The third "No Kings Day" program of protest actions in the USA are being organized for this Saturday. We will be out of the country that day, but hope and pray for a peaceful day, and a good turnout. I'd love to see lots of creative messaging that will reach new audiences, and a minimum of stupid caricatures.
Some USA citizens here in the United Kingdom will be marching under a slightly different banner, "No Tyrants," since here there is an actual king. The king is styled "sovereign" but, ironically, in normal times the British sovereign has practically no political power in comparison to King Donald.
The kings and queens in constitutional monarchies do have enormous symbolic power in their roles as stewards of national identity and guarantors of continuity. They would quickly lose that legitimacy and its grounding in the affections of their people if they became kings in the ancient tyrannical model described by God to Samuel, who—in vain—passed that warning on to the people demanding a king.
Many actual monarchs, having more majesty than power, still have the use of grand palaces, elaborately decorated, and they participate in impressive rituals and spectacles. They may have buildings, organizations, and various projects named after them, and their pictures may appear on currency or on the walls of government offices, but, again, if they themselves were to decree these arrangements, their legitimacy would suffer.
King Donald wants both power and spectacle. May he get an unmistakable NO on Saturday.
My June 14 sign.
On his blog, Interrupting the Silence, Michael K. Marsh points out that this upcoming No Kings Day is on the weekend of Palm Sunday.
This Saturday, March 28th, is the third No Kings Day protest and Sunday, March 29th, is Palm Sunday, but here’s what I wonder:
What if Palm Sunday was the original No Kings protest?
What if Jesus, the disciples, and the crowd that follows Jesus are protesting violence, injustice, and imperial power?
Instead of protest songs there were shouts of “Hosanna!”, a cry for deliverance and liberation, a plea for change. Instead of protest signs there were cloaks and palm branches, symbols of joy, peace, submission, and the celebration of a new way.
Here's how Nancy Thomas has been using slugs in her writing. It reminded me of the tradition among some pastors and seminarians to challenge each other to embed some incongruous word in sermons they'll be preaching.
Philosophers, political scientists, and advocates of civil discourse are grieving the death of Jürgen Habermas.
Jeremy Morris tells us why he thinks "Paul D’Anieri’s updated Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War is the single best book you can read to understand the domestic and geopolitical causes of the current war." He managed to persuade me to buy the book. I haven't started reading it yet, but I think Morris's post is interesting on its own ... as usual.
Source: David Sipress, New Yorker via Seraphim Sigrist's Facebook page, commenting on his own back pain.
... [T]he gifts of the Holy Spirit are revealed in community. As such, they are for all the community, and so one gift does not quench the others, even when, as happens often, they are opposite. So the analytical does not quench the emotional, the gift of tears does not quench that of laughter, the gift of the spiritual elder does not contradict that of the psychologist, the gift of ecstasy does not stand in disharmony with that of calm.
Bishop Seraphim Sigrist (Orthodox Church in America) died last Saturday morning. There must be many people all over the world who are going through what I'm feeling now. Yes, it's true that we believe that "he fell asleep in the Lord," but he gave us so much wisdom and care and sheer fun that I, for one, can't help feeling sad and very sorry for us.
I never met him in person. The closest we came to meeting each other was when I visited the Pleasantville campus of Pace University to conduct marketing interviews at a time when he was working in the library. We actually met through a Facebook chat when he contacted me to consider joining an ecumenical fellowship that, during the peak COVID years, was meeting online. That invitation led to, among other things, five years of correspondence that I'm very grateful to be able to revisit anytime. We chatted about Japan (where he served as Bishop of East Japan, and where my mother was born and raised), our experiences of Russia, several mutual friends there, the intersections of Eastern Orthodox and Quaker Christianity, authors and artists we both admired, and the joys and puzzles of ecumenical life. We sent each other many links over the years; it was he who told me that Friends Journal had published an interview with the Norwegian author Jon Fosse, whom he was reading at the time.
Looking over that correspondence, I am amazed at my own openness with him in writing about my family and early life. I've no doubt that many others found him to be a person of surpassing empathy as I did. And some of you lucky people knew him for far longer than my five years.
His scope of knowledge, interests, sympathies, and ability to detect unexpected affinities and hidden kinships across all those fields was amazing. And he frequently made those connections with gentle playfulness.
In his positive review of Bishop Seraphim's book Theology of Wonder, the Christian Reformed scholar James Peyton wrote words that ring very true, more generally, of what I came to know and love about our friend. In the Calvin Theological Journal (pages 479-481), Peyton wrote,
There is no question that the author is a gifted theologian: It is clear that Bishop Seraphim is well-acquainted with a wide spectrum of views and controversies, both among Christians of various stripes and with the views of practitioners of other faith traditions throughout the world. However, he never makes such familiarity the point of his presentation or of any of the sections; indeed, he wears his extensive learning lightly. He is not concerned to show us how much he knows, although he knows a great deal: He refers deftly to the understandings current among Hasidic Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and various kinds of Muslims. He cites with considerable dexterity literary figures from various cultures, across many centuries, and in a host of genres. Unostentatiously, the author weaves these all into a seamless tapestry that invites readers to appreciate that "all things (considered in their depth) led into eluctable mystery" (93): Bishop Seraphim is concerned to show us how much he does not understand—or, better put, what no one can comprehend. In the best traditions of the rich Eastern Orthodox tradition in which he stands, this little book offers a contemporary—and very accessible—mystical theology.
