A couple of weeks ago I sketched our travels from London, England, to Hampstead, New Hampshire, via Barcelona. As I prepared to publish that post, we were hearing reports of winter conditions predicted for the path of our upcoming train trip home via Boston and Chicago.
As it turned out, we traveled in great comfort (despite being in coach seats the whole three days), but winter weather did cause several delays, particularly west of Chicago. By Malta, Montana, outside temperatures were down to -6 F.
At one time, technical problems and "congestion" got us five hours behind schedule, but we pulled into Portland, Oregon, only four hours late.
I brought an 800-page book with me, and nearly finished it on the train. It was Anne Rivers Siddons's Peachtree Road, a fictionalized social history of 20th-century Atlanta, Georgia, mostly from the point of view of its midcentury elite families. It's a sweeping cultural epic combined with close-up accounts of family dysfunctions and episodes of social failure worthy of Tolstoy. In any case,the book had plenty to keep me occupied.
One moment in Peachtree Road was particularly poignant for me. The author described the impact of President Kennedy's assassination on the idealists in Atlanta's emerging leadership of the early 1960's. I remember the assassination vividly, but at age ten, I had not had any sense of the "Camelot" aura around the Kennedys' White House.
Now, reading the novel, I remembered an incident in my Russian history class at Carleton University. The professor was Carter Elwood, a central figure in Slavic studies in Canada and the world, and an inspiring instructor in the classroom. (And Carleton had no lack of inspiring instructors in Soviet studies—Vladimir Grebenshchikov, Paul Varnai, Halina Stepanovna van de Lagemaat—see last item here, Edward Lee, and others.)
On November 22, 1973, the tenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Elwood set aside his normal themes. He talked to us about that brief period of new ideals, energy, and elegance, that Kennedy's presidency seemed to bring, and that were ended so cruelly by Oswald's bullets. With tears in his eyes, he contrasted the Kennedys' Camelot with the state of affairs in 1973, Nixon having just gone on television the previous week to tell us he was not a crook.
We have made this particular three-day railroad trip several times before, but it's not the longest train trip we've taken. That happened in 2011, when we spent four days on the train from Moscow, Russia, to Sukhbaatar, Mongolia. Some pictures from that trip are here, and I described the book I read on that trip, Crazy for God, in the following week's post.
One final note on travel. This year I marked the fiftieth anniversaries of two trips that helped shape my life. The first one was to Mississippi, and the second, to Moscow and Leningrad. More on those trips at From Mississippi to Moscow.
The Friends Incubator for Public Ministry presents an online conversation with Windy Cooler and historian Tom Hamm on bold Quaker ministers. It's this Saturday at 11 a.m. Pacific time. Register through the link on this page.
Two Washington Post items on religion in the USA: "A hidden trend" (new fascination with faith among young people); and Senator Warnock's warning to all of us, particularly Democrats, of the cost of ignoring faith. (Video of Warnock's presentation is available here.)
Is there a moment of truth coming for the USA's NASA and its moon-landing project? Ars Technica's Eric Berger describes a recent congressional hearing in which one credible scientist made his doubts very clear.
I cannot, cannot press "publish" on this post without noting the vulgar inhumanity of Trump on Somalia and Somalis. It is a festering scandal that such a man occupies the White House. Words fail me, so I'll link to The Guardian's Moira Donegan.
In keeping with the travel theme, I'm closing this week's post with a classical pianist from London, Nataly Ganina. She began her musical education at age 5 in Riga, Latvia. We first heard her at a lunchtime concert at St. Olave's Hart Street, London, three years ago, and then again at the same place last month. I couldn't find a video clip from that location, but here she is at Holy Trinity South Woodford last October, playing one of my favorite impromptus from Schubert, as she did again a couple of weeks later at St. Olave.
(I've selected the segment that starts with Schubert's fourth impromptu from Op. 90, but if you have the time, listen to the whole concert.)
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.
"Is it true that white American men are being oppressed?"
I'm pretty sure that the Russian friend who asked me this question had no ideological agenda; it seems more likely that, out of the chaotic mix of slogans churning through social networks and mass media in this historical moment, that assertion caught his attention.
It reminded me of the Soviet-era whataboutism that I mentioned in this post following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Some of the emphases may have shifted, but today there's still a certain amount of smugness and even glee in Russian media coverage of American political and racial clashes. (To be honest, we sometimes see the same phenomenon in the opposite direction.)
To risk another generalization about Russians, many of my friends claim that, in contrast with Americans, they are free of political inhibitions or sentimentality, are ruled by common sense alone, and are ready to name things by their true names. (Hence the constant mocking of "political correctness.") So, for example, one of my Russian friends told me that poor people are responsible for their own poverty because they "breed like bunnies, don't they?" Proud of their capacity for brutal honesty, they may not pay attention to the reality that all political and social interpretations, yours and mine alike, rest on a complex fabric of mostly unexamined assumptions.
The raw truth behind my friend's question about American white males may be this: for some of us at least, our vast range of unquestioned freedoms has shrunk.
The #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements may have been the beginning of the end of the Important Man variety of impunity. Predators still exist, of course, but at least the tacit license they had from tradition and conventional wisdom is in the process of being revoked. Question: is the greater expectation of common decency really a form of oppression, or simply the imposition of boundaries that others already have to follow, or choose to follow as part of their membership in community?
White men may now be less able to make unilateral summary declarations of our own virtue. Before, when the Important Man declared "I'm color-blind," that was supposed to be the end of the discussion. Now we are learning to have the important conversations about how embedded racism distorts even our own choices and self-understanding, and that, after all, racism is as racism does. We are learning that our own personal virtue, and our consequent defensiveness, are usually not the central issue. Question: Is this greater accountability for our participation in objectively racist structures a form of oppression? Can we really find genuine freedom in remaining oblivious?
