The Convocation Unscripted S1E3. Screenshot from source. Top: Robert Jones, Diana Butler Bass. Bottom: Kristin Du Mez, Jemar Tisby.
Last week, in part one, I was thinking about how to pray honestly when considering the "butcher's bench" of history and the persistence of sin—by which I mostly mean the ways we mistreat each other and Creation generally.
Concerning that persistence, I linked to Kristin Du Mez's blog post in which she mentioned Tolkien's "long defeat" as quoted by one of the ministers at her church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She went on say how important it is, in our service on behalf of justice and truth, not to grow dependent on victorious outcomes.
Last week Du Mez published another post, "Peace where there is no peace," with what struck me as a case study for not depending on victorious outcomes—and the case was one which I immediately identified with. Here's a clue from the title of the podcast episode embedded in her post: "When Your Religion Cancels You."
(The podcast, The Convocation Unscripted, features conversations among three historians and one sociologist, all of whom "write about religion and its intersection with culture, history, and politics in America"—Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Du Mez, Robert P. Jones, and Jemar Tisby.)
Kristen Du Mez's denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, is tightening up its discipline regarding churches (and possibly faculty members of its associated educational institutions, such as Du Mez's Calvin University) who dissent from the church's "confessional" teachings on sexuality and marriage. For a brief and seemingly evenhanded summary of the situation, see this Religion News Service article.
Going back to Du Mez's newer post, written shortly before the Synod meeting described in the RNS article:
When your Religion Cancels You.
That was the topic selected for our second podcast episode over at The Convocation: Unscripted. Little did my fellow podcasters know, that’s a sensitive topic for me this week. As I write, my denomination is dictating the terms that will require my home church and many others to leave the denomination over a new interpretation of what is now deemed “confessional,” one that requires condemnation of same-sex relationships.
In terms of getting “cancelled,” my case isn’t like many others’ in that I’m staying with my congregation. We’re all leaving together, along with many other congregations in the US and Canada. Still, it’s a lot to process.
I shared just a bit here [in the podcast], and you can hear Robby, Jemar, and Diana talk about their own experiences leaving the faith communities they once called home. I’m guessing that many of you may find points of connection.
So, dear Friends ... when did "our religion" cancel us? Here's the blog post from 2017 that sums up the story from my personal point of view—our involuntary separation from a body of believers that I loved and appreciated, Northwest Yearly Meeting. One similarity to the process being experienced by the Christian Reformed Church and ours, is the length of time the process of enforcement is taking. In each case, it feels like an experience of the long defeat. Each time our little band of exiles meets, we do get a "some glimpse of final victory," but my heart aches for what might have been.
I'm going to stop here. I don't want to reduce the amount of time you might spend checking some of the links and videos above, particularly the Kristin Du Mez post.
Kent Hendricks: Observations on patterns of division and departure in the Christian Reformed Church. It makes for an interesting comparison with what we experienced in Northwest Yearly Meeting.
Still more sobering reading, this time on Russia and Ukraine. Both of the next two items are from the Meduza service:
First, Dmitry Kartsev interviews Jonathan Littell, author of the book An Inconvenient Place (with photographer Antoine d'Agata), reckoning with Nazi and Russian atrocities in Ukraine "from Babi Yar to Bucha." The book is available in French and Russian now, and an English-language edition is scheduled for publication in September.
Second, an interview (Russian original; machine-translated English) with Tatiana Kasatkina, wife of imprisoned human rights activist Oleg Orlov, former co-chair of the now-liquidated Memorial organization.
The Internet Archive (on which I depend constantly!) is forced to delete half a million books from its online library; 19,000 supporters write an open letter to publishers.
Sierra-Cascades founding session (2017, George Fox University); and 2018's annual session (Canby, Oregon).
In my first Stepping out of the boat post, I gave a personal account of our new Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting's early development as an independent Quaker association of churches.
Among the tasks still ahead of us (I said at the time) was the development of a book of discipline—a book that many yearly meetings call Faith and Practice. Such books often combine content that helps express the spiritual commitments and culture of the community, with content that describes organizational details and processes.
Six years later, we are still working on how we will describe our spiritual values in this book of discipline. However, several of our committees have been hard at work developing polices and practices that will eventually be collected in our book, so our overall progress is encouraging. And our experiences and mistakes as a yearly meeting—and as individual churches—are also contributing to our task, as we build our to-do list of areas we need to work on. For example, we have done a lot of work on the recognition and recording of ministers, but have not done as well as we would like in supporting our existing pastors and others who offer public ministry.
In that earlier post, I summarized the balance that we (at least in my personal view) seek in daring to describe our spiritual culture and commitments:
Step two, building our identity: Here we really had to decide whether we as a body were in fact walking toward Jesus. Some of our churches are uncomplicatedly and unaffectedly Christian, culturally indistinguishable from other evangelical Friends congregations, except for the refusal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. None of our meetings identify as non-Christian, but some have more experience providing spiritual hospitality to people who have survived encounters with authoritarian religiosity. Those churches are particularly careful not to use Christian language in ways that could come across as glib and domineering. At our Canby sessions, this issue came up in considering what to require of applicants for membership. Rather than asking applicants to use specific language about themselves, we agreed to describe who we are—a Christ-centered community—and leave it up to applicants to decide whether this kind of community was something they wanted to join.
After a number of false starts and after many, many conversations, here is a sneak preview of what our Faith and Practice Committee will lay before our 2024 gathering in eight days. Among our challenges to ourselves: we wanted to draw on the values we explicitly expressed in our founding years' business minutes, and we wanted to be brief and use plain English. I'd be glad to hear your comments, and to know that you'll be praying for us as we consider this latest draft:
Your Faith and Practice Committee proposes the following paragraphs as an introduction to the draft Faith and Practice we will be compiling with your help. We plan to present it (with some background information) on Friday of our annual gathering, with time scheduled for your comments on Saturday.
The Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends is a voluntary association of Quaker meetings, churches, and individuals whose worship, ministry, and service are centered in Christ, guided by Quaker testimonies and experience, and committed to the full participation of LGBTQ+ people in all aspects of the life and leadership of the Yearly Meeting. We see these three values as interrelated and mutually reinforcing.