Maybe he truly was a seraph cast among humans, sent on some mysterious mission. A seraph on earth would move awkwardly in crowds, his wings more hindrance than help, yet he would ache constantly for the divine presence he had known before. That longing defined Seraphim. I have never met anyone so profoundly nostalgic for heaven.
The fourth Global Ecumenical Theological Institute (GETI) in Wadi El Natrun, Egypt—an Eastern Orthodox perspective. (How I wish I could talk about this report with Eden Grace!)
You've heard of virtue-signalling. Now we have vice-signalling and vitriol-signalling.... (Skip these links if you want to stay on the sunny side of the street.)
Kristin Du Mez, Bruce Berglund, and the Moscow Playbook.
Writer and poet Nancy Thomas on the writing vocation, technological interruptions, and ... what rhymes with Forsythe?
This time, our "Baby Scratch My Back" version comes from Otis Redding (audio only with slideshow). It's probably my favorite version strictly for vocal performance. Musicians: Booker T. & the M.G.'s (Steve Cropper, Donald Dunn, Al Jackson Jr., Booker T. Jones) along with pianist Isaac Hayes and a horn section including Wayne Jackson, Charles "Packy" Axton, Andrew Love, Floyd Newman, and Sammy Coleman.
"A flag of peace and freedom"—a design for a post-colonial Russian flag. Source.
Since the death of Alexei Navalny, I've not written much here about the theme of the "beautiful Russia of the future." I continue to think about Russia often, and am in touch with some of our friends and colleagues of our years in Elektrostal, but the ongoing war, and the repressive political context, has complicated these relationships, to my sorrow and frustration.
However, I was reminded that this state of affairs won't last forever, Here's the communication I received today, written by two old friends, that reminded me:
Planting Seeds for Healing
A brutal war is raging in Ukraine and near the border with Russia. Will there be a winner in this conflict? I think not. In war, everyone loses. Both sides have lost many lives. The destruction in Ukraine is immense.
All wars eventually come to an end, and this one will not be an exception. When this war is over, the reconstruction begins.
However, it is not just the infrastructure and buildings that must be rebuilt. It is the lives of the people that will need restoring and healing—a return to mental and physical health. For every soldier who is killed, many lives are affected—parents, children, siblings, spouse, friends—and their lives will never be the same. Some sources estimate over one million killed plus many other wounded. There will be a great many people on both sides with unimaginable losses who suffer from trauma, stress, depression, hatred, grief, shame, regret, and many will carry unthinkable physical injuries for the rest of their lives.
Healing is a long-term process which will require dedicated professionals and volunteers who believe that, with compassion and understanding, it is possible to do healing work with individuals and groups. This process begins now in anticipation of the eventual end to this terrible war and the normalization of travel: willing professionals must be located; a sustainable program developed; volunteers
trained; money raised for transportation, office space, supplies, outreach.
There is a registered non-profit in the US that has been supporting projects in Russia and Ukraine for 29 years. Its supporters believe that an intense effort will be needed to answer the call for help from both sides in this war. They want to be involved and are looking for others who want to engage with the creative and inclusive process of assessing needs, connecting with the people in both countries, developing programs, raising funds, and implementing such healing.
Knowledge of the Russian or Ukrainian language is not necessary.
I can vouch for the authors of this invitation and hope that, if something stirs in your heart, you'll get in touch with the authors through that e-mail address.
Quakers have been involved in Russia and Ukraine for many years, dating back to Peter the Great. I know personally some of those who now carry these concerns for healing, but the majority of them are now 70 or more years old. If there are younger Friends with a concern for this part of the world, I'd love to hear from you. (johan@canyoubelieve.me.) And so would those who wrote the invitation above.
When I started studying the Russian language in high school in Evanston, Illinois, I didn't feel alone. It was great fun to go to the University of Illinois campus in Chicago on May 15, 1971, for the Illinois State Russian Contest, and see a whole lecture hall full of high school students with similar enthusiasm. (I won a "Superior" certificate!)
Stats for high school students of Russian then and now are hard to find, but college level enrollments have taken a dive since those years. At their peak (1990), there were about 44,500 students of Russian in the USA. (I wasn't one of them; I majored in Russian at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario.) By 2021 the number had gone down to 17,598. And that's before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which I'm sure made the language even less popular among those from non-Russian backgrounds. In my high school years, the Cold War (and the alarm over Sputnik I) gave some of us a sense of urgency, but the current grievous situation hasn't had the same effect.