It can actually be hard work to distinguish the white male default worldview from all the other ways of examining and interpreting the world around us -- and history, for that matter. It might make us long for the good old days when this supposedly extra effort wasn't required.
Nearly 30 years ago, the Economist published an article that described some of the stresses around the loss of this noxious white innocence:
Etho-consciousness has this to be said for it: not before time, it has confronted the idea that there is only one, white, experience of America. It has fed through into a kind of general sensitivity (so that people do not say the so-called “n-word”, and so that school textbooks now give as much weight to black experiences of history as to white). But it has also underlined a strong disruptive tendency in America: the elevation of group and race rights over the interests of either the individual or the whole. What is presumed to be equality has turned into balkanisation, one camp against another....
I'm not sure the Economist article describes the causes correctly, but this so-called balkanization is real, and may be a factor behind the dramas of alleged performative victimhood and performative repentance that sometimes frustrate our searches for genuine reconciliation and unity. We don't know how to talk about the possibility that claiming one's rightful equality and equity may not automatically make someone an angel, nor prevent them from exploiting the oppressor's shame. On the other hand, benefitting from generations of privilege has certainly not made white American males into angels!
Question: does the hard work required of us -- that we learn to distinguish habitual white-male-centeredness from alternate views and from a genuinely shared perspective -- constitute a form of oppression? Or to put it another way, isn't this work worthwhile? Aren't we just now learning a form of curiosity that should have always been part of the mutual accountability of the human family?
(Note: for better or for worse, the PDF version of the Economist article linked above was used for years by one of my colleagues in her English classes at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal. It has some typos, probably from the scanning process.)
I just finished reading Francis Spufford's amazing novel Light Perpetual. If you don't have it yet, read Laura Miller's review and be tempted.
Speaking of worthwhile books, Jesus and John Wayne became a surprise bestseller.
Of course, it not only Ben & Jerry’s who think the occupation is “inconsistent with our values”. It’s inconsistent with most people’s values. It’s certainly inconsistent with Judaism. Or at least it used to be. But somewhere along the line, Jewish nationalism drowned out what had become inconvenient themes previously dominating Jewish thought and Jewish identity.
Hound Dog Taylor, Little Walter, Koko Taylor on German television, 1967.
At Camas Friends Church last Sunday, it was my turn to say a few words at the opening of our meeting for worship. On that first Sunday of Advent, I referred to a quotation I've used three or four times before on this blog -- perhaps the closest you'll get to a George Fox quotation on Christmas:
We must not have Christ Jesus, the Lord of Life, put any more in the stable amongst the horses and asses, but he must now have the best chamber, the heart, and the rude, debauched spirit must be turned out.
Turning out the rude, debauched spirit is not the work of a moment. Maybe that is the reason we need a whole period of fasting and contemplation -- in other words, Advent -- to consider how we will make room to receive the Baby.
Is it fair to ask, after nearly two millennia of preparation, why we still need to turn out that rude spirit? Part of the reason might be that spiritual bondage is embedded and wily (think of addiction as an example), and combines with our individual appetites and blind spots in unique combination. There is no social evil that doesn't confront me with a personal challenge: do I challenge or acquiesce, and at what cost?
To take the spotlight safely off myself for a moment, I've been thinking about William Penn recently. This evening I was reading a biography of Penn published in 1851. It included a detailed, dramatic account of the Penn-Mead trial, widely credited with establishing the independence of trial juries. Author William Dixon observes,
Here we again observe William Penn enlarging the contracted sphere of his sect. The ordinary Quaker, in the simplicity of his heart, would have defied the unjust law, and suffered like a martyr -- satisfied with an appeal to conscience. Penn joined a larger amount of that worldly wisdom, which, like the rest, he fancied he despised, to his more ardent zeal. He knew his country, and his country's history. His legal studies at Lincoln's Inn had not been thrown into a barren soil. The circle of his mind was large, and he never sunk the Englishman in the sectarian. He was anxious about civil as well as religious liberty. Wisely therefore he took his stand on the old charters, and made his appeal to the public in their own cause. [Source, page 99.]
Just as he did in his earlier imprisonment, where he challenged the absurdity of imprisoning people for their theology, he made a direct connection between Quakers' freedom to preach in Grace-church Street and the rights of British citizens to a fair trial. He was not satisfied simply to be a good Quaker, but required of himself to be a full-fledged citizen as well, and he required the Court to respect his stand. No doubt, for him it was not a matter of "as well," because he made the connection.
With the advantage of three centuries, we wish he had made another connection. During the Penn-Mead trial, as the jury was led away to yet another night in jail for having rendered an unsatisfactory verdict, Penn looked at them and said, "You are Englishmen, mind your privileges.
Give not away your rights." His courageous witness to those rights went well beyond that era's common understanding; a short time later he was back in trouble for defending the rights of Roman Catholics, despite his opposition to many of their doctrines. But when it came to his colonial estate in Pennsylvania, and in the laws of that new colony, those rights extended only to Englishmen. William McNeill writes,
Penn’s Quaker professions of equality and fair play counted for little or nothing once confronted with a rapidly growing province with an acute shortage of labour to work the lands and carry out the multitude of tasks demanded by rural and urban Quaker society. Wage labour at this time was difficult to obtain in a Pennsylvania where land was cheap and fertile and where credit was readily available. Quaker pragmatism therefore, demanded the labour of slaves.