We understand the Quaker testimonies as a call:
to live simply and sustainably;
to seek nonviolent responses to conflict, and refuse participation in war and preparation for war;
to speak the truth and keep our promises;
to make common decisions based on our community’s practice of prayer and discernment rather than majority rule or force of personality;
to regard each other—and all people—with a commitment to equality and equity, rejecting all false distinctions based on social, cultural, or economic status;
in the wider world, to support, advocate, and initiate efforts toward peace, justice, care of Creation, and relief of suffering in ways that are consistent with these testimonies;
in all things, to put Love first.
As we set forth these values and commitments, we acknowledge that they are to some extent aspirational, not an inventory of our successes as of today.
We also understand that we have a variety of faith languages and experiences among us. We do not require of each other, or of newcomers, any standard interpretation or test to be part of our community. We are committed to listening and learning together, building trust in God and each other through the ways that we worship, conduct business, guard each other’s reputations, and resolve conflicts tenderly.
Anyone who feels drawn to our community based on these values and testimonies, and the ways we live them, will be joyfully welcomed.
We keep hearing new reports of people in Russia getting arrested for what seem like almost trivial expressions of dissent. The British organization Rights in Russia has a new program to support dissenters in prison: Write to Russia. And Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen talks about the consequences of getting onto one of those punitive official lists ("foreign agents" and worse) in this episode of the radio program This American Life. "Act Two," Gessen's part begins at 32:35. Thanks to Norma Silliman for the link.
"To me, writing is listening." Friends Journal's Sharlee DiMenichi interviews Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2023.
A Live Coal (Isaiah 6:1-8): Ashley Wilcox's message last Sunday at the celebration of the recording of Wess Daniels as a Friends minister.
Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston, USA, is looking for a Program and Engagement Manager. If interested, look into it right away; they'd love for this new staffer to begin this summer. Much of this person's responsibilities were among the things I did when I was on the staff of Beacon Hill Friends House back in the late 1970's.
Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Roman Catholic calendar and some other confessions as well. This feast reminded me of the years of protests that were set off when the U.S. Navy decided to name a nuclear submarine Corpus Christi. I mentioned those protests in this post: Worship and protest.
Here's a rerun, a video we used in class in Elektrostal. Wonder if we could do this now....
This is one of those times when I'm sorely tempted to explain my motives behind posting a survey, but doing so would almost certainly influence some of the responses. So I'm holding my tongue and hoping that you'll dive into the survey. It's a lot shorter than most of my surveys....
Quoting Sarah Aziza: “But what about Hamas?” I grew up with this question whipped at my face every time I declared my people’s right to survive. “What about Hamas?” It didn’t matter if I’d just asked for clean water or the right to return to our stolen land. “What about Hamas?” they’d ask, holding my humanity hostage. Their smug smiles at this question, which they saw as a rhetorical coup.
How would we be different from the wicked tenants, the devourers and thieves and murderers–the ones who occupy lofty posts, guard the fences, and sit on the watchtower to maintain their position? What does it look like to be a humble, receptive people, who welcomes the servants of God when they come to us with the Master’s message?
Konstantin Kolesnichenko: Blues from Dnipro, Ukraine. "I'm Ready."
Yearly Meeting: a definition (adapted from quakerinfo.org) Yearly Meeting refers to a larger body of Friends, consisting of monthly meetings (or local congregations) in a general geographic area connected with the same branch of Friends. This body holds decision making sessions annually. The term "yearly meeting" may refer to the annual sessions, to the body of members, or to the organizational entity that serves the body of members. For most purposes, a yearly meeting is as high as Quaker organizational structure goes. Each of the 30+ yearly meetings in the U.S. has its own Faith and Practice, and there is no higher authority in the structure of the Religious Society of Friends, although yearly meetings network with each other through branch associations and other Friends organizations. [Also see Margery Post Abbott's definition in The Historical Dictionary of the Friends (Quakers).]
Once upon a time, I was a Quaker denominational leader, emotionally invested in our structures and their missions. One weekend, I was visiting a Friends church in an evangelical yearly meeting. I stayed with a delightful family in the city where the yearly meeting's office was located, and I went with them to their Sunday morning meeting for worship.
The church was impressive, both in the size of its building and the breadth of its programming. Aside from the variety of Sunday morning options for all ages, there were programs for every day of the week, ranging from Bible studies to family finance seminars to Christian aerobics.
My hosts were very knowledgeable about these programs, which clearly had become a social and spiritual base for their family. They gently let me know, however, that they had never heard of my organization. As it turned out, they also knew nothing about their own yearly meeting or any of its wider affiliations, even though the yearly meeting office was in their own city. The word "Friends" meant little to them beyond the fact that it was in their church's name, and the word "Quaker" even less.
However, their Friends church gave substantial resources to that yearly meeting and its affiliates, in both money and people.
I thought about this visit, now a quarter century ago, during a recent committee meeting. We were considering how our own yearly meeting, Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends, could be of greater service to local Friends and their churches. In particular, how can we encourage the gifts of ministry among those local Friends emerge and flourish and be recognized?
There is arguably nothing wrong or "incomplete" about an individual Friend or family that finds all the spiritual resources that they need in their local church and their local community, just as that host family did during my visit years ago. But I still can't shake off some of that emotional investment in our wider structures and missions.
Source: masthead of our yearly meeting's Bulletin.
I wish I had asked my hosts at the time how they pictured their place in their world faith family. They would probably have said that their church was simply a local group of believers in the worldwide evangelical Christian movement. In my institutional tendencies, I might have felt a bit wistful about the specifically Quaker emphasis in our part of that movement, but who am I to question their identity and enthusiasm? Or, for that matter, in their apparent lack of interest in the intermediary structures for which their church was paying?
Now I'm thinking about the differences between the church I was visiting at the time, and the typical churches of our own yearly meeting. None of them have the resources of that seven-day-a-week church. Few if any are equipped to surround attenders and their families with such full-service programming. What can or should we as a yearly meeting do to strengthen our local congregations in their capacity to meet needs? Can we in fact affirm the advantages of a small-scale model of church (with its simplicity, intimacy, lack of hierarchy) by supplementing its programs, providing low-key mutual accountability, and helping identify potential leaders?