As writer and critic Dmitri Bykov noted back in 2022, commenting on the full-scale invasion,
It is clear that Russia crossed many red lines. It cannot live any longer as it did in the past. The world will no longer see [in Russia] a place of spirituality, a place of great culture, a place representing victory over fascism.
That may all be true, now and for some time to come, but all the severe judgments, indictments, cultural boycotts, social and economic isolation, and other consequences that this nation has brought down upon itself through coercion, passivity, and toxic cynicism, I can't help continuing to cherish the vision of a "beautiful Russia of the future." And a key component for recovering that beauty is the gift of healing.
It may well be the case that young adults in the United States view Christianity as an impediment to women’s equality, a view amplified by the “Orthodoxy as Masculinity” narrative. But that is not what Orthodox Christianity proclaims.
For several days, I've been thinking about Benjamin Netanyahu's speech at the United Nations General Assembly. The specific words that pulled at me were these: "I have a message for the tyrants of Tehran: If you strike us, we will strike you. There is no place—there is no place in Iran—that the long arm of Israel cannot reach. And that’s true of the entire Middle East."
(My italics.)
I'm not going to evaluate the whole speech, which is based on the unquestioned assumption of Israel's total innocence and victimhood in the region and at the UN. For just one example of the one-sidedness of the speech, its "blessing" does not take into account the treatment of Palestinians. Their existence in limbo has been prolonged indefinitely because Israel's leadership for generations has seen no advantage in resolving this cruel anomaly. The resulting inevitable bloody clashes, as each side "teaches lessons" to the other, are exploited as just another proof of Israel's victimhood.
Right now I'm more interested in the words, "If you strike us, we will strike you." On one level, that's the history of the human race. In any long-standing conflict, each side says these words to the other, taking turns with every action and reaction. It's true that one side's case may have more justice than the other's, but rarely do we see 100% good fighting 100% evil. Each side, however, usually portrays the conflict in those terms.
The politicians who raise the banner of "If you strike us..." are speaking to at least two audiences—the enemy and their own voters. The enemy doesn't need this information; they already assume the customary game is going to continue. The voters are supposed to understand that these politicians are their heroes, doing their heroic job to defend them, and deserve to remain in office.
What the "if you strike us" politicians are not making clear is the moral implication of their threat. "If you strike us, there must be death and destruction on your side. Our only choice is to kill people. We hope guilty people will die, but innocent people will also die. Instead of finding a more creative and lasting response to your attack, one that saves people on both sides of our conflict, we prefer to waste those lives."
In my fantasy world, Netanyahu's speech would have included ways that Iran could be part of "the blessing" and that the grievances of Palestine's allies could be addressed. (After all, the treatment of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are the ostensible reasons for the current hostilities against Israel.) To go even deeper into fantasy, he could also have admitted that Israel is not always innocent.
Those would be politically hazardous steps to take. When Barack Obama told international audiences that the USA was not always innocent, he was endlessly attacked by his political adversaries for "apologizing for America." Netanyahu's own political situation is far more precarious, and he would probably not survive the revolt within his coalition that would result. But the space might well open up for a wiser approach to the present conflicts.
In 2007, an ecumenical delegation with Quaker participation went to Iran and met with counterparts there, including an Iranian ambassador who quoted a proverb: "Build a bridge to me, and I'll build 99 bridges back to you." How many innocent people must die for lack of serious bridgebuilding?
The rhetorical strength of the "If you strike us" language, presented without any references to moral implications, depends on people accepting it as true and obvious. Christians particularly ought to be saying, in season and out of season, that it is not true and obvious at all. We are not to return evil for evil. (1 Peter 3:9; context. Romans 12:17; context.)
We might think that all we need to do is put more energy and creativity into evangelism, making the world more aware that paths to genuine peace do exist, that we are not trapped in endless rounds of counterstrikes, and there is a global community that has arisen around a Prince of Peace who has overcome death. I agree. But of course there's a problem with that. The awkward question arises: do we Christians ourselves believe that we are not to return evil for evil? After all, "if you strike me I will strike you" is Donald Trump's own attitude to conflict, and God knows how many Christian followers have become admirers of his belligerence. Apparently it turns out that it's hard to believe in Jesus.
Juan Cole, writing before the current stage of the Israeli-Lebanese war, described how U.S. president Joe Biden's Mideast strategy was disastrously falling apart.
Bloomberg's Matt Levine: Is there a way to automate (via AI) the things we like about Warren Buffett?
During a prayer meeting for peace this week, a Friend read this passage, ascribed to 'Anna', from the second chapter of Britain Yearly Meeting's Quaker Faith and Practice:
Prayer is an act of sharing with God, the Spirit, and not an attempt to prompt God to action. It is a promise that I will do my best, even if what I am able to do seems too insignificant to be worthwhile. When I pray for peace, and that the hearts of those in authority may be changed, it is a promise that I shall do such things as write to those in power, share in vigils, and above all lead my own life, as far as possible, in such a manner as to take away the occasion for strife between individuals and between peoples. When I pray for others who are in need, it is a promise to make my own contribution, perhaps by writing, by visiting, by a gift, by telling someone whom I know could help. When I pray for forgiveness, for strength and courage, I try to open my heart, making it possible for me humbly to receive.