McNeill describes the roles of slaves in Penn's own estate. Penn's 1701 last will and testament would have freed them at his death, but no such clause appeared in the next two versions.
I don't consider myself wiser or more courageous than William Penn. What connections do I still need to make in order to welcome the infant Jesus into a prepared heart? Is there a clue in the reference to simplicity that follows? Happy Advent!
A good question:
Dialogue with John Robinson, Lieutenant of the Tower, as the authorities were trying to trick William Penn into a situation where he could be required to take the oath of allegiance, against his principles. (Source, pp. 114-116.)
It has been forty years since we heard about these four Roman Catholic churchwomen from the USA who were killed in El Salvador: Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan. Margaret Swedish retells their story and makes the connection with today.
I learned from these women about the courage of stepping into reality and allowing it to touch you, to change you or, as Maura put it, to “strip you and show you God.” I told their stories over and over again for 23 years as coordinator and director of the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico in Washington, D.C. Over those years, I came to know many of their friends and family members. The four women became so much a part of my life that to this day I cannot believe I never met them in person.
I fervently wish that a younger generation will come to know their story because it expresses a historical thread that runs through our history to this day. It runs to our southern border where hundreds of Central Americans are languishing in misery because we refuse to open our border to them and in the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in recent years.
Clive Thompson on monetizing space -- the economics, ethics, and risks.
The unexpected costs of Bezos-style space exploitation are, as yet, a little distant—decades, at least. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from observing the human and environmental wreckage of the industrial era, it’s that history is like space travel: The path you set at the beginning is critical. Changing course later on is much harder. So it behooves us to plan now. Are there ways to avoid the worst possible outcomes in space? How is commercial life in space going to unfold?
An open letter to the Christians of Belarus: English. Russian.
At the Royal Society in London, a Quaker's portrait is unveiled: Jocelyn Bell-Burnell.
Giving Tuesday has passed, but there's still time to contribute to Christian Peacemaker Teams through my online Giving Tuesday campaign.
The Internet Archive makes room for classic flash animations, whose files must be played with software that is no longer supported. (However, the Archive doesn't seem to have my own favorite series, Masyanya.)
Vanya B. Goode! Denis Mazhukov and Ksenia Fedulova.
I can't count the times I've heard, read, and appreciated the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke's Gospel, in which the conventionally religious people pass by the injured robbery victim, and the despised foreigner proves to be the merciful neighbor and comes to the rescue. Rarely, if ever, have I taken into full account the provocation for the story: the lawyer's question, "And who is my neighbor?"
More precisely, I've become interested in the motivation for the lawyer's question. Having won Jesus' approval for his reading of the requirements for eternal life ("Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind" and "Love your neighbor as yourself”), he wants more:
"But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, 'And who is my neighbor?'" (My italics.)
In "justifying" himself, what was the lawyer trying to accomplish? Several commentators point to other examples of Luke spotlighting people who are more concerned about their own reputations than the essence of faith (Luke 16:14-15, 18:9-14, for example). Sharon Ringe's commentary on Luke (in the Westminster Bible Companion series) suggests that the lawyer, aside from showing off, was trying to get Jesus to put manageable boundaries on the concept of neighbor, perhaps to fit the lawyer's own comfort level.
Ringe ends her fascinating examination of this parable with these words:
No one can simply have a neighbor, one must also be a neighbor. Neighboring is a two-way street. The parable changes in a fundamental way how the question about neighbors is usually framed. The Gospel records no one's response to this story -- neither the lawyer's nor the onlookers'. The story simply stands as another challenge to the transformation of daily life and business as usual, which lies at the heart of the practice of discipleship.
I'm not surprised that the lawyer's and onlookers' responses are not recorded. What counts is Jesus' challenge to the lawyer's motivation -- his seeking to be seen as an expert on the law, and his desire to keep mercy in reasonable bounds. The response to Jesus' challenge that counts is ours.
Meme on Facebook.
The death of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter has put racism in the USA on trial in dramatic new ways, particularly in the polarizing context of this political season. As a sort of reaction, I've seen many variations on a theme that goes something like this: "I don't see race; I just see people." (Sometimes the tagline of this approach is "All Lives Matter," frequently accompanied by conspiracy theories about the Black Lives Matter movement.) My problem with this approach is that it reminds me of the lawyer who wanted to justify himself. First: he wants to show his own command of the law, and, to be fair, in doing so he is literally correct -- we are to love God and love our neighbor. In Black Lives context, we are to put an end to all false and unjust distinctions based on race. I can imagine Jesus saying, "Good! Do this and you will live."
In the Good Samaritan story, the lawyer still wanted to justify himself. In asking for a definition of "neighbor," the lawyer sought to prioritize his own comfort. Here we see a crucial lesson for our own dialogues on race: our personal story and our personal comfort are not the priority! You and I might personally not "see race," if that were possible in a nation that deliberately baked racism into every aspect of social and economic life for centuries. However, our smug certainty does not change life for anyone whose actual skin color makes life actually risky, who must "see race" to avoid those risks. And those who bear testimony to the risks of racism are our neighbors.
The man who was rescued by the Good Samaritan had been traveling on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. In commenting on this passage, Martin Luther King proposed a logical extension of the Samaritan's mercy:
On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [Source.]
This is what being a neighbor means now. For white followers of Jesus, it means not being obsessed with the need to prove that "we don't see race" and are obviously superior to those deplorables who do. It means learning to discern, with God's merciful help, what racism has done to all of us, and to engage in a deliberate collaboration with all the mystics and activists of all races, liberals, progressives, and conservatives alike, to pull down the strongholds of racism. Then we will know that All Lives Matter.