More than that: is it a legitimate aspiration for a Quaker yearly meeting to encourage Friends to say something like this...?
My Friends church is a local expression of something larger, a worldwide Quaker movement with a particular experience of Christian discipleship.
Furthermore, by belonging to this movement through my participation in this local church, I'm contributing toward this movement at a time in world history when this discipleship—with its practices of peace, equality, simplicity, and decisionmaking based on the discernment of the community—is needed to create hope and break bondages.
Does such a statement makes sense? Why or why not? (Or is it the wishful thinking of someone who yearns for the traditional structures and missions?)
If so, could it be affirmed by those who are eager to give their time to these wider relationships, such as the yearly meeting and its committees and affiliations, and equally to those whose focus remains local but whose awareness may, at one and the same time, be wider?
As I reflected on all these questions, I thought about my own history with Friends. As a college student who'd recently experienced a Christian conversion, I looked for Friends because I already knew that, with my inherited distrust of the religion industry, the simplicity of Friends as I'd read about them would be the most direct way for me to build upon my new faith. So, when I first stepped into Ottawa Friends Meeting in 1974, I already had that wider context, however superficially I might have understood it.
To my great fortune, Ottawa Friends had a wealth of mentors who were able to feed my hunger and my curiosity. Within months I was on a local committee; within two years I was sent to an international Friends conference with life-changing consequences for me. Around the same time I was appointed to a Canadian Yearly Meeting board that gave out grants from an endowment. Five years after that I was appointed as a Canadian member of the governing body of Friends United Meeting.
Shortly after the international conference, in that summer of 1976, I attended Canadian Yearly Meeting sessions for the first time. The presiding clerk of Canadian Yearly Meeting, Philip Martin, was a member of Ottawa Friends Meeting and was, therefore, someone I already knew and respected. One of the discussions at the center of the business meeting that year was about the formal importance of membership in Friends—a question that continues to arise among us to this day.
Given these early experiences that came to me through the care and mentorship of my meeting, without effort of my own, it's no coincidence that I see my membership at Camas Friends Church as being linked to a whole concentric series of wider Quaker networks, all supporting me as I try to work out the consequences of Christian faith in these times. It's my story, but it's not everyone's story, and so I continue to wonder: how will these wider engagements earn the attention of new and young Friends whose stories differ from mine, and whose lives are already full and demanding?
Does the theory of the concentric Friends structure, with its simplicity and lack of hierarchy, still have power for Friends? In this structure, the local Friends meeting or church is the inner circle. It is where we know each other best, exercise hospitality to newcomers, and learn to ask, "What does God want to do or say through us?" It's where people are born, marry, die; it's where we witness new believers crossing the threshold into the household of faith.
By appointment or interest or both (depending in part on the local culture), some of those local Friends report to and from the next concentric circle, traditionally the monthly or quarterly meeting, then the yearly meeting, then the larger associations to which this yearly meeting is affiliated. Most local Friends probably won't be interested or called to serve in these wider circles, and that's no problem as long as the connections are rotated and renewed often enough to keep the relationships real.
In some cases, maybe we've over-bureaucratized yearly meetings and routinized business rather than expecting our gatherings to serve as the forum where we ask each other whether Truth is prospering in each of our local settings, and how we need to coordinate with each other to meet the needs in places where our testimonies are being challenged. As we consider a world full of spiritual, social, and economic bondage, are we too busy maintaining our systems to consider these challenges creatively? Can we make room for new partnerships between the old yearly meeting-as-forum and new initiatives? Two generations ago, such partnerships included the New Call to Peacemaking and Right Sharing of World Resources. What are today's experiments in partnership?
I have heard of a couple of yearly meetings that have experimented with a radically simplified agenda—if only for one annual session. How did it go? I was present for one such experiment, a carefully planned session of Iowa Yearly Meeting FUM at which most routine business was set aside to consider whether to remain in Friends United Meeting. This example was a response to a specific crisis, but maybe at another time and place, the sheer urgency of focusing on the needs of people who have never heard of us would be "crisis" enough.
The Iowa example brings up another huge problem: local Friends have come to associate "yearly meeting" (the annual gathering as well as the ongoing structure) with conflict and church politics. I've heard this complaint in many places. We might be too busy arguing instead of figuring out together how to build our prophetic and healing presence in the world. We desperately need to restore the ability to extract value from conflicts and diversity instead of hiding or suppressing them.
...
I'm not ready to give up on the yearly meeting as an institution worth preserving and re-energizing. The simplicity of the concentric structure has a huge advantage, as long as its processes are prayer-driven and transparent. A yearly meeting serves as a clear and constant and public access point into the web of relationships that is the Quaker family beyond the local church.
Friends World Committee for Consultation offers World Quaker Day (October 1) as one way to spotlight our global family.
One of the rabbit trails I happily hopped along while writing this post: a history of Grindstone Island, a Canadian experiment in training for nonviolence.
Pyotr Sauer in The Guardian: Konstantin Dobrovolski has spent decades locating bodies of Soviet soldiers who died in World War II, and attempting to ensure their proper identification and burial.
“Every day I am confronted with the grim consequences of war. But it seems like our nation didn’t learn the right lesson from history,” [Dobrovolski] said as the conversation quickly turned to the war in Ukraine.
Monday, July 3, by a resolution of Portland's city council, was Buddy Guy Day in Portland, Oregon. Most of us at the Waterfront Blues Festival didn't find out until the day was almost over--when the hour came for Buddy Guy's performance at the Festival.
His performance at our festival was billed as Portland's turn at hosting Buddy Guy's Damn Right Farewell Tour. If those 75 minutes were indeed part of a "farewell" series, he is ending his touring career strongly. He stood upright for the full performance, and aside from his blazing guitar work, he was up to his old tricks--playing his guitar with one hand, generating sounds with a drumstick, a towel, even his clothes, all with his trademark look-at-me smile or one finger pointed at the audience. All he left out was his walkabout among audience members. As usual, he rarely played and sang a song from beginning to end, preferring to merge one song into another, as long as it illustrated one of his constant concerns, to give credit to the legacy he felt privileged to carry on as one of the few remaining representatives of the generation that shaped this music.
