. It's a core principle of U.S. constitutional law (see the Fifth Amendment and the Fourteenth), but the Bible witnesses to its antiquity, as in, for example, the quotation at the top of this post: "A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses."—Deuteronomy 19:15.
Concerning the centrality of this principle, jazz critic and commentator Nat Hentoff had the right idea. Back in 1989, he told a story about a visit he made to a conference in Israel:
I ran into a rabbi in Jerusalem, he’s a philosopher, he’s a big macher in many ways, David Hartman. I’d never met him before, and there was a brief respite between the discussions, and I met him in the corridor and he said, “Hentoff, I want you to tell me the most important development in the history of mankind”. And I said, “Due process”. He said, “Right”, and that’s the last I ever heard of him.
The ethic of due process is reflected in several other biblical passages. The Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20 and Deuteronomy chapter 5, include this central demand: “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” This may well be the most violated commandment of our political life.
Other examples:
Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. —Isaiah 1:17
Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly. —Leviticus 19:15
Ecclesiastes has an acid comment on politics without this ethic:
"If you see the poor oppressed in a district, and justice and rights denied, do not be surprised at such things; for one official is eyed by a higher one, and over them both are others higher still." —Ecclesiastes 5:8
The principle comes up in the New Testament, too, as in the dramatic scenes of the gospel of John, chapter 7, when Jesus shows up in Jerusalem halfway through the Festival of Tabernacles, and begins teaching in the temple court, fully aware of the risk. The authorities send guards to seize him, but ...
Finally the temple guards went back to the chief priests and the Pharisees, who asked them, “Why didn’t you bring him in?”
“No one ever spoke the way this man does,” the guards replied.
“You mean he has deceived you also?” the Pharisees retorted. “Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him? No! But this mob that knows nothing of the law—there is a curse on them.”
Nicodemus, who had gone to Jesus earlier and who was one of their own number, asked, “Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing?”
They replied, “Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.” —John 7:45-52
As for Marco Rubio calling Rumeysa Ozturk and people like her "lunatics," along with the choice insults he and his colleagues (led by the president) use for judges they don't like, and other targets of convenience, I don't want to push this Bible passage too hard, but it's interesting:
But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment, and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. —Matthew 5:22; follow link for the footnotes.
Finally:
Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. —Matthew 7:1-2
Here's a sobering perspective from Cornel West's presentation last Saturday at Reedwood Friends Church (sponsored by The Cultural Soul Project):
Democracy ain't nothing but a moment of interruption in the history of non-democratic and anti-democratic regimes going back to the beginnings of the species. And it doesn't last forever. You got to fight for it, sacrifice for it, truth-tell, justice-seek for it. And in the end there is still no guarantee.
(Be sure to watch the whole video; there's plenty more about the spiritual resources we draw on to truth-tell and justice-seek. And you'll get occasional glimpses of Judy and me in the third row!)
Heather Cox Richardson looks at some of the words of J.D. Vance (in 2021) and Curtis Yarvin (in 2022) that might help us understand the American future they and their networks are looking forward to: a future without democracy. What do you think: is the current DOGE chainsaw operation a fulfillment of those stated visions?
Andy Olsen at Christianity Today: How are Hispanic churches in Florida dealing with the state's "double immigration crackdown"?
Elizabeth Bruenig asks, "Can Silicon Valley Find Christianity?" As you guessed, it's complicated: "Christianity, they ought to know, is not a life hack: It’s a life-upending surrender to the fact of divine love."
The Council of Europe's Venice Commission provided an amicus curiae brief to Ukraine's Supreme Court on the subject of conscientious objection, particularly in wartime. Page 13 summarizes relevant Quaker experience. (Thanks to Ukrainian Quakers for the link.)
Less convenient: keeping up with the news. (Did you see this item on California water?) Maybe it's less important to scan for every single scandal that comes along, but cultivate the reflex to fact-check dubious and polarizing claims from those in power, as well as self-styled heroes of the resistance.
Politicians in the Democratic party are far from united in how to cope with all this breakage. Here are some thoughts from a trusted commentator:
... [T]here's a whole debate raging in the Democratic Party of what to do about Trump, with an early consensus forming that we can't just be the party of "the resistance" forever, (nbcnews.com) and I can see that point—pussy hats don't necessarily appeal to your average swing voter—but I think it's misguided, because the Republican Party is no longer a normal political party, it's a cult of fealty to their God-Emperor and if the Democrats don't push back with every tool in the toolbox, the Democratic Party will be banned (designated a terrorist organization or something), and there will be little room for discussing the finer points of Trump's economic agenda. Likewise, tuning out the "culture war" makes sense in some ways (although it misreads the moment—Harris never ran on culture-war issues, and she still lost), but the now-typical Democratic line that trans issues are a "distraction" from kitchen-table issues isn't quite right, because to the Republicans, trans issues are just the early fault line they're using to cleave apart America's multiracial democracy. Democrats need to push back on every issue, gum up the works in every way they can, because picking and choosing your battles right now may make some sense on a messaging level (no reason to chase after every single perceived Trump slight) but it makes no sense on the level of the political machinations of our fragile republic.
Coping emotionally may be just as big a challenge as keeping informed. (By the way, I was fascinated by Ashley Parker's article on the apparent competition in Washington, DC, to be at the top of the persecuted list.) Yes, "shock and awe" may be the tactic, but I'm looking for a more systemic metaphor to help me absorb and respond to what's going on.
