Christmas shorts

Why I still call myself a pacifist. One of my friends at Reedwood Friends Church often says that she prefers the word "peacemaker" to "pacifist"; the latter word connotes passivity to too many people.

I prefer to defend a word whose popular understanding still bears some resemblance to the meaning that its bearers, and the dictionary, would own. (Wikipedia: "Pacifism covers a spectrum of views ranging from the belief that international disputes can and should be peacefully resolved, to absolute opposition to the use of violence, or even force, under any circumstances." Wordnet: "The doctrine that all violence is unjustifiable.") The word "peacemaker" has its own set of valuable references, but also for me carries an echo of the old U.S. military tagline, "Peace is our profession."

As we prepare to celebrate the symbolic birthday of the Prince of Peace, the topic of pacifism came back to me because of Richard M.'s thoughtful post on the subject, "Witness," and the comments that followed. I continue to cling to the conviction that the human species will probably fight as long as we are (honestly) still animals with overdeveloped nervous systems. But I also believe that the believing animal can be freed from fear, and his or her herd instinct can be accessed and engaged toward commitment to a community whose ethics and behavior remove violence as the default option for an ever-increasing variety of threats.

Jesus is the way I, a human animal, have a relationship with the Creator of all us animals, a Creator who gave us our bodies and capacities--including a capacity for spiritual awareness. Being able to trust that Jesus means what he says (as in "love your enemies"; "I will be with you always, to the end of time"; and "I go to prepare a place for you") is just what I need to loosen my grip on violent solutions. Nothing more, but certainly nothing less.

Thank you for keeping the reality in pacifism for me, Jesus, and Happy Birthday!!


Looking over the past year's blog entries, I realize that I repeat myself a lot, but that's okay because a month after I've written one, nobody is looking at it anymore anyway. Usually, that's no big loss, but sometimes those entries have hugely important comments written by others. For the category of "blog entry most improved by the comments," I nominate "Are Quakers marginal?--part two." [Late Christmas Eve PS: Bill Samuel has just added another interesting comment there. Thanks, Bill!] Second place: "Risk and resurrection."


Interesting conversations are taking place on both sides of the Atlantic concerning the public space Christianity (including the supposedly Christian holiday of Christmas) is entitled to take up. Simon Barrow's always-interesting "Faith in Society" blog has tracked this topic, particularly for the U.K.; for example, "Loosening Christianity from Christendom." (Ironic tangent: Simon also points us to this sad Ekklesia post, "Americans not sure where Bethlehem is, survey shows.")

It's popularly assumed that the U.K. has gone further than the USA in evicting Christianity, or at least Christendom, from its cultural catbird seat, but a perfectly parallel analysis isn't possible. For one thing, Christianity has cultural entrenchments in the United Kingdom that Americans do not have. Despite our incumbent's pretensions, the U.S. President is explicitly prohibited from defending The Faith. Yes, the Congress has chaplains and prayers, but no entity of government has any role in naming any church officer, and no church officer has any automatic entre into any chamber of government. While American culture and tradition is probably every bit as marinated in Christian symbols as Britain's, our sauce might arguably be spiced with less establishment-oriented, more rebellious forms of religiosity. In any event, however the Christian stuff is attached to the social fabric in either country, the staples and glue are applied differently here. (Some might say that our glue is tackier.)


On the subject of the public space taken up by Christmas, I am, as usual, a bundle of contradictions. On the one hand, I'm naive enough to wish that non-Christians could enjoy the cultural festival, with all its colorful decorations, not to mention commercial add-ons and plug-ins, that Christianity has somehow bequeathed to the larger culture, without feeling oppressed by the Christian origins of the festival. Just because an element of our nation's culture has roots in a religion doesn't make them poisonous (I want to hope)--otherwise, who would want to live in Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love"? Or in any city or state or community founded on explicit spiritual values and hopes, as thousands were?

On the other hand, why must Christians be so hypersensitive and pugnacious in defending the most superficial and almost incidental artifacts of our belief system?? Don't we want our public presence to be accompanied by the fragrant incense of faith, hope, and love, instead of threats of lawsuits and a rhetorical fist in the old kisser? To me, the most important reason for any manifestation of Christianity to be public is to provide evangelistic access points to "taste and see that the LORD is good," not to reinforce our sociopolitical status for internal gratification.

A Jewish colleague just IM'ed me "Merry Christmas" as she left work. What gives me some comfort is that we ordinary people will muddle through just fine, wishing each other "merry Christmas" and "happy holidays" with more than adequate intuition for both intent and audience, even as the intellectual athletes go round after round in either documenting or vainly resisting the collapse of arrogant Christendom.


