Angels rush in where fools fear to tread

We are approaching the second anniversary of Marla Ruzicka's death on the Baghdad airport road. She was the founder of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) and an almost instant legend among human rights activists, journalists, and NGO workers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thousands of people all over the world were captivated by the story of this young American who threw herself into the struggle for relief for innocent war victims and their families, apparently oblivious to her appearance of total naivete and headstrong, foolish idealism. Sadly, many of us were only captivated after we found out she was gone.

Veteran reporters and politicians were shaken by her death, and were not ashamed to say so. Many of their reflections and reminiscences are collected on CIVIC's "Marla's Memorial" Web page. The first impressions I got from their stunned comments two years ago was of a young woman all of whose energy seemed to go into two activities--helping those who were injured, or whose loved ones were killed, by accident or error in the process of American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq; and arranging and animating wild and wonderful parties in improbably locations for the internationalists among whom she ceaselessly networked on behalf of her cause. In short, she seemed like an angel with a difference--a party angel, both stubbornly earthy and improbably ethereal.

In an early reflection on the Slate site, Jennifer Abrahamson warned that this was not a full picture: "Over the past few days I have seen many descriptions of Marla, including those likening her to an angel or a saint. Neither of those words do her justice. She was driven by a passion I have never encountered before, and she had a boundless heart. But she was also consumed by extreme lows as well as highs, tears along with laughter. In discussing plans for a book, she wanted to be depicted as the rich and complex woman that she was."

Abrahamson eventually completed that book, Sweet Relief: The Marla Ruzicka Story, and I've just read it. Now I see what she meant. That same young woman who could barge up to Donald Rumsfeld at a news conference and talk his ear off all the way to his car, or introduce herself to a whole roomful of experienced journalists she'd never met before with serene assurance that they would all totally be her friends, also suffered from depression and incredible self-doubt, didn't eat well or enough, pushed herself hard physically and emotionally, went into an unsustainable marriage, leaned too heavily on alcohol--while frequently trying to break this habit ... in short seemed incapable of sustained moderation.

Her complicated story also includes her evolution, or perhaps reorientation, from passionate American dissident to a sharply-focused organizer who was less concerned to find villains than to do whatever it took to obtain justice for victims--even if it meant building cooperative relationships with the U.S. military. Sadly, as a result she fell out of synch with some of her early collaborators.

Abrahamson's book itself feels a bit out of synch--shifting gears, rushing forward and braking, now reflective and now a breathless intercontinental itinerary. Maybe, given her subject, that scattered style is not entirely inappropriate. I also looked in vain for any understanding of the role of faith in Marla's story--the only tiny hint comes in the descriptions of her funeral at St. Mary's Catholic Church, Lakeport, California--for example the statement that the priest had known her all her life. The narrative includes her time at the Friends World program at Long Island University, but doesn't mention the Quaker background of that program.

It was not disillusioning to have my initial party-angel impression stripped away by Sweet Relief. To tell us what it cost for the world to receive her unique blessings is a deeper honor. It also challenges our conventional wisdom about what true effectiveness means, and what is required of us in community to support those who are led into unusually visible and risky confrontations with injustice.

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The CIVIC site also includes a page honoring Marla Ruzicka's colleague Faiz Ali Salim, who died with her on April 16, 2005.

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The American Civil Liberties Union has obtained the first, very partial, report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq compiled from U.S. military reports. (ACLU announcement. CIVIC commentary. AP article.)

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Friends United Meeting and symbolic politics, continued:

From several sources I've heard about the decision of Southeastern Yearly Meeting to suspend its membership in Friends United Meeting, for two years, after which, without a definite decision to reactivate it, it would be discontinued. Without discounting the pain involved, this feels to me like a decision that honors truth.

I have experienced convergence among Friends as we meet and mix in all sorts of informal ways, building new patterns of dialogue and mutual aid. I experience divergence as formal relationships seem less and less reflective of spiritual reality. Uniquely among North American yearly meetings of Friends, Southeastern was "united" in relating to Friends General Conference and Friends United Meeting almost right from its very origins, partly because of the natural mixing that resulted from snowbird and retirement patterns. That original vision, and the influence of Miami Friends from Cuba, have not proved spiritually persuasive for some critical minimum number of Friends. As was made clear to me in my own visits to Southeastern, many perceive FUM as something alien, external, something that causes pain. There is no theory worth subjecting people to pain.

More about all this later. May God bless Southeastern Yearly Meeting and also the remaining yearly meetings of Friends United Meeting. And may FUM remain faithful to its purpose of energizing and equipping Friends through the power of the Holy Spirit to gather people into fellowships where Jesus Christ is known, loved, and obeyed as Teacher and Lord. And more than that: may FUM become far more powerfully persuasive in advocating for itself and may it (we) become ever more transparent in its governance, programs, and finances.