That's where "under occupation" comes in.
Hebron, Palestine. Graffiti. 2019.
"Occupation" implies an alien power imposing control on us. "Alien" is a loaded term—I remember when I was an alien here—and I can't really claim that Donald Trump and his team are from outside the U.S. (with a few exceptions), despite their apparent affinities with certain authoritarian leaders on the global stage. And racism and nativism are certainly not new to America.
Here's the "alienation": MAGA priorities seem to diverge so dramatically from the generally bipartisan postwar consensus in favor of equal rights, free trade, workplace safety, educational reforms, greater access to health care, international collaboration and collective security, independent civil service and judiciary, and at least some improvements in energy and environmental policies, that the word "alien" may not be too far off the point. Any ideal that isn't linked to myth-based nationalism is dismissed or ridiculed.
All of these areas of postwar progress are now under simultaneous and coordinated (if at times sloppy and chaotic) attack, with potentially disastrous short-term and long term consequences. It's that "simultaneous and coordinated" quality, imposed from a central executive, that I'm comparing to an occupation.
The word "occupation" also implies that this control is coercive, even violent. If we don't think this danger applies to ordinary U.S. citizens minding our own business, we are probably not immigrants, we are likely of northern European background, and we fit into the new administration's preferred gender categories. (Full disclosure: I'm a former alien, an immigrant.) Also, our denial may be based on layers of financial security that most people don't have.
If we are Christians in denial, maybe we've managed to smother our testimonies on wealth, hospitality, and mercy in favor of a dominion agenda.
I don't want to push this "occupied" metaphor too far. It's certainly not perfect. For most of us life is pretty easy in comparison with, for example, Palestine, or Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine. But it does help me think more systematically about how not to inventory obsessively each new piece of evidence of all this breakage, but rather to contribute toward resilient communities of mutual care, communities who welcome the vulnerable people among us.
My father and his extended family lived under actual occupation in Norway (1940-1945), and they told me a lot about what that was like. Some interesting features:
Circulating accurate information was a vital service, far riskier in the Nazi years than it is so far in the USA. (Radios were banned, so considerable ingenuity went into concealing them. Alternative newspapers were another source of news—also at great risk.)
Teachers, pastors, judges, and other organized groups in Norway learned to practice nonviolent resistance as communities, defining the red lines that most of them would refuse to cross. My cousin Axel Heyerdahl told me how much he had admired his own teachers who joined that campaign.
Those who had particular resources (such as isolated cottages to hide fugitives), jobs (my grandfather spent most of his war years in the coastal lifesaving service), and physical stamina could undertake high-risk missions to undermine the occupiers. Smuggling Jewish people and British pilots into Sweden was one example from my own family.
In opposition to the resistance movement, there were people who actively supported the occupation. Aside from the actual collaborators at the top, such as Vidkun Quisling, the most famous example might be the great novelist Knut Hamsun. And in between these two groups of committed antagonists, there were thousands of people who simply tried to get along without being noticed by the authorities. Some of those became collaborators for convenience' sake. Some fell in love with enemy soldiers and bureaucrats. Some changed position during the war.
One of my grandfather's concerns as a member of the resistance army was to persuade hotheads not to engage in violence against Germans, which would only result in increased repression. By extension, in our own time, resistance doesn't require demonizing Trump supporters or committing our own sins of rhetorical mayhem. As disciples of the Prince of Peace, we are never allowed to forget that even our "enemies" are made in the image and likeness of God. We pray that their eyes would be opened to their captivity, even as we too seek to be free.
During our walking tour of Oslo's World War II and resistance-related sites last summer, our guide pointed out that five years of deprivation—little or no meat, fat, dairy products, etc.—actually led to better health for some people. (Do we see analogues in our own time? Increased capacity to discern priorities? I'm not sure, but I thought I'd ask.)
Finally, Germany's thousand-year Reich lasted twelve years in Germany, five years in Norway. Those were very costly years, but they ended.
I've found that the metaphor of occupation helps me to withstand the barrage of bad news, put it all in context, and focus on faith and resilience in community. What metaphors, filters, or tasks are helping you to cope? Where do you find resilience and mutually sustaining friendships?
Kristin Du Mez asks her "fellow enemies" at Christian colleges and universities to consider some implications of the MAGA regime.
In his new substack blog, Quakers and the End of Scapegoating, Tom Gates promises us "Part exploration of Rene Girard's groundbreaking 'mimetic theory,' part Bible commentary, and part dialogue with early and contemporary Quakers."
Waffen-SS recruitment poster (detail). See full graphic below.
The young man walked toward me with a smile, shook my hand, and said, "I'm on your side."
His next statement, however, was not reassuring: "Hitler has seen some of your letters."
For an instant, I felt flattered that someone as high up as the Fuehrer had taken notice of me. The next moment I felt the full flush of horror. Wasn't this young man supposed to be part of the Resistance? And what year was this, anyway!?
This dream (in my first night of dreams in 2025) had started innocuously enough. I was on a train, expecting to see a familiar face when I got to my destination, Stuttgart. It was a familiar context: I often have dreams in which my grandparents appear—my father's parents or my mother's parents, depending on whether I'm dreaming of Norway or Germany.
I stepped off the train and went into the waiting room, looking around for my grandmother. She wasn't there. Once again, I scanned the people on the wooden benches, looking for anyone familiar, and that's when the young man approached me.