I wish I were this mature! For me, prayer absolutely is full of my attempts, pathetic as they may be, to prompt God to action.
A few months ago I wrote about my prayers that God would send angel armies to the skies over Ukraine, fully conscious of my prayer's lack of logic or chances of being fulfilled. It's not that I believed that my tiny voice would push God over the edge, despite history's long evidence that, whatever God is doing, it doesn't apparently include restraining the hands of warmakers. It's more that, in the face of the constant stream of tragedies and agonies (for example, in Gaza) witnessed by the whole world, my relationship with God will suffer if I don't make this plea.
Consider the unnamed representative of God's people laying out their frustration in Psalm 44 (inEugene Peterson's paraphrase, slightly adapted), starting with verse 8:
All day we parade God’s praise— we thank you by name over and over.
But now you’ve walked off and left us, you’ve disgraced us and won’t fight for us.
You made us turn tail and run; those who hate us have cleaned us out.
You delivered us as sheep to the butcher, you scattered us to the four winds.
You sold your people at a discount— you made nothing on the sale.
You made people on the street, people we know, poke fun and call us names.
You made us a joke among the godless, a cheap joke among the rabble.
Every day I’m up against it, my nose rubbed in my shame—
Gossip and ridicule fill the air, people out to get me crowd the street.
All this came down on us, and we’ve done nothing to deserve it.
We never betrayed your Covenant: our hearts were never false, our feet never left your path.
Do we deserve torture in a den of jackals? or lockup in a black hole?
If we had forgotten to pray to our God or made fools of ourselves with store-bought gods,
Wouldn’t you have figured this out?
We can’t hide things from you.
No, you decided to make us martyrs, lambs assigned for sacrifice each day.
Get up, God! Are you going to sleep all day?
Wake up! Don’t you care what happens to us?
Why do you bury your face in the pillow? Why pretend things are just fine with us?
And here we are—flat on our faces in the dirt, held down with a boot on our necks.
Get up and come to our rescue. If you love us so much, Help us!
Look at this comment in the New Interpreter's Study Bible:
Pledging innocence and faithfulness to the covenant, the people accuse, because of you we are being killed all day long (v. 22, cf. Rom. 8:36). There is no justice in God's crushing them. The text insists that there is no congruity whatever between the people's sin and the judgment that has befallen them. It is easy to understand why this text was so frequently on the lips of those facing death in the Shoah (Holocaust) of 1939-45.
And from today's Palestine, Munther Isaac of Bethlehem Bible College does not hold back, either:
We prayed. We prayed for their protection … and God did not answer us, not even in the “house of God” were church buildings able to protect them. Our children die before the silence of the world, and before the silence of God. How difficult is God’s silence!
'Anna' (of Quaker Faith and Practice) is right about the promises that we make, or could make, as we pray: promises to do what we can in the face of violence. But those promises are in the context of our plea to our God for justice. After we pray and lament and grieve before God in utter honesty, and confess our inability to match reality with God's own explicit promises, we face what it actually means for us, our limited and often discouraged selves, to be the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27, context). So, even as I stubbornly ask for angels over Ukraine (counting on God and you to overlook my naïve ways), what I also want and need is for guidance on how we can rise up, in all our diversity of gifts and temperaments and levels of maturity, and be that Body of Christ.
It's in that context that I understand Anna's encouragement (again, drawing on the Britain Yearly Meeting text), to "write to those in power, share in vigils, and above all lead my own life, as far as possible, in such a manner as to take away the occasion for strife between individuals and between peoples." As communities, we can join and support the letter-writers and those who participate in vigils. We might find other strategic ways of influencing events: becoming diplomats, or serving in the government, even seeking elective office! Others may be led to take riskier paths: withholding war taxes, serving in medical teams, becoming war correspondents, or providing pastoral care and accompaniment in the very places of violence, knowing that in the Body, others are praying and paying in support. As Paul says (my emphasis): "[God] has committed to us the message of reconciliation."
Alice Walker wrote, "We are the ones we have been waiting for." Maybe God, the sovereign Creator, has been waiting for us, too....
Coming later this month to Youtube, the film For Our Daughters("stories of abuse, betrayal, and resistance in the evangelical church") is based on the final chapter of Kristin Kobes Du Mez's book Jesus and John Wayne. Kristin gives some context for the film on her substack blog.
Jeremy Morris on the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk, why the invasion registers so minimally among Russians, and (once again) the challenges of measuring popular opinion.
What are the specific challenges Friends face as we seek to embrace gifts of public ministry? Windy Cooler considers the results of Friends General Conference's survey on public ministry.
I'm delighted to see that Simon Barrow, long associated with Ekklesia, has just launched his substack column, Illuminations.
"Mellow Down Easy"—a version of Willie Dixon's classic, made famous by Little Walter. Here are Steve Guyger and his band at the Mojo Music Club in Kleinstaasdorf, Austria. Enjoy!