As he tells Gary Graff in the guitarplayer.com article, he may not be saying an absolute farewell to us, even though he turns 87 this month. He may still play occasional festival, and I selfishly hope that Portland remains on his list. But this farewell tour seems as good an occasion as any to say "thank you."
Buddy Guy, Waterfront Blues Festival 2011.
Elsewhere on my blog I've talked about the music of Buddy Guy and his genre-defining contemporaries, and how important it was to me in my years of growing up in a racist and dysfunctional family atmosphere. The honesty and ecstasy that I heard in my earliest exposure to those musicians still came through to me in this year's festival, and for that I will be forever and unapologetically thankful.
Thank you, Buddy Guy, for the more than fifty years I've personally enjoyed your music, starting with your collaboration with Junior Wells. And thank you for helping me remember where and how this music came to be.
I'm on the road and need to post this, so just one link this week, from Mark Pratt-Russum with thoughts from our recent Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends annual sessions.
The cunning nature of Screwtape speaks to the twisted ways in which evil squirms into our lives, presenting as love, or service, but which actually has, at its root, some kind of self-fulfillment that requires the exploitation of another person’s labor, resources, culture, or humanity.
Here are some glimpses of this year's Waterfront Blues Festival. (All photos, whether good or fuzzy, are mine.)
Now the kingdom
of God could be no otherways in them than
in a seed, even as the thirty-fold and the hundred-fold
is wrapt up in a small seed, lying in a barren
ground, which springs not forth because it wants
nourishment: and as the whole body of a great
tree is wrapped up potentially in the seed of the
tree, and so is brought forth in due season; and
as the capacity of a man or woman is not only
in a child, but even in the very embryo, even so
the kingdom of Jesus Christ, yea Jesus Christ himself,
Christ within, who is the hope of glory, and becometh
wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption,
is in every man's and woman's heart, in
that little incorruptible seed, ready to be brought
forth, as it is cherished and received in the love of it.
— Robert Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity, Propositions V and VI.
We spent last weekend on the campus of Western Oregon University, in Monmouth, at our seventh annual sessions of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends.
Our agenda included a number of items on which we didn't have immediate unity. For example, the Safeguarding Committee proposed several changes to our yearly meeting's Safeguarding Policy for cases when a possible abuse is committed by a pastor or other "person in charge." The first draft of the revisions caused a lively discussion, and the committee went back to work on some new wording.
The first draft of the budget (a document we call a "spending plan") also raised some concerns. Those concerns, too, led to some late-night work. The Finance Committee brought a revised spending plan the next day.
We had a visitor from another yearly meeting who was observing all of these discussions. Toward the end of our sessions, she told us how impressed she was with the tenor of these discussions. I was surprised and delighted with her observations, because (as I realized) I had begun to take our relatively calm style for granted.
Another interesting incident: During previous gatherings, the yearly meeting had made several appointments of representatives to other Friends gatherings and bodies. These representatives made reports to last weekend's sessions.
Then, during the discussion of the Faith and Practice Committee's report, a member of that committee reminded us that at our very first session as a yearly meeting, we had adopted a policy of not appointing "representatives." She suggested that this policy originated in our associating "representatives" with a structure in our old yearly meeting that had been used to impose an unacceptable degree of control over us. She suggested that our unpremeditated and gradual re-adoption of the term "representative" was a sign of healing.
I've said before that my dream is for us to form a church that is known to be, and really is, trustworthy. Could it be that our small and young group of churches is making actual progress toward this goal?
And ... is it possible to link this experience of a consistently gracious tone in our business sessions with my two previous blog posts on grace? If grace is God's unconditional, ever-available power and favor, doesn't it make sense that, to the extent we are open to this energy and allow it to shape how we see ourselves and each other—how we "cherish and receive" the precious seed of God's witness in each other—we become more trustworthy?
As I said before in my "grace" posts, the history of the church includes a long series of filters and structures to make grace manageable. Are we Quakers ready to be among the people of faith who want to live in the immediacy of grace, and given a trustworthy setting, become more ready to risk?
What do I mean by "risk"? Two examples:
One, our readiness to share our experiences of grief, hopelessness, anger, injury—whether as sufferers ourselves, or as witnesses to the suffering of others. Readiness to ask for help, including labor and money. Readiness to confess we can't see God at all today; readiness to listen tenderly to another's confession tomorrow.
Artist: Sally Wern Comport.
Two (and for Friends, this may be the deal-breaker!), readiness to be enthusiastic, outrageously joyful, to work our hearts out to find ways to make our grace-shaped community more accessible to people who might be blessed by our churches, whether these potential newcomers fit the stereotypes of "Quaker" or not. Let them decide!
This is not a call to rest contentedly in a state of self-congratulatory irrelevance. It's a call to uphold our best feature as Christians: gracious transparency.
At our best, we Friends have the ability to keep access to grace uncluttered. We don't let theology, ceremony, or structures get in the way. Let's not allow self-defeating diffidence or subterranean elitism to get in the way, either.
"...That every one's cup may run over." Recalling my favorite quotation from George Fox, 1669:
All Friends every where, in the living spirit, and living power, and in the heavenly light dwell, and quench not the motions of it in yourselves, nor the movings of it in others; though many have run out, and gone beyond their measures, yet many more have quenched the measure of the spirit of God, and after became dead and dull, and questioned through a false fear: and so there hath been hurt both ways. And therefore be obedient to the power of the Lord, and his spirit, and his spiritual weapons; war with that Philistine that would stop up your wells and springs. Jacob's well was in the mountain, (read that within,) he was the second birth. And the belief in the power keeps the spring open. And none to despise prophecy, neither to quench the spirit; so that all may be kept open to the spring, that every one's cup may run over.
There is much more to tell about our recent yearly meeting sessions, particularly about the central theme of trauma and hard-won hope. Stay tuned!
A small selection of commentaries on the Prigozhin affair:
... I know from experience that it is in the driest of times that our roots learn to reach more deeply to seek the Living Water, more deeply than they ever have before.