I have a hard time imagining not seeing race, but maybe that's just me. I see no particular value or demerit in my white skin color, but I do have pride in my Norwegian heritage (especially as it has been shedding its near-homogeneity in the last half-century). I want to learn about and enjoy the pride that people from other cultures have, whether or not those cultures are linked with skin colors different from mine. When I was in high school, the expression "Black is Beautiful" gained currency; am I to deny this? The Black church was my first consistent exposure to Christianity; am I to betray that legacy?
At the time I'm posting this, Aleksei Navalny, Russia's best-known opposition leader, is fighting for his life. This link is likely to be outdated in a matter of hours. More from Meduza. I've also been following coverage on this Russian site, Dozhd TV, which passes on a report from the head of Navalny's anti-corruption organization that Navalny's body contains a substance that is hazardous to those around him.
Kristin Du Mez: Jerry Falwell, Jr., and the legacy of evangelical machismo. (That's my term, not hers.)
Aside from controversies over "All Lives Matter" and the supposed socialist hell being prepared by Democrats, the evangelical support for Donald Trump is often driven by the anti-abortion movement. Supposedly, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are "hell-bent" to pull out all stops on abortion. I tried to encourage cooler rhetoric in this post from a year ago last spring. Randall Balmer has this interesting resource (PDF) to put this relatively recent evangelical concern into historical perspective.
Why do missionaries leave the field? In particular, what are the cultural factors? Andrea Sears presents data from 714 survey respondents.
Friday PS: I just saw this Washington Post article about interracial conversations among evangelical leaders and the dramatic effect of Trump's presidency. This quotation from Emmanuel Acho leapt out at me, just hours after I'd published this week's post:
"Some Christians say, 'It’s not about race, it’s about grace. It’s not about skin, it’s about sin,'" Acho said in an interview. "It’s hard for Black people to attend predominantly White churches, specifically when White pastors are silent on the issues that matter to Black people."
A couple of Sundays ago, Matt Boswell's sermon at Camas Friends Church looked at the story of the wheat and weeds in Matthew's gospel, chapter 13 (New Revised Standard Version):
24 [Jesus] put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; 25 but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. 27 And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ 28 He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29 But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. 30 Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
The audio recording of Matt's sermon is only about eighteen minutes, so I'd love it if you went to the Camas Friends Web site and listened to it before (or instead of!) reading my reflections. My thoughts here are not direct comments on his sermon, but they arose as I responded to the queries he gave us at the end:
What arises for me as I chew on this parable?
What important truth is this parable helping me see?
George Fox and some other early Friends talked about separating the wheat from the weeds as one of their metaphors for evangelism. In their book The Quakers, Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost described the process:
Early Quaker prophetic messages of judgment and confrontation were often given in a marketplace or during a puritan church service. For longer presentations, crowds of noisy but interested hearers were gathered on a moor or daily in a rented hall in an "appointed" or "threshing" meeting. Hearers who were "convinced" by these forms of mission were taken into smaller gatherings in private homes, where they shared their struggles of self-judgment under the Light with other seekers in daily or weekly "gathered meetings" with prayer and messages of guidance as well as silence and tears....
In an epistle from 1652, here's how George Fox distinguished threshing meetings from gatherings of the "convinced": (from Canby Jones, ed., The Power of the Lord Is Over All: The Pastoral Letters of George Fox, number 14)
All Friends, that are grown up in the life and power of the Truth, see that when you appoint your meetings in any open place, in the fields, on the moors, or on the mountains, that none appoint meetings in your own wills. That lets in the wills of the world upon the life of Friends and so you come to suffer by the world. But at such meetings let the wisdom of God guide you, that some may be there to preserve the Truth from suffering by the world, that all burdens may be kept off and taken away. So you will grow pure and strong.
When there are any meetings in unbroken places, you that go to minister to the world, take not the whole Meeting of Friends with you thither, to suffer with and by the world's spirit. But let Friends keep together and wait in their own meeting place. So will the Life ... be preserved and grow. Let three, four or six that are grown up and are strong in the Truth go to such unbroken places and thresh the heathenish nature.
A sample of his own "threshing" message from that same year: (from his Journal, Nickalls edition)
... There was a great fair at Sedburgh for hiring servants and many young people came to be hired. I went to the fair and declared through the fair day the day of the Lord, and after I had done I went into the steeplehouse yard and got up by a tree, and most of the people of the fair came to me, and abundance of priests and professors [those who profess faith in Christ]. There I declared the everlasting Truth of the Lord and the word of life for several hours, and that the Lord Christ Jesus was come to teach his people himself and bring them off all the world's ways and teachers to Christ, their way to God; and I laid open all their teachers and set up the true teacher, Christ Jesus; and how they were judged by the prophets, Christ, and the apostles; and to bring them off the temples made with hands, that they themselves might know they were the temples of God.
The separation of wheat and weeds in Matthew 13 is not a perfect metaphor for this "threshing" process of Quaker evangelism. For one thing, as Matt said in his sermon,
... We have to be careful about categorizing folks. I think the weed metaphor is a good one, especially if we can be less individualistic about it, more nuanced, more willing to admit that life is messy, that weeds are often subtle, that it's not that I'm a tare and you are wheat, but that in each of us are wheat and tares. And in each system, each community, are wheat and tares.
Along with tales of being beaten and imprisoned, Fox has countless examples of priests, officials, and whole audiences who start out hostile (weeds?) and end up receptive to his message. This threshing work does not not necessarily consist of separating people from each other, but challenging and inviting each person, household, or community into an experience of their own reflection and discernment. For this work, Fox insists that they don't need to be in a special place, or depend on a special person, because Christ has come to teach his people himself.