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.
I don't think I've seen this question asked any more bluntly: "Are Quakers part of the [uppercase-C] Church?" Or what? Are we on our own? Are we a new religion or meta-religion for whom those old ties have gone stale?
Some background: I'm a third of the way into an inspiring six-week Woodbrooke course entitled "The Shared Quaker Story," presented by Ben Wood, a Woodbrooke associate tutor, with eldership and technical assistance provided by another Woodbrooke associate tutor, Windy Cooler of Baltimore Yearly Meeting.
My personal description of this course is that we are examining the Christian elements that gave the Quaker movement depth and coherence for much of its history, and we are considering the cost of losing those elements. I think (here's an unauthorized prediction!) that we will learn that the most precious of those elements can be restored without resorting to ancestor worship or doctrinal rigidity, and without reducing our hospitality to sincere seekers in all their variety.
This exploration and conversation focuses particularly on Britain Yearly Meeting, where many Friends experience (or practice) a reluctance to describe the faith, if any, that we hold in common. In particular, Christian language and God language are often held at arm's length. Quakers' ethical discipleship (a.k.a. the "testimonies") are held in high regard but are often described without reference to their Christian origins. The customs and folkways of meeting for worship and meeting for business are likewise faithfully maintained but their connections with what early Friends called "Gospel order" are often not emphasized.
This last paragraph is not from the course materials, but from my own observations and reading. However, I think it's fair to say that similar observations form some of the context for this course. They help explain the question from our course's first-week preparative materials, "Are Quakers part of the Church?"
You won't be surprised to know that my initial answer to the question is "Yes, of course! Why not?" But maybe it's not that simple.
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post, "Are Quakers Protestant?" Among other points, I tried to emphasize the role we play theologically in that larger Church:
In conducting our loving and worthwhile dissent from the majority Christian perspective on certain issues—including the nature of leadership and discernment, the role of social status vs spiritual gifts in leadership, the disciple's attitudes to violence and wealth, and the realities of sin and perfection—we have every right to engage with our conversation partners as peers who love the same God and live in the same stream of salvation history. Protestantism, with all its defects, is a concrete, known, honorable movement in world Christianity; in comparison, what weight and presence does a disembodied, self-mythologizing Quakerism have?
Of course "dissent" can go both ways: if we are part of the Church, we don't just get to tell others where they go wrong; they may well tell us where we might be wrong, or where we (in our often high self-regard) may not understand what we're criticizing. As we slash away at anything that resembles liturgy, for example, we may not see how much of our practices begin to resemble liturgical forms of our own. And our criticism of sacraments would be far more useful if we actually knew something of the depth of sacramental theology instead of just assuming our superiority. (See here for Val Ferguson's "three misleading negatives.")
Another thought: if not all of us Friends feel as if we're part of the larger Church, does that invalidate our community's identification with the Body of Christ? If the only unit that factors with us is the radically separate individual, then the game is already lost; on our own, nobody simultaneously acknowledges all of our connections with the wider community and the planet, and we all have different priorities. Using citizenship as an analogy: some USA citizens are extremely patriotic, while others are totally skeptical about the very idea of citizenship, but for most purposes, they're all still part of the country. Happily, most of us are embodied in community most of the time, and we don't need to constantly inventory every connection we have for those connections to remain meaningful.
(The same is true for other member communions of the Church. Even those churches who place a very high value on ecumenical relationships have members who individually couldn't care less about those relationships.)
Just to get a bit more argumentative.... Considering those Quakers who do not believe they're part of the larger Church: do they even see themselves as members of the larger Quaker family?
My understanding of the Quaker movement is that the first generation of Quakers decided to go to Christ directly instead of relying on the Christian establishment of their time. In turn, those founders told their descendants (us) that we could do the same. Along the way, we've learned a lot about what it means to rely on Christ at the center of our meetings, including the ethical consequences. But at the same time, the "establishment" and the other rebels and reformers who preceded and followed us have also been listening and learning—making discoveries and mistakes along the way, just as we have. That's what we are part of, not the creation of a whole new separate religion.
While I'm taking this Woodbrooke course, I'm also reading Ben Wood's book The Living Fountain, which contains much of the background information he uses in "The Shared Quaker Story." I'm about a third of the way through his book; so far, so good—so very good.
Last week I linked to an article in The Atlantic about the social costs of no longer going to church. This week: here's a poignant article, "The Death of a Church," on the decline of the Methodist churches in the UK, again illustrating what we lose when these communities disappear from our lives.
Simon Barrow at Ekklesia provides a comprehensive annotated list of online resources to follow events in the Gaza Strip and the rest of Palestine. It ends with a list of articles and analyses as of April 3 [last updated September 7], promising to update as often as possible, and provides links to several organizations providing disaster aid.
Daniel P. Horan in the National Catholic Reporter, on distinguishing nationalist pseudo-Christianity from the real thing. "To be clear, this is a real religion we're talking about here; it's just not Christianity."