It was confusing. I had the strong impression that he was indeed an ally, a part of the resistance against fascism, but why did he mention the chief fascist himself? And why did that young man look so strikingly like a stereotypical "master race" poster child?
Before I could untangle my confusion, the dream came to an end. However, unlike most of my dreams, I remembered this one with crystal clarity, so I continued to try sorting it out.
My first question: where did that young man come from? I think the image came from a recruiting placard for the German occupation forces in Norway, specifically for their SS forces and their "Norwegian Legion."I had seen this placard before, most recently at the impressive Norwegian Resistance Museum in Oslo last July. The invitation to join the common fight against Bolshevism is based on a blatant visual appeal to a myth of racial solidarity. The explicit identification of their mutual enemy was "Bolshevism," but, in Nazi usage, that political term often signified "the Jews."
Here are some other influences that probably went into the creation of my confusing dream:
As the 80th anniversary of World War II's end approaches, I've kept up my usual reading habits, which have always included a proportion of books about that war, its roots and its aftermath. After all, that war and its associated deportations and migrations resulted in my hybrid Norwegian-German family. Last week, for example, I read Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich, by Volker Ullrich, the most detailed account I've seen of this period.
My recent reading also included the powerful story of Daniel Finkelstein's mother and father, Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family. Finkelstein's mother Mirjam and her family were caught in Nazi Germany's mass brutality and the Holocaust, all of which the author describes in heart-stopping detail. This amazing story is interwoven with the equally miraculous survival of the author's Polish-born father Ludvik, who somehow survived Stalin's mass savagery. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, even though it puts us face to face with the reality of our human capacity for mass cruelty committed by leaders and followers and whole societies who all seemingly could have chosen differently.
Among the factors that seem to have reliably fueled this cruelty is racism in all its demonic forms, of which antisemitism has played a persistent and outsized role for many generations. All of these forms are rooted in the primordial sin of objectification, which to my sorrow and distress as a follower of Jesus, seems to have found expressions in today's white Christian nationalism, and not just in the USA.
The other sources for the "resistance" theme of my dream are no doubt the stabbing heartaches of the daily news: the genocide (as Amnesty International names it ... and I'm persuaded) in the Gaza Strip, committed by the armed forces of a nation that acts with near-total impunity; and then there's the ongoing "special military operation" in Ukraine, committed in the lethal service of a "great power," its leadership, and its "Russian World" mythology; in short, a gang whose other organizing principle seems to be to embezzle money and natural resources from its own population while suppressing most means of protest.
Add to all that: the uncertainties of our post-January 20 USA, with a new administration whose saving feature so far seems to be its own internal contradictions.
I have a feeling that there are going to be some more interesting dreams in my future. I'll keep looking for my grandmother ... and for the resistance.
Latest United Nations reports on the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Your tax dollars at work. And since that last OCHA report: Israeli air strikes hit "safe zone."
What are the odds that artificial intelligence will wipe out the human race in the next 30 years? Ask Geoffrey Hinton.
"The Secret of England's Greatness," Thomas Jones Barker, National Portrait Gallery, London (my photo—I wanted to include the frame).
In my series of blog posts, almost six years ago, on building trustworthy churches, one of the posts was centered on Gordon Aeschliman's book Cages of Pain: Healing for Disillusioned Christians, published in 1991. I read that book in preparation for my service at Friends United Meeting (1993-2000), which began during a period of theological and cultural conflict at FUM. That all happened before I'd heard of deconstructing one's faith.
By the time I wrote the post "Choose curiosity, part two," the reality of deconstruction was more familiar to me, particularly through the actual experiences of people I trusted. As I say in that post, I thought about the factors that helped explain why I hadn't had some of the disillusioning experiences that had caused them to question their earlier understandings of faith.
As I continue to wonder how I can support Friends who care about building a trustworthy church, I've thought about those factors. How have I been sheltered from pain and disillusionment?
One very jarring moment happened a couple of months ago at the National Portrait Gallery in London, when I stood in horrified fascination in front of T. Jones Barker's painting, "The Secret of England's Greatness." This painting may have been inspired by an anecdote, one version of which is recounted in the gallery's description of the painting, in which Queen Victoria supposedly explained to her colonial visitors that the Bible, rather than England's wealth or military might, explained her nation's greatness.
"Black History Walks" on the "Greatness" painting. Screenshot from this video.
I was stunned by the painting's blatant colonialist condescension, an observation that I'm hardly the first to make! The original intention was surely to elevate piety and charity as noble characteristics of the Empire and its self-attributed civilizing mission. And if it were possible to neutralize the imperial agendas from Christian missionaries' work in the golden age of Western missions (some would say not possible!!), there were cumulative blessings in many places. (See Robert Woodberry's "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.")
But it's equally true, as historian Michael Ohajuru quotes in the "Black History Walks" Youtube video on that painting, "When England came to Africa, they had the Bible, we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land."
Part of what shook me at the gallery was the realization that, had I been around in 1863, when this painting was first exhibited, I probably would not have been shocked. I would have been sheltered from the Empire's coercive cannons. From what am I now being sheltered?