Eventually, there is a harvest, of course, as Fox and his successors (perhaps you and I) gather the "tender," receptive people together for "prayer and messages of guidance" and mutual encouragement. Quaker ecclesiology in its essence is no fancier than this: people who gather around Jesus, learning how to live with him at the center (including the ethics of that life) and helping each other learn. But there is no tying up the "weeds" to be burned, because nobody is ever judged to be permanently outside. The promise of grace is for everyone.
Are we Quakers still providing access to this experience of being gathered, encouraged, and invited to trust our inward Teacher? How do we offer this access in our own times, 370 years after the first threshing meetings?
THRESHING SESSION. Originally used to refer to general meetings for evangelizing. Today, threshing sessions are a form of business meeting where only one issue is considered, and, usually, recommendations are brought to the regular business meeting for decision.
Britain Yearly Meeting has published this guide to threshing meetings 2.0.
Alfons López Tena: Authoritarians, populists, nations in decline -- common characteristics, and the case study of Catalonia. Long but fascinating. Is the case study fair?
The journalists who have quit the Russian newspaper Vedomosti have begun a new online publication, VTimes (Rus), dedicated to honest, independent, and responsible journalism.
In place of my normal blues dessert, here's a healthy dose of inspiration: Barack Obama's eulogy at John Lewis's funeral service at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Quick quiz: which four countries of the world have the highest numbers of Quakers?
Answer: Kenya is in number one position, followed by the USA and Burundi. In fourth place by total number, and in third place by proportion of total population, is Bolivia. How did Quakers attain such prominence in a relatively small South American country?
Nancy's book is just one product of a joint INELA-Northwest Yearly Meeting commission on INELA and mission history. In addition to compiling and preserving written records, the commission conducted numerous interviews with descendants of the earliest generations of Quakers in the country. The commission's Facebook page includes videos with a sampling of their work.
A Long Walk, a Gradual Ascent includes an early chapter by Nancy's husband Hal Thomas on the history, worldview, social structures, political context, economic life, and language of the Aymara people who are the great majority of Bolivian Quakers. As he notes, "The Aymara-speaking people of the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes have inhabited the mountain pastures, high plains, and the breakaway valleys of what is today Bolivia and southern Peru as a significant social and cultural presence for more than nine hundred years." Their experience over the last four and a half centuries includes cycles of colonialist oppression and Aymara resistance, making 20th-century experiments in Bolivian democracy, and the honoring of indigenous identity that is part of former president Evo Morales's mixed legacy, an important part of the history.
Conflict is a recurring theme in Aymara culture and history, leading Nancy to write, "It may be an irony that this should be the setting for the development of a 'peace church' such as the Quakers; or it may be a sign of grace."
I call this a grand epic and a modest epic. Its grand scale is in part geographic -- starting from just one village church on the shore of legendary Lake Titicaca and one urban church in La Paz. A hundred years later it counts around two hundred congregations in the INELA denomination alone, with hundreds more in the other Quaker yearly meetings in Bolivia. Along the way, a sister denomination took hold and flourished in Peru, and outreach began in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. INELA, as an independent denomination, has formed strong relationships with the rest of the world Quaker family while maintaining its close fellowship with Northwest Yearly Meeting.
William Abel, 1916 (from book)
At the beginning of this epic, it's a story on an intimate scale. One young man, a son of the Kumeyaay tribe in San Pasqual, California, William Abel, became one of the very first students of the Training School for Christian Workers in Whittier, a mostly-Quaker initiative which later became Azusa Pacific University. The narrative of Abel's life, including his education at this school, interrupted halfway by eleven years of missionary service in the Philippines, is truly gripping, thanks in part to new details about his youth that emerged from the Thomases' research.
When he finished the Training School, Abel decided to serve God in Bolivia. This was a fateful decision. In Bolivia, he met and began joint ministry with three Quaker women. One of them, Florence Smith, had taught at the Training School in California. The other two, Mattie Blount and Emma Morrow, were from Westfield, Indiana (the originating point of the other major stream of Bolivian Quaker history, now associated with Central Yearly Meeting).
During these months in La Paz, Abel met a young Christian, Juan Ayllón, who (as events unfolded) is now considered, along with Abel, the co-founder of the Quaker movement that became INELA. After this important convergence of personalities, and after only eight months in La Paz, William Abel contracted smallpox. Morrow and Ayllón cared for Abel in his final days; when Abel died, Ayllón arranged for his funeral and burial in La Paz. The commitments made by everyone involved during these eventful days and months, including the international and inter-Quaker relationships represented by these diverse personalities and the prayers of their communities, laid the foundation of the Quaker movement in Bolivia. Nancy's book leads us through these stories with sensitivity but also an earthy realism. This is history, not hagiography.
Meanwhile, a seemingly separate story was unfolding on the shore of Lake Titicaca. A Christian convert comes home from the big city and holds small meetings in his village of Amacari, forming a completely independent little Christian movement that reminds me of the Seekers of English Quaker history.
As you've no doubt anticipated, Juan Ayllón eventually makes contact with Amacari village. Those early developments, along with the shift of sponsorship for Ayllón and the young Quaker movement from Central American Friends Church (Guatemala) to Oregon Friends (now Northwest Yearly Meeting), the founding of Bolivian Friends schools, the formulation of the "indigenous principle" to guide relationships between the Oregon missionaries and Bolivian Friends, all the way to the independent yearly meetings in Bolivia and Peru that we have today -- are all part of Nancy's grand epic.