[Matias Spektor:] ...The “rules-based order” and its liberal elements “were not created by Western fiat.” Rather, they are the product of decades of contestation and diplomatic battles that ran through an era of decolonization and through the emergence and consolidation of principles of human rights in international law and the global public debate.
By offering those links above, I intended to provide access to news coverage and commentary about the memorial events for Aleksei Navalny. I can't, and don't need to, compete with these sources.
Instead, I'd like to turn to one specific aspect of these events: their Christian context.
When I wrote about Al Sharpton, I framed my comments in our common identity as Christian ministers, which allowed me, as a commentator, to dare to cross lines and rush in where angels might sensibly fear to tread. My goodbye to Navalny is in a similar context. With all the differences in our social locations, political circumstances, and all that, we are brothers in Christ.
Maggie Phillips urged us, in her article in America, not to ignore Navalny's Christian faith, as the news media usually do. (Thanks to Faith on View for the link.) A fascinating sample of that faith came in the form of a statement by Navalny in a court hearing on February 20, 2021. Inga Leonova, in Public Orthodoxy, provides the full text of that statement. You can hear the original recording here, and read Leonova's article in Russian here.
These words leaped out at me:
This teaching—“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied”—appears somehow esoteric and odd, but in fact it is the central political doctrine in modern Russia. Your Honor, what is it, this phrase or slogan, the most important political slogan in Russia? Where does power lie? Power lies in truth.
The more that the principalities and powers try to distract us with lies and confusion and doubt and cynicism, the more persistent we need to be in our hunger and thirst for righteousness; the more determined we need to be to seek out truth; the more ready we need to be to admit (without wasting time shaming ourselves and each other!) when we fall short, and continue the pursuit.
This "central political doctrine" applies in this very moment in Russia, and in the USA, too. Where does it not apply?
If we Christians apply this doctrine consistently in our political involvement, we will bless our neighbors far and wide. But, for some of us at least, our first challenge may be to continue confronting the scandalous stink that too often surrounds the word "Christian" in the public arena. Where did that stink come from? Evidence suggests that some of us hunger and thirst for something else—dominance, privilege, the approval of the alpha figures of the moment. Maybe it takes the words of a contemporary martyr to recalibrate our values.
Thank you, Aleksei. Eternal memory!
Related:
Saying goodbye (memoirs by Sarah Rainsford and Aleksei Navalny).
I've never forgotten a post I read back in 2007 on Contemplative Scholar's blog:
On Being an Animal
July 12, 2007
As a human being, I am an animal too. And so are you.
This summer I am feeling moved not to travel much. While my main plan had been to get back into my academic writing, I'm having a really hard time with that. I think I am just profoundly tired. Plus, my support system has been seriously diminished over the past year: from the ending of my music group, to the departure of two people in my life who have been really important mentors and guides.
After my busy year and these important losses, I'm now mostly focused on trying to reestablish a basic discipline of taking good care of myself. No one else can do that for me anyway. More and more I realize that this is a deep and fundamental animal responsibility we each have. It is exactly for ourselves, but not selfish. We are not just our own private property. We matter to others in the world. And so if we don't take good care of ourselves, we can bring considerable grief into others' lives, because they can do little to restore health and well-being if we are not ourselves cooperating.
I have come to realize this in myself, but I also see it from another perspective in my relationships with others. Those who are good at taking care of themselves are happy and healthy and their lives are in balance, which means that they have lots of energy to attend to others as well.
As philosopher Immanuel Kant points out, we have a basic duty to be happy, so that we are not so distracted by our unhappiness that we fail to attend to our other moral duties!
The key marker for my own self care is exercise. Happily, I am running again. This is a very good sign. This year, I will place this as one of my highest priorities. No matter how busy my life gets, I will try to regard this as essential as eating and sleeping and going to Meeting! (Hold me too this, my faithful readers!)
So I've made the radical decision not to worry about how "productive" my summer is. I'm going to live my days as aimlessly as I need to. I'll attend to anything urgent that crosses my desk. But other than that, I'll just do what I feel moved to do from moment to moment. I haven't had a real vacation as such in a long time. I hereby declare the rest of this summer to be the first really extended vacation I have ever in my whole life let myself have.
I feel open and in a data-gathering mode. What gives me life? I want to experience the world in a new way. I want to let the world fill me with healing and renewing energy. I want to pay full attention to everyone I see, but refrain from agreeing to anything that establishes a controlling dynamic in our relationships. I refuse to expect anyone to do anything for me in particular; and I refuse to agree to anything that means that others expect something of me.
(I must emphasize that this is purely temporary. When the academic year begins again, I will have no choice but to enter back into that complex network of relationships dominated by controlling dynamics going in both directions.)
But for now, I just want to be a wild animal, quiet and shy, alert and tuned mostly into the pure present moment. I want to eat and sleep and run in the woods. I want to watch beautiful sunsets and let them work their magic on my soul.
The summer, after all, is beautiful. The sun. The breezes. The freedom to walk straight outside without the fanfare of coats and hats and scarves and gloves and complicated shoes slipping on icy walks. This is the time store up health and hope.