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Righteous links:

Elizabeth Bwayo and Carol Briggs, victims of a violent carjacking in Nairobi that killed Elizabeth's husband Jacob, were visited in Portland, Oregon, at Eastertime, by their Kenyan surgeon, Eric Kahugu. KGW-TV's story here; the Oregonian's here.

PC World reports that "Google Earth has added a Global Awareness layer to its maps program that lets you learn about the crisis in Darfur." I tried it and found this feature profoundly helpful and disturbing.

Wander around in Susan Jeffers' Peace Church Bible Study Home Page. You may experience a strange urge to learn biblical languages!

The Guardian presents two (at least!) different viewpoints on blogosphere civility: Jonathan Freedland "The blogosphere risks putting off everyone but point-scoring males" and Brian Whitaker "Blog and be damned: Today's argument over the tone of online debate would be familiar to the pamphleteers of 18th-century Britain."

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Buddy Guy does have a quiet side, and not just when he's shushing his band. Here's a nice clip of "Lucy Mae Blues."

Buddy Guy - Lucy (live)
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Risk and resurrection

It may have been Angela Berryman of the American Friends Service Committee staff who said, at a Friends World Committee regional conference about twenty years ago, that she and others learned the meaning of resurrection by attending the funerals of their friends who perished violently in the Central American civil wars of those years.

In those years, I worked for Right Sharing of World Resources, which supported a medicinal plant project under the care of Salvadoran Lutheran Aid. The office address of the project was the Lutheran Church of the Resurrection in San Salvador. I loved getting letters from that address; my eyes were always drawn to the word "resurrection."

Much of Central America has gone de la locura a la esperanza since then, but the trail of the red horse continues to slash the globe. Although safety is never guaranteed to any of us, most of us in North American Quaker blogdom do not live with daily risk. But risk, voluntarily accepted, has always been a part of discipleship. Resurrection, too. (See Frances Grandy Taylor's article in the Hartford Courant: "When living your faith means risking death.")

By our understanding, Tom Fox did not live to see this Easter. Neither did Marla Ruzicka, whom we lost a year ago. (Find video glimpses of her here.) I prefer to think they got there first.

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Maxine writes that she and the Baghdad CPT team are leaving Baghdad for a time. This arrived yesterday:

Dearest friends-

Well, I'm finally making my way home for a bit. I'm in Amman, Jordan right now and will be leaving for the United States tomorrow. I have some work to do when I get back, as there is a meeting or two I have to attend, and then hopefully I'll be able to take some time off with family and friends.

The CPT Iraq team has decided to have all of the team come out for a while based on the advice of friends and working partners in Iraq. Nearly all of the people we consulted suggested some time out, partly because we are very visible in Iraq right now and partly because the situation is deteriorating. They suggest waiting until the new government gets up and running, hopefully in about two months but perhaps longer.

They don't mention the alternative if the government is not able to form itself, which is civil war. So, we are in a "wait and see" mode for now.

It was incredibly difficult to literally close the door behind me as I left Baghdad, to leave people who have become family over the years. I have the option to leave when things get tough; most of them do not have the same option. I felt like a coward. However, most of them said the same thing to us--"You are too precious to us to have anything happen to you. We can't have another death among you."

It's simply amazing to me that they feel this way. It is real love they feel for us, a deep and tender love.

Although we feel strange about it, we are taking their counsel. After all, we are guests in their country. It's not our right, but rather our privilege, to be there.

I'm struck by the difference in the way we as CPT have been advised and how we have chosen to take advice, and in the way the US government and its military has heard the voice of Iraqis saying "leave" yet refuse to go. It seems to me that the bottom line is whether we are serving our own interests, or those of the people we say we say we have come to serve.

Due to the fact that I need a good, long rest I haven't made myself available for any speaking just yet. With the future uncertain I'm leaving it open for now, and waiting to see what way God leads in this.

Blessings to you all, and the next time I will hopefully be back with you in the U.S.

Peace to you-
Maxine

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I appreciated the gracious exchange that Brooklyn Quaker recorded in the post "April Fool satire not intended as sarcasm" and the comments that followed.

In fact, his graciousness came as a just rebuke to my sometimes cranky attitude toward inter-Quaker dialogue—particularly his generous reply to Pam's question, "I guess I just feel like there are so very many religions where you can cleave to christian doctrine, why are you a quaker??" I highly recommend his thoughtful response, which he promised to amplify later.

It is not Pam's fault at all that the question reminded me of two questions I heard years ago in other contexts. At an All-Kentucky Gathering of Friends, someone said to me that he could understand why his secretary was a Christian; she didn't know better. But surely I had the brainpower to know better!? I was so taken aback by the question at several levels that I cannot remember what I said.