Detecting low-frequency gravitational waves that seem to stretch and squeeze time (while scientists try to avoid letting our planet's politics get in the way...).
One of the bands I'm looking forward to hearing in the next few days, at the Waterfront Blues Festival: Rick Estrin and the Nightcats. If I don't answer e-mails or pick up the phone, now you know why....
What does an apology from [Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends] to Native Americans look like?
This question arose a couple of weeks ago at our Yearly Meeting's quarterly gathering at Eugene, Oregon. It has been put on our SCYMF Prayer Committee's agenda as an item for prayer, anticipating that we continue to pray and work together toward an answer.
One of the first things we had done on that quarterly meeting day, all of us together, was to participate in a workshop led by Dove John of North Seattle Friends Church. As background, Dove summarized the Discovery Doctrine -- the legal doctrine that supposedly justified European "Christian" powers in claiming that any lands their representatives "discovered" became those powers' possessions, and any claims by existing non-Christian inhabitants on those same lands were null and void. This doctrine was asserted by the young U.S. nation as applying to the territory that came to them upon independence, and then confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1823.
The Discovery Doctrine was never universally accepted even in Christian Europe, and in the European settlement of the "New" World, Quakers were not the only people who actually negotiated with the original inhabitants and paid for real estate. However, these precedents were disregarded by U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall in favor of...
... the uniform understanding and practice of European nations, and the settled law, as laid down by the tribunals of civilized states, [which] denied the right of the Indians to be considered as independent communities, having a permanent property in the soil, capable of alienation to private individuals. They remain in a state of nature, and have never been admitted into the general society of nations.
I recommend reading the full text of Marshall's opinion. I think it reveals his divided conscience (even despite his personal vested interest in the matter). However, his decision seems to rest on two poisonous assumptions ... and it's these assumptions that linger into the present, and must be taken into account in our work of prayer.
First, Realpolitik: Whatever misgivings we might have today about the "extravagant" and "pompous" claims of colonial powers and their descendants (most of us!), it's too late to do anything about it. "it becomes the law of the land and cannot be questioned."
Second, "savages" must bow down to civilization, if they are to be allowed to live. We of course are far too progressive to believe this (at least stated so bluntly) nearly 200 years after Marshall, but are we able to assess the damage done to actual humans and their communities by this principle, and its ever-more-subtle iterations, over the centuries?
And even if we are able to begin to comprehend the damage, Realpolitik is always right at hand to discourage our attempts at redemption.
Back to Dove's workshop. After background information on the Discovery Doctrine, we counted off by tens. We were all then ejected from the room -- all but one out of every ten, symbolizing the devastating effects of death and exile on the First Nations' population. After spending some time in exile, we were admitted back into the meeting room to reflect on our experience.
Some practical commitments arose among those reflections: first and most urgent, a commitment to find out who had preceded us as inhabitants of the specific places where our homes and meetinghouses are located. We also wanted our Friends community to respond to what we learn, to apologize to those people, and to their descendants, and if possible to find a path toward redemption.
I became a Friend during my university years in Canada, and remained a member of Ottawa Friends Meeting for about ten years. In 1974, Canadian Yearly Meeting was drawn into a concern for right relationships with people of the First Nations by a dramatic incident at Kenora, Ontario, that began during our yearly meeting sessions. (Brief background here.) Shortly afterwards, I was involved in helping host the termination point in Ottawa for a Native Caravan in fall 1974. Their arrival at Parliament Hill was disrupted by a riot, provoked by a small contingent of radicals that I don't think was part of the Caravan, and by an overreaction on the part of the RCMP. I was in a group that got caught in between these two forces. That was my first, and so far only, personal encounter with riot police in full gear.
Canadian Friends worked at Kenora for peaceful resolution of the crisis, and after the direct conflict ended, they also helped arrange for expert analysis of the mercury pollution situation that had been a contributing factor in the crisis. To this day, a concern for justice for Aboriginal people has remained important to Canadian Friends.
At our quarterly meeting sessions in Eugene, Dove's workshop touched on the mixed record Friends have had over the centuries. William Penn gets credit for honest dealing with American Indians in negotiating for land. His son Thomas was another story, notorious for the 1737 "Walking Purchase" that cheated the Lenape nation in a rigged land purchase. John Woolman and other exemplary Friends believed that Quakers and Native Americans could learn from each other, but as the appetite of European Americans for land and resources grew, Friends participated in the many evil ways by which the original inhabitants were forced to adapt. In place of the violent elimination of obstinate Indians -- the old conventional wisdom -- Friends advocated a new conventional wisdom, to civilize and christianize. That was the liberal view of their day. Just around the same time as Marshall's decision, Friends participated in setting up some of the first of the extensive network of church-run boarding schools into which Native American children were placed, with or without family approval, with the more or less explicit goal of making them more like white Protestants.
It is easy now to mock Friends for their participation in this approach, but that would imply unfairly that all Native Americans were only passive victims. It would marginalize those who, for example, made deliberate choices for Christianity, and whose own churches continue to this day, including a few Friends meetings. For a hint of this more complex reality, read this article about the Christian Reformed Church's 2016 Synod at which the Discovery Doctrine was declared a heresy.
"Heresy" is the right word. The Discovery Doctrine was not just defective colonial-era political theology. It was yet another face of our ancient enemy -- the primordial sin of objectification, of false witness, of denying the sacred image of God that lets us all regard each other as we regard Christ. For this reason, the first motion in answering the question with which I started this post ("What does an apology ... to Native Americans look like?") should be prayer. We need humility, curiosity, endless love as well as boldness. We need to overcome the double paralysis of Realpolitik and smug superiority. We need to confront racism that is so deeply embedded in our systems that I am sure the word "diabolical" is not too strong. We can't just choose from a political menu; in shaping and addressing any apology well, we need the leading and power of the Holy Spirit, and the cross-shaped (cross-cultural, cross-political, cross-fertilizing) community that the Spirit makes possible.
Does an apology include some form of restitution or reparations? This question comes up in relation to slavery as well as our nation's evil record of relations with Native Americans. I can list the defensive objections that might arise:
It was so long ago.