Righteous links: Well, Lauren Sheehan isn't using the "Christmas" label for her "Soulstice" concerts at various McMenamin's locations in NW Oregon, including tomorrow's at Hotel Oregon in McMinnville, but I plan to try to get there anyway. She is a wonderful presenter of blues and folk music's spiritual dimension as well as its more overtly playful elements.

Here is great material for my thesis that our discipleship testimonies (including pacifism/peacemaking) are deeply evangelistic: Jerry Levin writes a Hebron Reflection, "We are the Message," on the Christian Peacemaker Teams' message board.

This might be a logical place for my biennial plug for my own forum on the subject of evangelism and the Friends testimonies. If you've already visited, nothing much has changed in the last few months, but if you've never looked, please visit and leave your comments. I keep intending to move it to another hosting service, but for the time being Network 54 seems to be doing a decent job preserving the material. (Pop-ups used to be a huge problem, but not so much anymore.)

Brian Ross probes the very limits of irony in his "Confessions of Emerging Guy" at TheOOZE dot com. It's worth gritting your teeth and reading to the end.

A harvest of inspiring links, all gathered in one place by Aj Schwanz in her reflection on Northwest Yearly Meeting's Board Retreat, "A Time to Gather and a Place to Share."

Adding to Robin M's list of "coming attractions": Reedwood Friends is hosting a Friends World Committee regional conference in March. Theme: Poverty, Compassion and Economic Justice. See FWCC Americas regional events page.

My YouTube-powered Christmas gift to blues lovers, Howlin' Wolf performing "How Many More Years?" (from 1965). As one commenter points out, it's a bit of period surrealism to see how all the women in the audience are dressed the same. [PS: The clip is from Shindig, which explains the women's attire. YouTube pulled the clip, so I've substituted one of the several copies on dailymotion.com.]

Howlin' Wolf - How Many More Years
Uploaded by soulpatrol

Friday P.S.: Righteous links

These shorts are to remind me to keep it short. My last post went way too long. These Web sightings are in no particular logical order or relationship.

First, Slate carried an interesting commentary by Amy Sullivan on Sen Obama's speech to the Pentecost 2006 meeting, mentioned in this earlier post. I confess that I didn't know how much venom was being spewed Obama's way (and also at those writing sympathetically about his speech) until I followed some of the link trails in her essay.

The Waterfront Blues Festival was a great success, reaching its goal of half a million dollars income for the Oregon Food Bank, and providing us blues music lovers a solid five days of ecstasy.

It was, however, sobering to see the demographics of the attenders. Perhaps 10% or fewer of the people I saw were what I'd call young adults. Most of the time I felt that my 53 years put me at the low end of the age range. Music aside, it felt like a boomer convention much of the time. A very NICE boomer convention, but chronologically sobering....

This year's harvest of performers I didn't know about before, but will be watching for, included the two International Blues Challenge winners who appeared at the Festival: Eden Brent, a wonderful keyboardist with a rollicking sense of showmanship and a voice like Janis Joplin; and Joey Gilmore, who could easily qualify as a young and mellow version of B.B. King. ("Mellow" refers to his easy stage personality, not to his guitar playing.)

Lauren Sheehan, whom I commented on last year, was back for three appearances, including two on the intimate Workshop stage. I arrived on day one just in time for her first appearance and was delighted to be greeted with a beautiful gospel song.

Blues music only accounts for about 5% of today's U.S. recorded music sales, if I remember correctly, but it's really an umbrella term for a whole bunch of subgenres, many of which were part of the festival. Saturday, for example, was zydeco day, and one of the best bands that day was T. Broussard and the Zydeco Steppers. Sunday was jug band day. (The Delmark Goldfarb Quartet were a high point.) Bill Rhoades' Harmonica Blowoff took place on Tuesday. British blues guitarist Ian Siegal appeared both in the acoustic segment and the big-stage full-out band context, doing well in both settings.

Speaking of blues, a few weeks ago I was in Atlanta, sharing a cemetery picnic lunch with a couple of co-workers and a human rights activist who told us about his search for music of all kinds that incorporate human rights themes. Right after I got back home, I was listening to the Roadhouse blues podcast and heard Corey Harris singing a song about police brutality, "5-0 Blues." The song is fascinating, both lyrically and musically—(featuring a tuba, which I don't hear much in a blues setting!). There's a link to the song in the playlist for that week's Roadhouse podcast.