It's also a modest epic, in several senses. There is genuine heroism and amazing self-sacrifice in this movement, including, at times, serious persecution from the unsympathetic sectors of the Roman Catholic church, sometimes in combination with skeptical politicians. However, Nancy also reveals less heroic dimensions of the story: conflicts among church leaders and among missionaries, and several instances of leaders falling into various moral pitfalls, both sexual and financial. (There's also a story of a genuine, touching romance with a heartbreaking conclusion. Here is a missiological study that doesn't lack for human drama!) The theme of conflict arises repeatedly, sometimes among church leaders, often between INELA's Bolivian leadership and the Oregon missionaries, and sometimes between generations in the church. The Thomases' commitment to tell the story from both "inside" and "outside" (from the Bolivians' viewpoint as well as the missionaries') means a commitment to unvarnished truth.
Throughout the decades of INELA's history, Nancy weaves Bolivia's political developments into the narrative, as the country endures right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism, coups and revolutions, and eventually adopts electoral democracy. One very specific and illustrative case study involves the farm that the mission bought in 1947 as a source of income and a location for leadership training. As it turns out, the farm came with a whole community of farm families (colonos) that were bound to the land as part of Bolivia's hacienda system! Oregon Quakers were shocked to find themselves as, to put it bluntly, slaveholders. To make things more complicated, as the new owners sought to free the farmworking families and give them title to their plots, a few of them actually preferred the existing arrangements, but demanded improvements within that structure. As Nancy says, "... [O]ne has to ask if the mission or the OYM [Oregon Yearly Meeting], back in the 1940s and 1950s, had any sense of the gravity of owning an ex-hacienda in such revolutionary times." The story of Quakers divesting themselves of the farm and smuggling out its equipment in the dead of night is told from contemporary correspondence. Unfortunately we don't have access to much of the local non-Quaker point of view at the time.
Nancy also avoids exalting the Quaker element in this narrative. The earliest missionaries were, as she points out, more interested in planting churches in the Protestant holiness mold than conforming to specifically Quaker models. However, the Quaker element is always present as a sort of subterranean stream. The Chaco War with Paraguay (1932-35), for example, found some of the young Quaker men choosing to be conscientious objectors. The egalitarian and participatory nature of Friends governance coincided with similar features of Aymara culture. Women were central figures in the early history of the movement, and have regained influence in more recent years through their own women's organization within INELA. An increased emphasis on social justice outreach in recent decades fueled both innovation and tension within INELA's ministries.
In sum: this history balances well-sourced historical accounting (1,151 footnotes!), with a testimony to the power of the Holy Spirit in raising up a people for God's service in Bolivia and beyond.
It may be a hard and uncomfortable time to be a white Christian. But it is time for the church of Jesus Christ to sit with that discomfort–maybe even to kneel in it–knowing how much more “uncomfortable” it is to be a person of color in this country; and recognizing that the Church has played a role in the violence of inequality.
-- Rev. Erin Wathen, "Truth and Transformation: Can The Church Survive Confronting Racism?"
I attended the regular monthly meeting of Camas Friends Church's Peace and Social Concerns Committee. We had invited anyone in the church interested in our agenda to attend (via videoconference), so we had excellent participation. The agenda included questions about how to observe Juneteenth (June 19) or participate in community events dedicated to this occasion. The agenda was posted before the most recent global whirlwind caused by the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd in full view of the whole world, so the concern for wholehearted attention to racial realities was close to all our hearts.
I don't feel free to go into great public detail about what we said to each other, so I just want to make a general point: it is not easy for a majority-white church congregation to take our hunger for justice, our frustration with the world and sometimes with ourselves, and our sense of urgency, and translate all that into concrete action.
Furthermore, it is also hard to confront embedded racism in majority-white churches and meetings without inadvertently making the people of color among us seem invisible or marginal to the conversation -- or giving them the task of fixing us.
(Referring back to Erin Wathen's article, one thing that does not happen at Camas Friends Church is any complaining that we are "being too political.")
It's been my experience with race-related conversations with other white people, starting with my high school years in the late 1960's, that we're desperate for "resources." We want to know what to read or watch to educate ourselves. This can have the effect, as Lauren Michele Jackson pointed out in her visit to the Slate Culture Gabfest, of choosing great writers such as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison for their utility in our self-improvement rather than opening ourselves to a full, direct encounter with their works. Not surprisingly, books and seminars on race for anxious whites are also doing a brisk trade.
As I try to contribute to these conversations, I don't want to be preoccupied with my motives, slaloming between the hazards of self-flagellation and virtue-signalling. I want to learn how to "dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord...," and to see that beauty in all my fellow creatures made in the image and likeness of God, and share that dwelling with them, delighting in the joy of reconciliation.
And I want to know what gets in my way.
"What gets in our way" ... there's the rub! I remember Little Richard's version of "Joy In My Heart" where the second verse goes like this: "The devil doesn't like it but it's down in my heart, down in my heart...." When we look at the past, we can and should trace the destruction caused by racism, not flinching to look at the full picture, not avoiding the lament and repentance involved, not overly concerned with our own fastidiousness but acknowledging the reality of our own limitations, addictions, vested interests, denials. The devil won't like it, but here's the best part: when we turn around and look into the future, there is joy awaiting us in that dwelling place, a joy that is made complete when every system of exclusion is torn down.
Yes, that's political, but it's also biblical. Can we go there together?
During the Christmas season of 1969, I was home alone. One sister was in the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute in Chicago; the other was in Germany with my parents, tending to my mother's parents, who were in fragile health. On Sunday, December 14, my neighbors invited me to attend the Christmas party at Evanston's enormous Protestant cathedral, the First United Methodist Church, where my neighbors introduced me to their legendary minister Dow Kirkpatrick.