I earned what I have.
Not guilty! As an immigrant, I have an alibi. (For example, I was born in Norway. We Norwegians did our own Viking-era mischief much longer ago!)
Mostly freeloaders will benefit, not honest victims.
I think these objections miss the point, spiritually.
It's not just that murder and genocide don't have statutes of limitations, although that's true. (John Marshall's interpretation of the Discovery Doctrine, that it's too late to reverse the consequences of conquest, should not still be allowed to decide things.) The main point is that repeated clusters of deliberate, organized cruelty, resulting in massive suffering, become almost like nodes of demonic oppression.
Whether you believe in an intelligent Satan (along the lines of Peter Wagner's ideas) or a more impersonal mechanism of demonic evil (Walter Wink), we shouldn't pretend that such nodes just go away. Their evil persists. The basis for apology and repentance is not white guilt or shame or any form of self-flagellation. Instead, it is to conduct spiritual warfare against the demons of racism and oppression and false witness, to declare them off-limits in the land that we now share, so that we can conduct our future stewardship -- and make our public investments -- in freedom and mutual regard.
Who lived here in the area now named Portland, Oregon, and who are their descendants? This (pdf) booklet begins to give some answers.
Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends, May 18, 2018, opening session.
Immediately [after feeding the multitudes; context] Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Later that night, he was there alone, and the boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it. Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” “Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.” “Come,” he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!” Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?” And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”
When Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends opened its very first annual sessions as an established body, about two months ago in Canby, Oregon, USA, I was practically holding my breath with excitement and anticipation. During our opening worship, Matthew's account of Jesus, the disciples, and the water came to my mind. I quickly realized why: we were Peter, stepping out of the boat. Would we have the necessary faith?
The parallels with Matthew's gospel aren't perfect. We weren't simply on our way to the next stop; our boat was more like a lifeboat dropped from the shifting deck of Northwest Yearly Meeting. (Nautical metaphors might be a bit risky; some would say we were forced to walk the plank!) One thing we had in common with Peter: We had asked Jesus to command us, and he did.
Here we're among those receiving
certificates as recorded ministers.
Step one, conducting business as disciples who love each other: We were a completely new yearly meeting, a new association of Quakers, with only a few quarterly rehearsals under our belts, but I was impressed to see how well we worked together. Important decisions were discussed and approved. (You're invited to access minutes through this page.) We named committees and officers. We received a treasurer's report and approved a budget. We recognized ministers. We received visitors from other parts of the Quaker world.
It seemed to me that we took that first step without sinking. Much of the practical credit goes to clerk Cherice Bock, who led us with grace and patience and sensitivity.
Step two, building our identity: Here we really had to decide whether we as a body were in fact walking toward Jesus. Some of our churches are uncomplicatedly and unaffectedly Christian, culturally indistinguishable from other evangelical Friends congregations, except for the refusal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. None of our meetings identify as non-Christian, but some have more experience providing spiritual hospitality to people who have survived encounters with authoritarian religiosity. Those churches are particularly careful not to use Christian language in ways that could come across as glib and domineering. At our Canby sessions, this issue came up in considering what to require of applicants for membership. Rather than asking applicants to use specific language about themselves, we agreed to describe who we are -- a Christ-centered community -- and leave it up to applicants to decide whether this kind of community was something they wanted to join.
Once again, we grappled with a complex issue ... and did not sink.
We're not out of the water yet, so to speak. We have more decisions to make, including the adoption of a book of discipline. Beyond these important identity-and-boundary concerns ... and intimately related to them ... are the questions that all we Quakers are bound to ask ourselves at all times: what does God want to say and do through us? Given our legacy of Quaker discipleship, what will be the shape of our peace witness, our evangelism, our Lamb's War against racism and elitism, our care for God's creation? What wider associations of Friends might help us in being faithful to God's leadings?
Beyond what is required to protect children and vulnerable members and attenders, we do not claim top-down authority over individual churches, but we will be free to develop shared services and ministries. What might those be? Will we collaborate on Christian education for children? Will we consider joining wider associations of Friends?
Referring to William Barber's message to Friends General Conference (see next item below), we're living in a time where there's just a lot of meanness. There will certainly be temptations to look down at the water, to fear the wind, to fall back on the tired answers of the past. To be honest, I feel those temptations multiple times a day. I want to keep going step by step toward Jesus, knowing that even if I slip, I can still say, with Peter, "Lord, save me!"
About a week ago, William Barber II, a minister from Goldsboro, NC, and founder of Repairers of the Breach, addressed the annual gathering of Friends General Conference. Basing his message on Ezekiel 22:23-31, Barber traced four enmeshed sins (meanness in politics; misuse of the courts; misdirection of the masses; and theological malpractice) from Ezekiel's time, through the era of Lucretia Mott and Levi Coffin, right up to today.
At 47:40 he says,
And we ended up in America with a president steeped in racism, narcissism, economic isolationism, and we ended up with a majority Congress so paid off by the corporate backers that they would sell their own children's future out to get a tax cut to the wealthy, guns to the NRA, freedom to the insurance companies, deregulation to the polluters, and the right to oppress workers to the corporations, and more money, more money, more money to the military defense contractors and the war economy. That's where we are, that's the analysis.
And here we are, at a time -- we are saying in the Poor People's Campaign -- where once again, like Dr. King said, we have to address systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy, and militarism, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism, if we're going to turn this country around. And you can't separate any one of those from the others.
Why do I say that? Because systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy, and militarism, and the false moral narrative of Christian nationalism, has created a kind of meanness in politics, like in Ezekiel's day, like in Lucretia Mott's. There's a meanness in politics, a meanness we haven't seen as overt for a long time.
Early on, Barber refers to Ezekiel's indictment of false prophets. Toward the end, he returns to this theme: "...What we see now is a boldness of the false prophets, this kind of covering up and being puppets to the Empire rather than being prophets to the Empire." His call to Quakers: be still and quiet long enough to know we're called by God and not by ego and arrogance, and then speak out, act out, as true prophets -- as the moral witness of our time. (I recommend not skipping anything, but to hear his charge to Friends, go to 1:03:09.)