The other things I care about will come to fruition in their own good time. Let me finally honor the wisdom of the structure of the academic year. Let me finally trust in the natural rhythms of life and nature.
At some point I posted a link to this essay on my own blog, but soon after that, Contemplative Scholar had decided to close public access. The Contemplative Scholar blog remains closed to this day, although the Scholar gave me permission to republish this post here.
(The author said that it's also possible that the blog will be reopened in the future. I'll be sure to let you know if that happens.)
Maine Botanical Gardens.
Water vole, Klamath Falls, Oregon.
Panther Pond, Maine.
Maybe you've already guessed, at least in general, why I've found solace in this post at this particular moment, even though my own life cycle isn't academic anymore. For me, the winter serves as something of an equivalent to Contemplative's summer. And yet the coming winter season in the Northern Hemisphere promises even more cruelties among vulnerable people than we witness today. How can we justify ever averting our eyes?
On one of our online Quaker meetings for worship, with our attention focused on Ukraine and the Holy Land, one of our attenders drew our attention to this "Invitation to Sit Together for Peace," with its guided meditation in the Buddhist tradition taught by the late Thich Nhat Hanh. I found points of contact on a communal level with "On Being an Animal."
(Dear anxious members of my Christian family, I'm very willing to discuss what might make you anxious about this meditation, but not here.)
Another impulse to reprint "On Being an Animal" came from a letter I just got from a friend of mine in the UK. She wrote, "... I am due one of my biannual deplugs ... so from Nov 25th to Dec 25th that's it—no news or views on the present day (...history will be permissible)."
There is something in me that resists the idea of unplugging, as if I am somehow letting humanity down if I give up, for a time, my obsessive attention to the deeds and misdeeds of the Powers That Be. How much worse off everyone would be if I withheld my awesome influence for good!
If you sometimes feel the same way, but know down in your bones you really do need a time of retirement, consider some of these thoughts:
Consider that you, too, are an animal. Contemplative Scholar does not advocate inattentiveness, but a different, more creaturely kind of attentiveness. There is no break from reality, only a break from a set of stylized behaviors that we humans esteem much too highly, given that they are all elaborate variations on the same behaviors that all mammals display—data-gathering, marking territory, distinguishing friend from threat. We are wise to be aware of the ways human myths and conceits impact us and our global neighbors, but let's dedicate some time to resting quietly with our Creator, aware of the present moment, before returning to those demanding arenas.
Back in 1990, I made a tour of about thirty communities in southern India that, at the time, were active or potential partners with Right Sharing of World Resources. My first visit was to a non-governmental organization in Chennai. One of the most helpful and liberating pieces of advice that the director gave me was this: "Never believe (or allow people to convince you) that you are indispensable. The communities were there before you ever showed up and will be there after you leave."
The kind of retirement I see in "On Being an Animal" is very different from simply quitting in disgust or becoming cynical. However, if you feel those temptations to quit altogether, a period of retirement from the deluge of difficult news may be just what's needed. Everything we have to offer is rooted, not in our own undoubted competence and cleverness, nor in our righteous anger (though it's sometimes exactly right!), but in the everlasting and universal love of God.
But the Lord did stay my desires upon himself from whom my help came, and my care was cast upon him alone. Therefore, all wait patiently upon the Lord, whatsoever condition you be in wait in the grace and truth that comes by Jesus; for if ye so do, there is a promise to you, and the Lord God will fulfil it in you. And blessed are all they indeed that do hunger and thirst after righteousness; they shall be satisfied with it. I have found it so, praised be the Lord who filleth with it, and satisfies the desires of the hungry soul. O let the house of the spiritual Israel to say, 'His mercy endureth for ever.' It is the great love of God to make a wilderness of that which is pleasant to the outward eye and fleshly mind; and to make a fruitful field of a barren wilderness.
— George Fox (Journal, Nickalls ed., pages 12-13), 1647.
A letter from Ramallah Friends School students to the U.S. Congress, posted by the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Related note: the three young Palestinian men shot in Vermont last Saturday, Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ahmed, were all graduates of the Ramallah Friends School.
An Orthodox priest writes to Christians in Russia who are not in unity with Orthodox officialdom on the war in Ukraine. (English. Russian.)
I first began making regular visits to Elektrostal, Russia, in 1994. I had no idea at the time that eventually I'd make a home there for ten years, and teach in a local college. My first goal had simply been to get to know the local Friends meeting, and, through them, the local students, doctors, and educators who had initially reached out to Friends in the USA.
Elektrostal is a relatively new city, built around heavy industry. Many of the people I met were from distant parts of the former Soviet Union, including Kazakhstan, the Russian republic of Dagestan, and several parts of Siberia. However, the greatest number of family connections were in Ukraine. Among the families I grew close to, one of them spent every summer at grandma's home in rural Ukraine.