Scot McKnight's blog recently featured a guest post by Aimee Byrd, "Her Aversion to Christian Language." After commenting on a number of words and phrases dear to most evangelicals I know, she says,
I’m not tossing out the whole Christian vernacular. I’m not saying, let’s get rid of the language. Or that the language is bad. But I don’t put my trust in the words. And I see how they can catch a virus, or how bacteria multiplies on them, and they can make you sick. It’s a tricky sickness because it disguises itself and masks as sanctification, another tainted word.
I am having to dig deeper, read wider, listen stronger, ask more questions, and be more descriptive about what is meaningful, beautiful, agonizing, disintegrating, real, and good. This is more difficult and much richer.
Given that her situation, and her aversions, are shared by many in our Quaker yearly meeting, and by countless others who are clearly not sheltered, I need to pay careful attention.
Speaking of Scot McKnight, I've just finished reading a book that he wrote with co-author Tommy Preson Phillips, Invisible Jesus: A Book about Leaving the Church and Looking for Christ. The authors use their own experiences of deconstructing former certainties, as well as many quotations and case histories of others with similar experiences, and statistical data about developments in North American institutional Christianity, to open up the major crisis represented by today's exodus from established churches.
McKnight and Phillips believe, and try to document, that most of those exiles still feel attracted to Jesus—just not to those who claim to be his official representatives and spokespeople, and the structures, methods, and toxic propaganda that those who hold power in the church are using to try to keep the rest in line. The authors describe how that power and propaganda are used, and the painful results for so many.
Invisible Jesus is not an apologetic aimed at those exiles and refugees to try to lure them back, nor a handbook of strategies for church leaders to use for that purpose. It's more a book for people like me, who are trying to understand what's going on. In today's Christian establishment, why is Jesus so invisible!? For that analysis, I think the book is an effective resource. It is eloquent on the beauty and centrality of Jesus (and on the importance of identifying anything that gets in the way of authentic relationship with him). It doesn't deal directly with the situation of those who have even given up on the reality of Jesus himself, although there's a lot of value in their careful distinction between the Jesus who never gives up on us, and the figurehead presented by toxic theologies. I recommend the book.
It’s telling that Weil has risen to new prominence in the same moment as Arendt: both are safely dead, safely female (and so, it is assumed, feminist); perhaps above all, both are so safely historical in their antifascism that readers can pick and choose what to apply and what to allegorize, what to take as eternal truth and what to dismiss as being simply of their time, or their unique, unreproducible personality.
Near Firbank Fell, Cumbria, England. Photo by Judy Maurer.
Valient for the Truth
by Judy Maurer
The day after the presidential election was called, I had lunch with a good friend. In pain from a recent injury, she had misjudged the distance and was very late. I was good with that because I needed time to simply calm myself and sit for a long while. A Thai restaurant in Milwaukie, Oregon, served that purpose well.
Over pad Thai, my friend pointed out that the Quakers who were conscientious objectors in World War II knew what to do when the system was against them: they networked. They knew each other well.
Quakers were also active in Germany in the rise of Nazism, in helping Jews escape and caring for those who were left. As the war progressed and France was occupied, Quakers remained to help. By then, Quakers had to tread carefully on both sides, Allies and Nazis, if they wanted to feed the hungry rather than join the military. Both systems were against them.
My point now is that we have been here before. In the coming years, our commitment to welcome and uphold the rights and safety of LGBTQIA+ people inside and outside of our community will mean the system will be against us.
In 2022 we as a yearly meeting approved the following statement: “We recognize the unequal burden Black, Indigenous, and People of Color have suffered historically and presently. We will make restitution to Indigenous and African American people. We will renounce white supremacy and learn to live in peaceful ways with our environment.”
Living into that commitment will mean that the system will be against us.
Daniel Hunter, in his excellent article on the Waging Nonviolence website, stated that one of the keys to resisting an autocrat’s goals of “fear, isolation, exhaustion, and disorientation” is nurturing community. We know how to do this. We, as the Society of Friends, have been in times like these before.
Indeed, Quakerism was forged in times like these.
The Fells' Swarthmoor Hall. Photo by Judy Maurer.
In the middle of the violence and chaos of the English Civil War, new religious ideas around egalitarianism were floated, and some took root. In 1650, an itinerant trader who had emerged from a period of profound depression heard a voice telling him there was a “great people to be gathered.” Several years later, George Fox met up with Margaret Fell, a spiritually restless woman of the landed gentry at her estate in northwest England (see photo)
The collaboration from that relationship, and the protection given by her husband, a judge, meant that the great people to be gathered were organized into the Society of Friends.
We had strange ways. Women were prominent leaders in the movement. We would not swear in court, because stating the Truth should be enough. Men refused to take off their hats to honor the nobility. In those days, one was supposed to use “you” to address those with high status. We insisted on saying “thee” and “thou” to all, “without any respect to rich or poor, great nor small,” as Fox said. Pronouns were important then, too.
In 1649, Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, was beheaded and the monarchy ended. Oliver Cromwell was pronounced Lord Protector; he ruled more or less like a king, although with a parliament. Cromwell was a Puritan, but he gave some measure of protection to Quakers.
Then the political winds shifted. In 1660, Charles I’s son, Charles II, returned from exile and was crowned. By then, the people were longing for stability. Charles II wanted loyalty. Puritans and the Church of England wanted control over the religious lives of the English. The nobility wanted to keep their top spot in a “well-ordered society” that happened to have them as the chosen-by-God elite. Quakers’ strange egalitarian ways were seen as a threat to all of that.