I remember this broadcast, especially the statement by Lyndon Johnson.
One of my most vivid memories of April 4, 1968, still with me after fifty years, was listening to U.S. president Lyndon Johnson's statement that evening concerning the assassination of Martin Luther King. I especially remember flinching with irritation when Johnson said, "I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King., who lived by nonviolence." Even at age fifteen I disliked the utilitarian salute to nonviolence, a salute that seemed to be intended to keep things peaceful on city streets rather than paying actual tribute to the values of nonviolent resistance.
All of this took place on my younger sister's fourth birthday.
I recounted more memories from that difficult evening and the days that followed back in this earlier blog post, entitled "April 4, 1968." (Text below; original here, with Jeremy Mott's comments.)
To describe the emotions in our home on April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King was assassinated, I have to go back to October 1962. I was nine years old, and was having a hard time decoding all the reasons my parents seemed so fearful. That was the month James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi, and the news (as I realize now, reviewing my fragmentary memories) was full of the violent resistance to his enrollment. For the first time, I heard my parents using a mysterious term, "knee-grow," an apparently anatomical term that made no sense as a source of fear, but it was clear that "knee-grows" were apparently causing big problems for the USA.
The anxieties of fall 1962 were only just beginning. Later that month, the Cuban missile crisis seared itself into my consciousness as the first major political crisis I can still clearly remember. I can picture the front pages of newspapers, showing the mobilized U.S. Navy imposing its "quarantine" around Cuba. The lesson of October for me: the world outside my home had the ability to make my parents very fearful.
It wasn't long before I understood what "Negro" really meant, but the twin dangers of black people and Communists in my parents' worldview were frequently confirmed. In the fall of 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. After we were supposed to be asleep, I heard my mother ask my father for reassurance that Lyndon Johnson was up to the task of confronting the Soviets. And their anxieties also had a local focus: Beginning with a voluntary program in 1963, Evanston's schools were becoming integrated.
In those years, we lived right on the boundary line between black Evanston and white Evanston, but my elementary school, Miller School (now a Montessori school), was halfway to Lake Michigan and almost completely white. During my elementary years, our school superintendents Oscar Chute and, later, Gregory Coffin, were both very committed to integration, and my parents (as we children realized from those late-night overheard conversations) were emphatically not. Well, at least my mother was not. She was the one who grew up surrounded by Nazi ideology.
By 1968, I was in my first year of high school. I started my diary on the first day of that year; little did I know on January 1 what a tumultuous year it would be. Most of my early entries were lists of television programs watched and (when baseball season started) White Sox scores. Hoyt Wilhelm, with his strange name and equally strange knuckleball pitch, was my hero that season. But normalcy came to an abrupt end on April 4, my younger sister's fourth birthday, when the electrifying and awful news came that Martin King had been killed.
My family went into crisis mode. My mother was sure that we white kids would be attacked if we showed up at school, so we were kept home for several days as I smoldered at our captivity. I used the time to listen to my home-made crystal radio (which received two stations, including WJJD, the "Country Gentlemen") and tried to make sense of what I was hearing. Finally back at school, our high school teachers encouraged us to understand the poison of racism--and I took them at their word, thus in a way proving correct my mother's worries about the Communists in the school administration.
The one thing I couldn't confess at school was the shock I felt at my mother's words, the very evening of King's death. I still remember the blonde end table next to the sofa where I was sitting; she sat on the other side. Between us was a table lamp with its brass base and spokes leading up to the socket and bulb. My mother said it served King right that he was murdered, because he had no right to bear the name of the great German reformer Martin Luther.
I suppose that I was still an atheist at that point, as were both my parents. But as I look back, I think my conversion may have begun with my attempts to confront and unravel that strange pronouncement. Soon after, I began to listen every Sunday night (surreptitiously, after bedtime) to the First Church of Deliverance radio broadcasts, hearing Rev. Clarence H. Cobbs pray for "the sick the shut-ins, and all those who love the Lord," always feeling strangely touched at that last phrase.
This meditation on April 4 ends with Martin Luther King's words to those who could not understand why he added a concern for peace and reconciliation to his racial justice portfolio. "Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?" To Martin King, Clarence H. Cobbs, Oscar Chute, and Gregory Coffin: thank you for your part in making these words so real for me. From humane schoolteachers and from radio voices, even from violence and words of hate so close at hand, came a new home, a new worldview, and a new purpose that keeps me going to this day.
Excerpt from Agronsky's interview on NBC.
During my years of teaching in Russia, Dr. King provided powerful lessons that were part of my vision for what I could do in the classroom:
His English usage and rhetoric showed how language could be mobilized to serve moral values.
The way he embedded the Bible into his speeches and conversations helped demonstrate the influence of the English-language Bible in public life. One of my class handouts was a biblically-annotated version of the "I have a dream" speech; another was a listing of significant phrases from this transcript of Martin Agronsky's interview of Dr. King not long after the Montgomery bus boycott.
He was a young man, not much older than my students, when he began changing the course of history.
Everything about him was a powerful refutation of racist stereotypes that are as pervasive in Russia as they are in the USA, and less frequently challenged.
Above all, he demonstrated how faith and civic engagement could serve each other. (My principle in the classroom was never to make tendentious comparisons between the USA and Russia, but provide tools for students to consider for themselves whether to use, or not.)
During my Ferguson Fellowship year at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, I drew upon Dr. King's sermons against the war in Viet Nam as part of my materials showing how evangelism and the Friends testimonies were interrelated. Excerpts are here.
And here's a link to David Finke's tribute to "the Doc," referencing nonviolence in its full perspective, a perspective that the U.S. president was not free to acknowledge on that bleak evening.
Yearly Meeting: a definition (from quakerinfo.org) Yearly Meeting refers to a larger body of Friends, consisting of monthly meetings in a general geographic area connected with the same branch of Friends. This body holds decision making sessions annually. The term "yearly meeting" may refer to the annual sessions, to the body of members, or to the organizational entity that serves the body of members. For most purposes, a yearly meeting is as high as Quaker organizational structure goes. Each of the 30+ yearly meetings in the U.S. has its own Faith and Practice, and there is no higher authority in the structure of the Religious Society of Friends, although yearly meetings network with each other through branch associations and other Friends organizations. [Also see wikipedia's definition.]