The second question was asked on the floor of Friends Church Southwest's yearly sessions, during a discussion on the yearly meeting leadership's proposal to allow symbolic baptism and communion if local churches wanted it. "There are so many other churches where people can enjoy these ceremonies," began the questioner (based on my memory). "Why would you take away our unique understanding of spiritual reality?"

Billy Lewis, long-time Christian educator in the yearly meeting, openly grieved. He asked, in substance, how they could have failed so completely in educating their people in the essentials of Quaker doctrine.

If his yearly meeting failed in a secondary matter, the spiritual understanding of baptism and communion, I find it much more serious that other Friends bodies have failed in a central matter, the definition of Friends as a community who experience and organize themselves around Jesus Christ coming to teach his people himself.

Friends began, not as a relativization of Christianity, but as an intensification of Christianity. We did not throw away the Baby with the bathwater, but (sorry if you've heard this rant before!), the new scented bathwater in use among some seems to be so fine that the Baby can be left in the cold, and this is somehow called Quakerism! The majority of Friends in the world were never consulted about our name being used as a cover for marginalizing our Savior. If you can sense how sad and bizarre this seems to some of us, then you will understand why we sometimes despair of meaningful dialogue among Friends. Thank goodness there are still bridgebuilders like Rich Accetta-Evans, who has the patience to accompany us through our despair, wherever we find ourselves in these dilemmas.

Nevertheless, I would find it dishonest if I didn't ask the question that haunts me: Why would those who can't unite with Christianity insist on staying among Friends? There are so many ways of being non-Christian or loosely Christian, whereas Quakers have held up a unique and powerful understanding of Christian discipleship. But perhaps the spirit of Billy Lewis's question needs to be heard: What kind of educational vacuum have the "experienced" Quakers left that would cause anyone to contemplate a relativized quakerism without the living Christ?

It is possible that Pam's question is more directly aimed at liberal Friends, and not the larger worldwide Quaker movement, among whom liberals (however defined) are a minority. Is it possible that liberal Friends and "orthodox" Friends are simply two completely different religions with common historical roots, as the advocates of "realignment" asserted fifteen years ago to the near ruination of Friends United Meeting?

Perhaps, on an organizational chart, the answer might appear to be "yes." But I resist that simplistic characterization—it implies neat divisions between faith and practice, and between language and reality, that simply don't hold up. The most exciting Christian Quakers to work with, in my experience at FUM, were often those coming from the "liberal" communities. They were not burdened by churchy culture, outmoded models, and prefab rhetoric. Their experience of Christ was still at the thin line between expected and totally unexpected; they often had an amazing intellectual ability to synthesize Christian insight with politics, economics, and personal disciplines. Was I about to shut the door on the collaborations between (to risk stereotypes) Midwestern salt-of-the-earth, tested disciples, and these Eastern on-fire Quakers? Better to disrupt categories than get in the way of the Spirit.

So, even though I continue to gasp at the gulfs which occasionally open up between us, I know the bridges are still needed.

Easter blessings!

Leaving Quakers

About eight years ago, a weighty Friend in Iowa Yearly Meeting (FUM) came to me with a question. He had found a congregation in Iowa that was actually more in accord with what he thought Friends stood for than his Friends meeting. However, he was torn by loyalties to that meeting and to the Yearly Meeting he had served for so long, and to Friends United Meeting. What did I think he should do?

I knew him well enough not to be at all tempted to suspect him of having a superficial commitment to Friends faith and practice (if I were presumptuous enough to have that kind of a critical circuit in me, which ... unfortunately ... I do). I knew the question came from a deep place. My only choice was to affirm that loyalties, family ties, and tradition, did not trump the care and stewardship of his soul. Although I believe that we are saved in community as well as individually, I cannot justify advising someone to choose a spiritually barren community when they have access to one that will feed them, unless I'm pretty darn sure that they have a Spirit-led call to that barren community. Nor could I claim that being Quaker in itself was somehow an inoculation against barrenness. Far from it, I have seen too much cultishness among Friends to advocate any such elite status for us.

The question has come up again as a former FUM board member and an experienced advocate of Friends discipleship, Bill Samuel, has announced by e-mail and on his Web journal that he is giving up membership in his local Friends meeting. He has joined the Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland. I recommend reading his full statement on the Web journal, but what especially affected me was realizing that he's far from giving up on the Quaker ideal, he has just found a congregation outside Friends that lives up to that ideal better than Friends do.

Background: I used to serve as the head bureaucrat of Friends United Meeting, possibly the largest of the associations of Friends yearly meetings. Around the time that my service there began, FUM adopted a new purpose statement that, at least in part, brought an end to the theological civil war between liberals and evangelicals within FUM. (At least it gave FUM staff clear programmatic direction and helped block disruptive politicking.) This purpose statement continues to be determinative: "Friends United Meeting commits itself to energize and equip Friends through the power of the Holy Spirit to gather people into fellowships were Jesus Christ is known, loved, and obeyed as Teacher and Lord."