Public humiliation, family splits, loss of property, imprisonment, and deaths resulted. Meetings for worship were declared “unlawful assemblies.” The jails were so bad that a sentence of a month or so often became a death sentence from dysentery and other diseases. In 1660 alone, about 300 Quakers died from the persecution.
To endure, Quakers knew to stick together. Individual Quakers volunteered to substitute themselves for other Quakers in prison, to give them respite to regain their health. They actually went to prison for each other. Now that’s community! There are reports that in some meetings, all the adults were imprisoned, so the children carried on the work of their homes and meetings.
We endured, we persevered, then we did good things for the wider society with what we learned while enduring.
In a book forthcoming from Barclay Press, Ben Richmond has versified many of Fox’s epistles. Here’s one written in 1663:
Sing and rejoice,
ye children of the day and of the light;
for the Lord is at work
in this thick night of darkness
that may be felt.
And truth doth flourish as the rose,
and the lilies do grow among the thorns,
and the plants atop of the hills,
and upon them the lambs do skip
and play.
And never heed the tempests
nor the storms, floods nor rains,
for the seed Christ is over all,
and doth reign.
And so be of good faith and valiant for the truth:
for the truth can live in the jails.
And fear not the loss of the fleece,
for it will grow again;
and follow the lamb,
if it be under the beast's horns,
or under the beast's heels;
for the lamb shall have the victory
over them all.
---
Now in our own thick night of darkness, we remember that we are children of the day and of the light.
Judy at Firbank Fell.
"Valiant for the Truth" is crossposted from the Newsletter of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends. Links to the Sierra-Cascades newsletter archive (and a subscription link!) are here.
Judy van Wyck Maurer lives in Portland, Oregon, USA, with her husband Johan. She is clerk of Communications for Sierra-Cascades and editor of the yearly meeting's newsletter. Other guest posts by Judy on this blog are here.
First principles 2.0
I was glad that Judy wrote the essay above for our yearly meeting's newsletter, and allowed me to repost it here, because in my search for a new set of first principles for Donald Trump's second term as U.S. president, I found a core principle right at the heart of George Fox's psalm.
And so be of good faith and valiant for the truth: for the truth can live in the jails.
(Maybe some of you who have memories of our late Friend T. Canby Jones, can picture him smiling in the background, saying "... and the nonviolent Lamb shall have the victory.")
I think, by and large, my first principles 1.0, from the eve of Trump's first inauguration in 2017, remain useful—especially if you help improve them. Briefly summarized, and with a few edits, here they are:
Don't hide from the truth. We mustn't let either denial or cynicism do our thinking for us. Remain sober, clear-eyed, and vigilant, drawing intelligent conclusions from the evidence. Recognize the differences between the chaos of 2017-2021 and the planning that has already gone into 2025-2029, even though the potential for utter chaos is still there, too.
Do not divide the USA into pro- and anti-Trump populations. To me, this is part of what "good faith" means. Listen with grace and curiosity, respond from your center to the actual human you're with, not a caricature. (And the political scientist in me has an intriguing reminder: only 64% of eligible voters cast ballots in November 2024. The non-voters far outnumber the tiny plurality of Trump's victory.)
Resist the degradation of civil discourse. Do not use condescending mockery of anyone, or of their diets, appearance, or class origins. Don't mock their faith communities, although it's perfectly fair to propose contradictions between their publicly-proclaimed faith and their behaviors or policies.
Finally, count the cost of protracted resistance, and organize accordingly. Some of us are Quakers in part precisely because we dislike any kind of combativeness. We will probably need to help each other learn some new skills and disciplines in the area of a dignified ferocity and persistence in engaging in needful conflict for the sake of the Cross. In the division of labor that's inherent in the New Testament concept of spiritual gifts, I hope some of our pastorally-gifted Friends will stay mindful of the psychic cost of being in nearly constant conflict. How will it affect those of us who are naturally inclined to rage, or are even addicted to rage? How will it affect those of us who are totally conflict-avoidant?
What additions, improvements, and implementations can you contribute? Robert P. Jones, sociologist of religion and a member of The Convocation Unscripted podcasters, provided a possible example of the first and last points above. In a recent podcast, he advocated "... deciding ahead of time what [our] bright lines are.... If they come to round up immigrants in our community, we show up. ... If they are targeting Muslims in our community, we are showing up." It is hard to believe that a mass deportation plan could ever work, but even a partial attempt would involve much conflict and cruelty. I want to establish ahead of time what, in the name of Jesus, my response would be if the attempt were made. For the truth, we are told, can live in the jails.
Beloved Spear asks: Who might be the largest group caught up in a deportation net? Answer: Conservative Christians.
Craig Mokhiber in Mondoweiss: Arrest warrants are issued for Netanyahu and Gallant, but the fight is far from over.
In doing so [issuing the warrants], the judges have given the world a glimmer of hope that the international legal system is not dead yet, that Israel is not above the law, that the abusive power of U.S. empire is not without challenge, and that justice may indeed be on the horizon. But if that justice is to prevail, all who believe in justice must remain vigilant.
The ICC warrants were issued after the longest delay in the Court’s history, during which Israeli and U.S. persecution of the court, slander of the Court by pro-Israel media and lobby proxies, and personnel shake-ups, were also unprecedented.
But the glare of global public attention, its demands for justice, and the principled convictions of the ICC judges prevailed, at least for now.