Odesa Main Station, Pushkin Square (October 2009)
In October 2009, the board of Friends House Moscow held its annual meeting in Odesa, and Judy and I seized the opportunity to make our first visit to Ukraine. Anyone who knows Odesa will not be surprised to hear that we fell in love with the city. (Some pictures and comments in this post.)
Our next visit to Ukraine, in 2011, was totally unplanned, a quick visit to Kyiv to iron out a work visa problem. (See Judy's post about this trip.) Thanks to this unexpected opportunity to explore Kyiv, we made our first of two visits to the Ascension (Florovsky) Convent and the grave of St. Helen, which was renowned for its healing powers.
Later that same year, we returned to Kyiv and the convent after a Quaker retreat in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, on the theme "The Gathered Meeting." (I wrote about the retreat here.) We enjoyed our long walks around the city of Kremenchuk during free time.
Our own Friends meeting was divided on the situation in Ukraine, but after one particularly lively discussion, we were able to agree to watch and pray through the week, forming a spiritual observatory for the events unfolding in Ukraine, with the hopes of writing a statement at the next meeting for worship. The result was this message to the world family of Friends. A week later we had another vigorous discussion on Ukraine and added a few more words to our message.
We continued to follow the situation during the occupation of Crimea, the Minsk processes, and the ongoing fighting in Donbass. With the help of Friends World Committee for Consultation, Europe and Middle East Section, we urged Friends worldwide to support Quaker fact-finding visits to Ukraine; one visitor was our meeting's own Misha Roshchin, and the other was Roland Rand of Tallinn Friends. I first wrote about this initiative here, and in January 2015 posted a follow-up report.
• 2022-23
In January 2022, as Russia was demanding security guarantees, and world powers were sending their diplomats here and there, I felt we were witnessing an "artificial crisis" that was strikingly similar to Adolf Hitler's confrontation with Poland at the end of August 1939.
Novaya gazeta, Friday, February 25, 2022: RUSSIA. BOMBS. UKRAINE.
Then, on February 24, as I listened online to explosions and air raid sirens, I tried to come up with some first principles to help me cope with my sorrow and anger.
For me, maybe for most of us, the hardest thing to witness is the suffering of Ukrainian people under fire—the deaths, bereavements, separations; the loss of homes, loss of light, heating, and water; the interruptions of careers and educations. But for those millions of us who also cannot turn our backs on Russia—I've spent my whole adult life studying the country's language, culture, and politics, and have years of good memories and hundreds of former students among my social-network contacts—there's another level of pain as well. (And I can barely imagine what those who have had to leave their Russian homeland are feeling!) It's as if the country we know is being held hostage, politically and spiritually, and it's no comfort that a huge part of its population seems to have accepted this state of affairs. This is a country that broke the power of the tsars, and then of the Communist Party; why such passivity now? (I know, I know: it's easy for me to ask!)
Out of these sorts of questions, I wrote about the "beautiful Russia of the future." Later, in "beautiful Russia of the future, part two" I quoted Dmitri Bykov: "It is clear that Russia crossed many red lines. It cannot live any longer as it did in the past. The world will no longer see [in Russia] a place of spirituality, a place of great culture, a place representing victory over fascism."
I'm sure that most of my posts on this war over the past year are utterly forgettable, however therapeutic their writing was for me personally. Although I've tangentially touched on the increasingly extremist descriptions of Ukraine in the Russian media (see this article from my "Ceasefire shorts" list of links), I have written almost nothing about the uses to which religion, and specifically Satan, is being put as a tool to attempt to heat up popular enthusiasm in Russia for the war. (See this discussion on YouTube about whether Zelens'kyy is the Antichrist or just one of his demons.) The manipulative enmeshment of religion into politics is, of course, a phenomenon we also constantly need to confront in the USA.
In the meantime, please join me in watching and praying, and let me know what you've learned over this past year that keeps you centered in this storm. Thanks for your company!
The two most visited posts this past year, related to Ukraine, have been the "first principles" post on the day of the invasion ("RUSSIA. BOMBS. UKRAINE.") and "the dilemmas of pacifism."
What happens to Ukrainian children transported to Russia, according to the Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab. (PDF.)
Eschatological rhetoric, which is gaining momentum and has become part of state propaganda, is designed to justify more clearly Russia’s mission in its present and future. Russia has one path and task: to crush the forces of Satan that Ukraine serves. And this view of the current conflict is not a marginal phenomenon but in fact, is the official position of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was expressed at the last World Russian People’s Council, where in the presence of Patriarch Kirill the radical professor Alexander Dugin spoke, stating: “This is the war of heaven against hell… His Holiness in his special report gently hinted at the figure who stands on the other side, which defines, inspires, and organizes our enemies. This figure is very close. We do not know the times; no one does. But we can understand them by the signs, see how close they are… That’s why more and more often, we talk about Armageddon, the end of times, and the apocalypse. We are taking part in the last, maybe the penultimate, no one knows, but a very important battle.”
OK, this has been a somber blog post, and rightly so. Still, it's good to see how much fun these musicians are having. Rick Holmstrom and his band with Nathan James.