At the time, Bill served on the Board of Friends United Meeting, one of the appointees of Baltimore Yearly Meeting. It is no secret that those yearly meetings in FUM who for historical or theological reasons also held membership in Friends General Conference, a more liberal association, never corporately united with this purpose statement, although their Board members were willing for the statement to be adopted, probably recognizing its value to those Friends who found the FUM affiliation congenial. In other words, even though the purpose statement was of enormous value in reviving FUM's morale and clarifying and mobilizing its programs, and was broadly supported by FUM internationally, it had little resonance for the liberal end of the FUM constituency in North America.

I don't want to speak for Bill, but I imagine there are Friends in a number of places who find FUM's purpose statement to be a powerful contemporary expression of Friends ideals, but who are members of meetings where this is not true corporately. In the world of unprogrammed Friends, I'd make a wild guess that the majority would not find the formation of Christian communities to be the primary motivation for yearly meetings to work together. Unprogrammed Friends who find themselves to be Christian dissidents in theologically promiscuous meetings have sometimes found the conservative yearly meetings (sample document) to be places where they are understood, and have even sometimes sought long-distance affiliations with them. (This practice seems to me to have problems of its own, but that's another story.) However, even those yearly meetings, while preserving in various degrees the deep Christian devotional character of their ancestors, have been disastrously unable to unite around any sort of evangelistic energy, which is the direction that FUM is setting for itself.

When I first joined Friends, shortly after my Christian conversion, the joy of finding a church home where a New Testament faith found prophetic social expression carried me blissfully along past the point where a more discerning person might have noticed some gaps along the way. We still find these major gaps among Friends--meetings that specialize in quakerishness and marginalize the living Gospel from which our peculiar discipleship sprang OR meetings that, on the contrary, talk Christian language with enthusiasm but have allowed that precious and still-needed discipleship to atrophy--and eventually these incongruities became the central ingredients in FUM's civil war.

There are still too few Friends meetings that connect all the dots and manage to stay balanced. As long as that remains true, we can expect to lose more people like Bill Samuel. Of course, in God's divine economy, we haven't really lost them at all--but their departure from the human dimension of Friends community is a signal that those gaps remain, to our bitter cost. If someone as experienced and committed as Bill Samuel feels he has to say goodbye, think of what disillusionment and confusion we may be offering to people with far less experience and investment?

Personal confession time: I have felt blessed in various ways by all the Friends meetings I've known, including my present Quaker home, Reedwood Friends Church, part of Northwest Yearly Meeting of Evangelical Friends International, a body usually considered to be to the right of FUM. However, I'm also involved with a Hispanic Mennonite congregation that is feeding me spiritually in ways I have not experienced before. And I continue to draw strength from my ongoing ties with FUM, Friends World Committee, and a number of other Quaker and ecumenical associations. If I ever tried to diagram my location in the body of Christ, it would be a pretty confusing chart.

Friday morning PS:

Here is a follow-up story on the item, "Praying for Trade Justice," that I appended to last week's entry, "An Eastwood Film with No Villain."

The remarkable tributes to Marla Ruzicka, late founder of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, include a proposal for military tracking of such victims, as in this letter to Senator Leahy from Multnomah Friends Meeting's member Chris Hogness:

Dear Senator Leahy,
I was moved by your April the 18th statement on the death of Marla Ruzicka, founder of the humanitarian organization called "Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict" and recently working with the Civilian Assistance Program in Iraq.
I invite you to consider writing a piece of legislation in her memory: a bill which would require the United States Department of Defense or other agency to count estimated civilian lives taken in any military conflict the United States is engaged in. In systems management, generally when things are studied, the act of study in itself leads to improvement. And if it is not counted or tracked, its as though it hasn't happened. It is the stated policy of the United States Department of Defense to attempt to minimize civilian deaths in any military conflict. And yet the department does not track data necessary to determine how close or far it is from that goal. The United States Government, through the Department of Defense, has in fact consistently refused to do so.
As you so aptly stated, "our job now is to carry on the work that Marla started, because it is so important." Your authorship of legislation requiring estimated civilian body counts in any situation of conflict would be a very concrete means of honoring one who "saw her work as part of the best of what this country is about", and through it became "as close to a living saint as they come", to quote your moving statement. Perhaps if all countries of the world adopted similar laws--or worked through the United Nations to do accurately tally all lives lost in armed conflict, civilian and combatant, all sides--the horror of war would become more evident to us all.

I was glad to read that Friends Committee on National Legislation is involved with the effort to move forward the legislation mentioned in Chris's letter.