Toward the end of her book Goodbye to Russia, Sarah Rainsford, BBC reporter who was expelled from Russia in 2021 as a "security threat," wrote:
Still in our kitchen.
When I got kicked out, people would tell me it was a 'badge of honour' and congratulate me for getting under the Kremlin's skin. At first that niggled, because I still felt the loss. The remnants of my many years in Russia as either student or reporter were all around me in London, as reminders of the enormous time and effort I'd invested. My bookshelves were loaded with Russian literature and history. I had crates full of notebooks from reporting trips across the country and a phone full of contacts and friends I'd probably never see. Even squeezing the last drop of shampoo from a bottle marked in Cyrillic script felt stupidly like the end of an era.
Six months later, the invasion of Ukraine killed that nostalgia dead. Reporting from the Donbas at first, and then places like Bucha, I was documenting what Russia was doing instead of being forced to hear its denials and distortions.
When I returned from Ukraine in March, I binned all the Putin mugs. For a long time I couldn't bear to see any of the Russia stuff. I couldn't bear even to continue writing this book.
The two books I'm recommending today both offer intense exposure to the realities of today's Russia. Sarah Rainsford's book hit me more personally: it reminded me of my own experiences in Russia on almost every page. She started studying Russian at the same age I did. Her first experiences in the country were at age 18 (in 1992); mine didn't happen until I was 22 (in 1975). I returned to Russia, often to attend board meetings of a Quaker organization, nearly every year between 1994 and 2007, the year we began our ten-year period of service in Elektrostal under Quaker sponsorship. Rainsford spent twenty years as a BBC reporter in Russia, many of those years overlapping with my visits or with our residency in Elektrostal.
Rainsford's book opens with her personal experience of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. At that moment she was in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, and she vividly describes the buildup of tensions just prior to those first hours of invasion, as well as the opening blows of the invasion itself. Her book is framed by those February events, and how it has influenced her relationship to a country into which she invested much of her life.
Much of the book is a well-organized succession of journalistic experiences accompanied by her candid personal reflections. Many events and tragedies of her years as a BBC reporter and producer in Russia may be familiar to you: the incompetent response to the sinking of the submarine Kursk in 2000; the mass tragedy of September 2004 among the students and parents of Beslan, and the death of Anna Politkovskaya, who had refused to give up her coverage of human rights abuses in Chechnya; later, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov; the poisoning of Vladimir Kara-Murza; the suicide of independent journalist Irina Slavina ("Blame the Russian Federation for my death"); the banning of the Memorial organizations.
Along the way, she introduces us to some of the unforgettable personalities who were caught up by these events—or who sparked them. Among them: opposition activist Anastasia Shevchenko in Rostov-on-Don, in 2019, who was arrested for her links with an "undesirable organization," and consequently unable to be with her daughter Alina, when Alina died in an intensive care ward. This incident of gratuitous cruelty sparked a "March of Mother's Fury" in Moscow, with one participant telling Rainsford that "the case proved you could now be arrested in Russia for nothing at all." Rainsford went on to say, "Russia had dozens of political prisoners by 2019, far too many to tell all their stories or attend all their trials. But for me, Anastasia always stood out." The personal tragedy of mother and daughter was one element, but it was also an example of a new category of political repression in the wake of Ukraine's independence movement: the suspicion of people with links, however tenuous, to "undesirable" foreign organizations.
Rainsford's book encompasses the last years of Alexei Navalny's activism in Russia, his poisoning in 2020, followed by treatment in Germany and his return to Russia and immediate arrest on January 17, 2021, and, eventually his death in prison in February of this year, and his burial in Moscow.
Navalny's own account of his life and activism, Patriot: A Memoir, also touched me at a personal level. I loved Sarah Rainsford's book in part because of something we share: a nearly lifelong interest in Russia, as students and then as visitors and residents. Both of us have had to wrestle with the realization that somehow Russia includes both a capacity for extraordinary humanity and self-sacrifice as well as a capacity for systemic cruelty on a mass scale, fueled by greed and assisted by centuries of dysfunctional relationships between those with power and everyone else.
At least that's what it looks like from the outside. Navalny, on the inside of this reality, seemed to have made a decision not to tolerate this contradiction. If Russia is to flourish, cruelty and arbitrary absolutism must be confronted and defeated. The first two-thirds of his book recounts how he came to this conclusion; the last part shows how he paid the price for his convictions, through his prison diaries and many of his Instagram posts right into this year.
The most attractive aspect of his book is also the most difficult: his own cheeky voice. It just seems so odd and delightful that one of Russia's most prominent opposition politicians could be the very opposite of the wooden-faced political operatives, drawing from a limited list of familiar cliches, who usually dominate the scene. Navalny almost died as a result of the Novichok poisoning in Tomsk, but his account of gradually coming out of his coma is sheer comedic genius. That's the joy and tragedy of this whole book: it's funny and refreshing and often very entertaining, even when he describes the remorseless and sadistic realities of maximum security prison life...
... But we already know how the story ends.
We can tell that he often took pride in his political accomplishments. Among the high points of the book is his account of running for mayor in Moscow in 2013; his use of street-level and door-to-door campaigning was traditional in democracies but unusual in Russia. Navalny attributed some of his campaign initiatives to his love of the American television drama The Wire. "In one season there was a storyline about the hero running for mayor of Baltimore. I explained to our staff responsible for organizing meetings with the public that I wanted the same scenario: a stage, chairs for the elderly, groups of other people standing around. That is probably entirely typical in an American election campaign, but no one had done anything like it before in Russia."