The party began with a dramatic presentation on racial justice. Ten days earlier, Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark had been killed in a hail of gunfire from a combined city/county/FBI force, the official cover-up was in full swing, and emotions were high all around. The whole country was also still reeling from the My Lai Massacre revelations. I had never been to a church event of any kind before (at least not since my Lutheran baptism as an infant in Norway), so my eyes and ears were wide open. However, my hosts were twitching with impatience during the presentation. "Come on, let's get to Christmas," said one of them.
The problem is, we can't really get to Jesus without an encounter with truth.
Reality check: Radley Balko presents his updated evidence of racial bias in the police system. (If you can't access this because of the paywall, contact me for a PDF version.)
Meet the artist who painted the George Floyd murals on the Israeli separation wall.
Igor Yakovenko introduces us to "ordinary racism" in Russia, and how recent events in the USA brought it into the daylight.
Ethan Zuckerman on why video recordings of police violence are not the accountability tools we had hoped they'd be. (Thanks to Oregonlive for the link.)
The institutions that protect police officers from facing legal consequences for their actions—internal affairs divisions, civil service job protections, police unions, "reasonable fear"—work far better than the institutions that hold them responsible for abuses.
"I could be a Quaker under those terms. Where do I sign up?"
"Elites always feel entitled to take what belongs to others."
"As the article notes, some Friends believe that private schools ought not to exist. But it is also true that many Friends are strong supporters of private schools."
'"Quaker values can be remarkably flexible' is one hell of a backhanded compliment."
"My loathing of organized religion is infinite."
These are among the lively and sometimes profane Twitter reactions to a story in The Atlantic last month, "When Quakers Become Takers: Sidwell Friends, one of the nation’s most elite private schools, cites its religious values in seeking government money." Commenters vented about the spectacle of a Friends school with an annual tuition of over $40,000 and an endowment of $54 million accepting CARES Act assistance.
Until the rise of nearly-universal public education, Friends communities worldwide made providing a Quaker education to its children and young people a high priority. Many newly-established Friends meetings in those earlier generations prioritized building a school first, then a meetinghouse -- or else combining the two functions into one building. The intention, at least in part, was to provide a "guarded education" to ensure that Friends values were instilled along with instruction in "all things civil and useful in creation," to quote George Fox, implying that a Quaker curriculum would not promote vain distractions.
A few years ago, in her article, "Westtown's Integration: 'A Natural and Fruitful Enlargement of Our Lives'," Margaret Morris Haviland gave us a case study in the changing environment that caused many Friends schools to modify their mission. The arguments of nearly a century ago, both for and against removing the denominational "hedge" around Westtown School, continue to be part of the debate about the propriety of Quaker education to this day. (Notice, for example, the pressures Westtown faced as a result of the Great Depression.) At the same time as we continue to debate the merits and demerits of Quaker schools, it's also true that dedicated public school teachers make up a significant part of nearly every Friends meeting and church that I've been involved with in my four and a half decades among Friends.
One serious charge against the large and well-established Friends schools in the USA and elsewhere is hinted at in the Atlantic story and its trail of comments, namely a form of elitism that comes with charging the levels of tuition required to support the low student-teacher ratios and lavish facilities forced on them by the private school market. (According to the article, less than 25 percent of Sidwell Friends families require financial aid.) I'm sure that no Friends school consciously adds "elite status" to the list of Quakerly values in its mission. Probably all of them are trying figure out how to compensate for this danger by enlarging their financial aid programs -- some more than others -- even though a culture already shaped by wealth might not be easy to change.
Back to the Westtown case. An early participant in the debate over possible changes to its mission, Carroll T. Brown summarized the three principal arguments for change, and dismissed two of them. However, the third reason he identified for opening the school struck him as particularly compelling,
"... that our treasure [our Quaker faith (Haviland's note)] serve as many persons as possible." Brown believed that the General Committee needed to discuss this reason fully. But he cautioned that only when the Committee and the Yearly Meeting were sure of what they believed should they act.
It's possible that Brown, in his caution, anticipated a risk that may have come true for Quaker education in general -- the wider world, at least in the American context, has influenced the public description of this "treasure" more than the treasure has influenced the wider world. Take a look at the Friends Council on Education's Web site, particularly its page on "What Is Quakerism?" I don't think I've ever seen a description of Friends faith that seems more intended to conceal, rather than reveal, the substance of that faith.
My own education from Kindergarten through high school was in the Evanston, Illinois, school system, starting around the time it was being deliberately and carefully integrated. Every child should have access to education of this quality. As a child of a violent, alcoholic, and white-supremacist family, it was at my public school that I found safety and inspiration. Such schools bless the pupils but also enhance the whole community, including that part of the community that has no children in the public schools. For that reason, I'm skeptical about school vouchers that divert funding away from public schools.
At the same time, school systems vary in adequacy and quality, and families have their own educational priorities as well. Families should always have the freedom to supplement or replace public schooling for their own children, forming their educational choices around the values they hold precious. Our own family took that route at vulnerable points in our children's development, and the way we did it may be the simplest of the Quaker school models, at least beyond home-schooling: the family co-op school. We joined the local Quaker family co-op in Richmond, Indiana, the Children's School. We parents ran the school (through a committee, of course!), we hired the teachers, we had received space on generous terms at West Richmond Friends Meeting, we cleaned the classrooms, collected the funds, and so on.