Eugene Friends Church and other Friends participating in the formation of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends are considering some Big Questions. We were in Medford, Oregon, last Sunday, so we missed the Eugene Friends Church worship service in which people contributed their answers to the first question right during worship.
Here for easy reference are the two questions:
Why are we joining together instead of going our separate ways? What holds Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting together? (Examples: Common beliefs/theology? Relationships? Friends' testimonies? Other?)
How should we make decisions that affect the whole of SCYMF? (Examples: refer all decisions to the yearly meeting as a whole? Choose reps to make some or all decisions? Let a specified group make urgent decisions? Other?)
I love the idea of inviting responses to these questions during worship. It is a wonderful way of expressing the importance of covenant and community -- and of transparent process. Has anyone else done something similar?
Exercises like this are also a good opportunity to reconsider the whole concept of a "yearly meeting" in an era where its usefulness is no longer taken for granted.
A couple of years ago, Micah Bales asked, "Is it Time to Get Rid of Yearly Meetings? " (My response: "Yearly meetings, myth and reality.") Just last summer, I had another long discussion about these themes with some Friends with ties to both Northwest and North Pacific yearly meetings. One Friend pointed out two important trends:
First, yearly meetings may be evolving from a model based on geography and shared history, to a model based more on shared theology or ideology. This trend goes back nearly two centuries, if not longer.
Second, a crucial function of those wider bodies -- mutual accountability and particularly the role and preparation of elders -- is weakening in the old system and is being at least partially replaced by more informal processes and by new institutions such as the School of the Spirit.
I don't want to pour cold water on any sorts of experimentation that might help renew Friends discipleship and provide love and accountability for local Quaker meetings and churches. But I still love the old concentric model that I described in the "myth and reality" post. Maybe one reason it seems less attractive is because we've just taken it for granted rather than deliberately investing our enthusiasm and commitment.
In some cases, maybe we've over-bureaucratized yearly meetings and routinized business rather than expecting our gatherings to serve as the forum where we ask each other whether Truth is prospering in each of our local settings, and how we need to coordinate with each other to meet the needs in places where our testimonies are being challenged. As we consider a world full of spiritual, social, and economic bondage, are we too busy maintaining our systems to consider these challenges creatively? Can we make room for new partnerships between the old yearly meeting-as-forum and new initiatives? Two generations ago, such partnerships included the New Call to Peacemaking and Right Sharing of World Resources. What are today's experiments in partnership?
I have heard of a couple of yearly meetings that have experimented with a radically simplified agenda -- if only for one annual session. How did it go? I was present for one such experiment, a carefully planned session of Iowa Yearly Meeting FUM at which most routine business was set aside to consider whether to remain in Friends United Meeting. This example was a response to a specific crisis, but maybe at another time and place, the sheer urgency of focusing on the needs of people who have never heard of us would be "crisis" enough.
The Iowa example brings up another huge problem: local Friends have come to associate "yearly meeting" (the annual gathering as well as the ongoing structure) with conflict and church politics. I've heard this complaint in many places. We might be too busy arguing instead of figuring out together how to build our prophetic and healing presence in the world. We desperately need to restore the ability to extract value from conflicts and diversity instead of hiding or suppressing them.
We also need to learn how to deal with those among us who actually (perhaps subconsciously) love conflict and are too fond of being partisan heroes.
I'm not ready to give up on the yearly meeting as an institution worth preserving and re-energizing. The simplicity of the concentric structure has a huge advantage, as long as its processes are prayer-driven and transparent. A yearly meeting serves as a clear and constant and public access point into the web of relationships that is the Quaker family beyond the local church.
Ideological and programmatic associations may come and go; they may focus on specific initiatives; often, they may be the long shadows of gifted individuals. In the meantime, the yearly meeting can keep plodding along, not seeking to out-dazzle its partners, but cherishing relationships, channeling resources, and providing mutual accountability for those initiatives, and always asking, does Truth prosper?
My responses to the "big questions" are based on my love for this traditional concentric organization of the Friends church. The church is nothing more or less than the people who have -- now and throughout history -- gathered around Jesus, learning what it means to live with him at the center, and helping each other to live that way, including its ethical consequences. This learning and mutual support, and our desire to make this kind of community accessible to others who would be blessed as we have been, are the elements that connect us. No matter how far beyond the local church we go on the organizational chart, God remains at the center.
When we make decisions that affect the individuals, and (in the next level of connection) our member churches and meetings, those decisions ought to be made by people we can trust and hold accountable, and to whom we've granted authority to hold us accountable for our commitments. We choose these people based on the spiritual gifts we see in them, and on our experience of their trustworthiness, not on their social status. I like the way Eugene Friends are instructed concerning decision-making at meetings for business: everyone may attend and contribute, but the presiding clerk looks to members and active attenders in discerning when a decision has been reached.
Our leaders and representatives can make decisions on our behalf when necessary, but basic decisions on faith and practice should, sooner or later, be ratified by all committed participants in the meeting or yearly meeting. And the default question remains, "What does God want to say and do through us?"
Street-naming as political theatre: In Washington, DC, local politicians are considering renaming a section of Wisconsin Avenue -- the section in front of the Russian embassy -- Boris Nemtsov Plaza in honor of the assassinated opposition leader. The desire to embarrass is blatant and (to my mind) just plain stupid. However, instead of making its predictable objections, the Russian foreign ministry could have neutralized all that scheming by simply deciding to treat the whole thing positively: "Thank you for honoring our former cabinet member and vice premier, tragically cut down in his prime!"
Russia and America have spent the last 100 years as mirrors held up to one another, revealing in excruciating detail both the loftiness of our ambitions and our frequent failures to live up to them. Indeed, our almost ubiquitous failures to live up to them. Russia and America – and perhaps the west more broadly – have constructed their contemporary selves with clear and abiding reference to one another: the American way was American because it was the rejection of the Soviet way, and vice versa.