In his attempted campaign for president in 2017, he took mass campaigning of this sort to a national level with thousands of volunteers and dozens of campaign offices. But he also often poked fun at himself, writing (for example) about his difficulties in front of the television camera.
A more caustic brand of humor comes out in his accounts of his trials. The material is very rich: in at least two prominent criminal trials, he is accused of "crimes" that are actually normal business practices. One of the trials ended with Alexei's brother Oleg being sentenced to prison for three and a half years, while Alexei himself was given a suspended sentence. For Alexei, seeing his brother in prison while he remained outside was worse than being in prison himself.
In his final post-Novichok prison years, Navalny occasionally confessed to discouragement, but usually his droll voice quickly returned. For example, he gave four reasons for wanting to complete this book, which he had started before returning to Russia from Germany. First, he simply wanted to. Second, he had promised his agents. And then ...
Reasons three and four for writing this book might sound overly dramatic, and if everything ends badly, this will be the point at which my more emotional readers may shed a tear. (Oh, my God, he could see it all coming; imagine how that must have felt!) On the other hand, if everything works out for the best, this could be the most pathetic part. It could be tidied up with a bit of editing or simply omitted, but I have promised myself that this is to be a very honest book.
Reason three, then, is that if they do finally whack me, the book will be my memorial.
Reason four is that, again, if they whack me, my family will get the advance and royalties that, I hope, there will be. Let's face it, if a murky assassination attempt using a chemical weapon, followed by a demise in prison, can't move a book, it is hard to imagine what would. The book's author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?
This is Russia, too.... I'm taking the opportunity to re-run a slideshow that I posted here in 2013. It's the pages of a booklet presented to me by one of my former students on the occasion of my 60th birthday. (I added translations, and the second slide to explain the title reference to Shurik.)
To tell you the truth, I'm a bit embarrassed to wear my campaign tee shirt for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
I'm not embarrassed about my support for these candidates for the USA's highest offices, and my intention to vote for them on (or, rather, before) election day, November 5. Choosing them has been part of my observance of "sober hope," as I'm about to explain.
Instead, I cannot help being sad that, among their campaign's several tag lines ("We're not going back," "we're turning the page") is this stark set of three words: TRUTH HOPE DECENCY.
That last word refers to the direct contrast between their candidacy and that of their principal opponent. Over the years, I've said enough about him in this blog (for example, last week) and I don't plan to say any more today. If I can't convince my own beloved relative, quoted last week, to change her mind, then I doubt very much that this modest blog post will change any other minds. But it's a sad commentary that a low-bar word such as "decency" even needs to appear in a presidential campaign tagline.
So this week I'm simply going to explain my endorsement of Harris and Walz as an expression of sober hope. There's more to it than simply opposing the alternative.
Yes, both Harris and Walz seem "decent." They're not perfect, but they're also not likely to embarrass themselves or their country with blatant corruption or petty cruelty.
I have enjoyed watching the enthusiastic crowds drawn by Harris and Walz in their campaign stops. But star quality, which both Harris and Walz seem to have (based on their own personalities and merits as well as a contrast with hardworking but uncharismatic Joe Biden), is not enough to earn our votes. And the other team is also capable of bringing out crowds of cheering people. However, I will not discount the evidence that millions of donors and potential voters seem to have shaken off their political passivity and found hope in the Harris/Walz message.
I would not expect instant miracles from a Democratic victory. It's true that both Harris and Walz have executive and legislative experience, and have been able to attract good teams to help run their organizations and implement their programs. As I've said before, if the winners of an election were merely five or ten percent more competent than the losers would have been, that could still save or improve the lives of many thousands of people worldwide. And this year, the competence gap seems very large.
I expect that the priorities of Harris and Walz, who are both Christians, would align as much with the values of capitalism and USA-style imperialism as they would with the Gospel. Regardless of her private beliefs, Kamala Harris would have little room to maneuver with respect to Israel and Palestine, for example. (Oh, I hope I'm wrong!) The Pentagon will still account for nearly half the military expenditures of the whole planet. And even where Harris's heart is in the right place, our dysfunctional Congress and our compromised Supreme Court may frustrate some or all of her best plans.
Making a choice among imperfect candidates in a presidential election is not placing U.S. citizenship above the claims of Christian discipleship. Making the best selection I can is an attempt at faithful stewardship and care for neighbors, in hope but not illusion.
If you are a voter in the USA, and are undecided about this year's presidential race, I hope you will prayerfully consider voting for the Democratic candidates, even if you then spend four years protesting their inadequacies. Given the level of polarization and mistrust in our country, they would need our prayers as well as our protests, our support as well as our vigilance. No outcome of this year's election would guarantee national healing, but a public commitment to TRUTH HOPE DECENCY would be a good place to start.
Why Billy Graham's granddaughter Jerushah Duford is voting for Kamala Harris.
My copy of Alexei Navalny's autobiography Patriot just arrived. Here's talk-show host Stephen Colbert interviewing Yulia Navalnaya on her late husband and his book. I plan to post a review of Patriot as well as Sarah Rainsford's Goodbye to Russia in the next few weeks. [UPDATE: Here it is.]