I don't want to exaggerate the ease and simplicity of this model -- we had our share of arguments about details big and small. The one I remember most vividly echoed the Westtown debates: how much overt Quakerism is too much for a school that was already attracting non-Quaker families? After listening to some of this debate, Earlham's Paul Lacey said to me, "Instead of being 'in the world, but not of it,' too often we Quakers are of the world, but not in it!"
Nevertheless, the model proved its worth, put down sturdy roots, and ultimately grew into today's Richmond Friends School. It outgrew the simplest versions of the parent co-op, but declined to become a voucher school to avoid playing by rules that felt alien (standardized testing, pledges of allegiance, and so on). And to ensure that the fees would not shape a student body that was unintentionally exclusive, the school began raising funds for financial aid. In normal times, almost every donated dollar goes into the financial aid budget.
And just as the Great Depression tested the sustainability of Westtown and that era's other Friends schools, the COVID-19 pandemic is squeezing Richmond Friends School. I asked Marcie Roberts, the Head of School (until the end of last month -- she is moving to Asheville, North Carolina) about some of the effects of the pandemic on the school. On-site attendance ended on March 13. Families in financial difficulty were offered a 25% tuition discount for the months affected by the pandemic, with the hope that other families who could afford to pay the full amount would do so. At the same time the school's income was falling, the spring fundraising event had to be cancelled. At this point, tuition payments don't even completely cover payroll, so voluntary donations are more important than ever. (You don't have to look hard to find the big blue DONATE ONLINE button on the school's home page.)
At the time of our conversation last month, Roberts was open about the uncertainties faced by the school, even as it remains committed to a sustainable and value-centered operation. I hope they continue to receive the support of West Richmond Friends Meeting, the region's Quaker community generally, and the growing numbers of families who've been blessed by the school. This is the sort of community-scaled Quaker educational witness that is worth maintaining -- even while also defending the vision of universal access to good public education.
Just about the time I was reading about Sidwell Friends School and recalling the perennial debates around Quaker education, I got a letter from an old friend, Ellen Cooney, who had moved from Colorado, USA, to Monteverde, Costa Rica, about three months ago. She's the new development director of Monteverde Friends School, serving in a volunteer capacity. Over the years I've heard much about this school, and we have family ties to Costa Rica, so I was eager to learn more about how Monteverde Friends School is facing the global health emergency.
Costa Rica has done a good job of acting fast to limit the spread of the coronavirus, Ellen explained,
... making health care available through the national system etc. so only about 700 cases and 7 deaths (Colorado is just a tad larger, and has 19,350 cases and almost 1,000 deaths). But the impact on the tourist-dependent economy is devastating. The economic crunch is especially severe here in Monteverde where tourism pretty much is the economy. A survey a few weeks ago that focused on Monteverde found that over 80% of workers had either lost their jobs entirely, been cut way back, or had been furloughed. We don’t expect much relief soon, as tourist season – where most people get their annual earnings – is ending soon as we move into the rainy season.
The Monteverde Biological Cloud Forest Preserve, one of the "Seven Wonders of Costa Rica" (La Nación) is one of the nation's biggest ecotourism magnets. It draws 70,000 or more visitors in a normal year, but this year is far from normal. Local families need fabulous summer seasons to store up income for the low-income rainy seasons that follow, and this year it's not happening. For the school, staff cuts and reductions in work hours are apparently inevitable, as members of the staff have been learning these past days.
There are some similarities between Richmond Friends School and Monteverde Friends School. Monteverde has (at least up to now) about 120 students, about double Richmond's enrollment -- so their scale of operations is relatively similar, especially in comparison to Sidwell's enrollment of 1,100. They are both closely linked with their host Friends meetings; in fact, in Monteverde's case, the school is a direct expression of Monteverde Friends Meeting's own vision of value-centered bilingual education for both local and international students, and was begun practically as soon as the meeting was established. However, there's an important difference -- in comparison to Richmond's three substantial (by Quaker standards!) meetings and a Friends college and seminary nearby, and many more meetings in Wayne and nearby counties, Monteverde and its whole surrounding region have an estimated 50 Quakers. In this time of severe financial constraints, their school needs to call on an international support base of Quakers and others who find its mission inspiring. Once again, donation information is not hard to find.
The story of Monteverde Friends Meeting and its community is told in a new film, Sweet Home Monteverde, whose rollout in the USA was somewhat short-circuited by the pandemic. The trailer and other excerpts on its site promise an inspiring experience; I'm going to see whether our Friends church would like to sponsor a virtual showing of the film. Instructions on scheduling a screening are here.
In presenting these glimpses of these two relatively small schools, Richmond Friends School and Monteverde Friends School, and by noting the recent controversy around Sidwell Friends School's acceptance of a pandemic-related government loan, it wasn't my intention to make snide comparisons or imply that one or another school was more authentically Quaker. Draw your own conclusions. Each school has its own vision of hospitality to the larger community, or to put it another way, to the market. Each has adjusted (muted?) its presentation of Quaker faith and practice to accommodate the breadth of their market. From my work with Crane MetaMarketing Ltd. I remember how difficult it is for any organization, no matter how idealistic its founding and mission, to keep and communicate a consistent set of promises to its best-fit market over the years. I wish all these schools the very best as they confront the pandemic, and hope that the terrible stress that they're undergoing now will clarify and strengthen the values that would make their survival worthwhile.
In place of my usual blues dessert, here is today's memorial service for George Floyd. The eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence that Al Sharpton announced at the end of his eulogy (the length of time George Floyd lay on the Minneapolis pavement, pinned down by Derek Chauvin's knee on his neck), begin at 1:47:20. Note his query at the end of that silence: "That's a long time ... that's how long he was laying there. There's no excuse. They had enough time. They had enough time. Now what will we do with the time we have?"