Cheyenne McNeill in The Guardian writes about American evangelicals deconstructing their religion. You probably already know most or all of what the author covers, but I rarely see a treatment as thoughtful as this in a secular newspaper.
"The City Gent" writes about the place where we go to meeting when we're in London, and the immediate neighborhood. And a few weeks earlier, he wrote about the nearby Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, which we pass through on our way to meeting.
If you'd like a guide to London's Quaker historical sites, this map on the Bunhill Fields Friends' Web site may serve well.
Here's a repeat announcement: In November, Friends Peace Teams are celebrating their 30th anniversary with an online Global Gathering 2024 with a staggered schedule to accommodate diverse time zones. Theme of the gathering: "Justice and peace are possible! What sustains our faith in justice and peace in the face of violence and war?"
For the last three or four days, I've been captivated by Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960's. "Captivated" isn't too strong a word for my reading; I've resented nearly every interruption.
The book is structured around an intellectual and emotional adventure that historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband Richard Goodwin undertook together: systematically exploring the 300 cartons containing documents and memorabilia of Richard's participation in the election campaigns of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert F. Kennedy, and his speechwriting for presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Among the fascinating episodes (described by quotations from the documents and the lively conversations between husband and wife) are Dick's involvement in the creation of the Peace Corps, the shaping of Johnson's civil rights campaigns and the War on Poverty, and the painful end of their powerful alliance when Dick rejected Johnson's Viet Nam policies. Not only did Dick have to turn his back on Johnson after devotedly serving Johnson's "Great Society" vision with all his heart, soul, and superlative communication skills (Jack Valenti called him "the most skilled living practitioner of an arcane and dying artform, the political speech"), but then he also had to abandon presidential primary candidate Eugene McCarthy, whom he greatly admired and whose youthful campaigners he adored, when his personal friend Bobby Kennedy entered the 1968 primary race.
All of this drama might make for absorbing reading in the hands of any competent historian. But Doris and her husband had deep emotional stakes in retelling these stories for each other—and now Doris for us. They were eleven years apart in age, and at times their disagreements reflected their deepest political and personal allegiances—Richard to the Kennedy family, for example, although the example is an oversimplification; and Doris to LBJ. Many times they had different recollections or interpretations of important events, and their conversations seeking a fuller understanding are part of the sweet essence of the book. They recreate a half-generation of American politics where passionate advocacy for economic and social justice (despite all the hardball political maneuverings they recall together) was worth putting one's whole career on the line. Equally challenging for both of them were the times they had to insist on saying goodbye to a titanic political figure simply in order to reclaim one's own life.
I've read about 70% of the book, so I shouldn't give any sort of final assessment. However, I've just made it through the chapter devoted to 1968. I'm ten years younger than Doris Kearns Goodwin, so at the time she was working in the Johnson administration (first as an intern, a member of a year-long program called the White House Fellows), I was just beginning high school. My diary, which I started on January 1, 1968, recorded my first awareness of the events of that year—events that filled many of those 300 boxes Dick and Doris were exploring together.
Honestly, I have fewer than 10 boxes, just a file cabinet of correspondence from back in the times of paper letters, and these 55 diaries, most of which are locked up in a bank. Even so, it's interesting to me to take my 1968 diary and correlate the echoes I received as a fifteen year old high school student with the great events that these authors witnessed or participated in. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, threw President Johnson into one of his episodes of despair and depression, no doubt made worse by the fires of Washington, DC's riots. When Johnson recovered, he decided to seize the crisis to push housing legislation through Congress to honor Dr. King. My diary recorded the assassination and my own family's crisis at that time, but didn't make the connection with Johnson's legislative response.
A few events made it into my diary that weren't mentioned in Doris Kearns Goodwin's book: the loss of the submarine USS Scorpion, for example, the suppression of the Prague Spring, the flights of Apollo 7 and 8, and the North Koreans' seizure of the USS Pueblo. Their inclusion in my diary reflected my own increasing interest in the Cold War (an interest that actually started with the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was nine years old) and space exploration. The Goodwin selection process for their joint exploration of the documents, and for this book, reflected their personal involvements, and the memories called up by their joint exploration of Dick's archives.
The overarching theme of those involvements, and those memories, was a yearning on both their parts and among their colleagues during that era, to rebuild a politics of justice and fairness. It's a theme reflected in Bobby Kennedy's aspirational speech in the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, on the night he won the California primary. It was a speech he gave a few short minutes before he was fatally wounded. Dick Goodwin had never heard the speech until he and Doris played the recording together, fifty years later:
I think we can end the divisions in the United States ... the violence, the disenchantment with our society; the division, whether it's between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, between age groups, or the war in Vietnam.
Suddenly Dick rose from our couch. "I can't watch this anymore," he said. And with that, he quickly left the room. I stayed on to listen to a voice that did indeed seem capable of bringing us together.
We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country. And I intend to make that my basis for running...
Who Is Afraid of Degrowth? Visit this page to download Celine Keller's graphic treatment of the idea of degrowth, and how its critics misunderstand it.
Nancy Thomas has also been looking through old journals.
... Explanations and arguments appropriate to the rational, discursive mind so often skip over the surface of our deep selves, over the waves of grief and longing, the currents of desire, like stones over the sea; it is only when they have worn themselves out with bouncing that they will sink out of sight.
Remembering Lazy Lester ... with guitarist Eve Monsees at Antone's Records.