George Lakoff, the "reframing" guru, posted an important suggestion on the Rockridge Institute website: The "war" in Iraq is not a war, it is an occupation, and we should stubbornly refer to it as such. To the average American, in wartime "these colors don't run," but every occupation must end.

The US won the war three years ago when Bush said, “Mission Accomplished”. Then the occupation started, and our troops were not trained or equipped for an occupation under predictably hostile circumstances. Finally getting the courage to tell the truth that the US is an occupying force drastically changes the picture in Iraq. You cannot “win” an occupation. “Cut and run” does not apply to an occupation. Occupiers have to leave; the only question is when and how.

Back in December 2004, I challenged the use of the word "war," but my challenge was essentially one of outrage. Maybe more of us could get behind a simple issue of accuracy. Especially us Quakers, who have a conceit about being "publishers of Truth" and about "speaking truth to power."

C. Wess Daniels wrote a helpful article for Quaker Life concerning the budding "convergent" movement among Friends, which I see as a movement toward converging dialogue, a source of new energy and creativity and renewal, rather than an actual large-scale convergence among Friends.

The secret truth that many Quaker leaders of the past don't mention is that, among the leadership of the larger Friends organizations, similar dialogues have taken place for decades, in venues such as Friends World Committee for Consultation, and the annual gatherings of the Superintendents and Secretaries of Yearly Meetings. Some of the participants in those dialogues probably treated them as personal retreats, not to be talked about much back home. But the tendency among some of the Evangelical Friends leaders to boycott these events is relatively recent.

The refreshing difference now is that the dialogue is taking place under people power, not just for the benefit of the managerial circles. (Note: I am NOT minimizing the importance of that benefit—I'm not a hypocrite; I benefitted!) Nobody requires official authorization or budgeting to participate. The ripples may go a lot further, thanks both to technology and to the fact that the participants in this converging dialogue acknowledge no organizational taboos. They're not afraid of being seen with each other.

Thanksgiving Shorts

I love Northwest Yearly Meeting! There's something so sturdy about this group. When I get frustrated at the apparent timidity, traditionalism, and uninspiring politics, there's still a day-in and day-out faithfulness that somehow doesn't give up.

So, for example, this year, lots of churches distributed this bulletin insert for the annual Thanksgiving Offering:

2005 Thanksgiving Offering Supporting Peace Educationfor Northwest Yearly Meeting How carefully have you examined your beliefs concerning war? Some thoughts from Ralph Beebe My uncle killed several Germans in World War I. Then one killed him. Uncle Lester was convinced he was protecting God's people. The Germans all wore belt buckles inscribed, "God is with us." How do we know when Jesus wants us to kill someone? The peace education program for NWYM is trying to help young people answer that question. I have read some of his letters, and am certain my Uncle Lester, a deevoted Christian, had never even considered whether Jesus might not want him to kill the Germans. Has the United States government ever done anything you thought was a mistake? If so, is it possible that one of those mistakes might be getting us into a war Jesus doesn't want us to fight? Yet if I am in the military, I have sworn to uphold my government and obey my superiors, whether or not my country made a mistake, whether or not Jesus wants me to kill another human being. The Board of Peace and Social Concerns is determined to make sure no young person from our Yearly Meeting is ever targeting someone with a rifle, or about to fire a missile or drop a bomb, without knowing for sure whether he or she is doing Jesus' will. We are determined to give our young people the opportunity to really ponder what Jesus said on the subject; to examine why most Christians today believe killing an enemy is acceptable and heroic; and to determine personally whether they believe Jesus teaches conscientious objection to all killing. In the final analysis each Christian's conscience is subject to the teachings of Jesus. We want to support our young people no matter what their decision. But unlike Uncle Lester, we don't want any of them to kill or be killed without having considered whether or not it is Jesus' will. What better offering of thanks can we make than to give such a gift to our precious children and grandchildren? The Northwest Yearly Meeting Board of Peace and Social Concerns invites you to make a donation this Thanksgiving in support of peace education throughout the Northwest.

There's no rule preventing people from outside Northwest YM supporting the peace education program. More information at the YM's Web site.

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Finally in print!! It seems like forever since we began working on the Friends International Library's trilingual version of Lighting Candles in the Dark, now entitled Power of Goodness. I thought I was in a hurry as I left the house yesterday for the gym, but then I spotted three book-sized packages almost underfoot by the front door. Even before I saw the name Edward Sargent on the return address label, I knew that these were the long-awaited copies of the book, which Edward so kindly transported from Moscow after the Friends House Moscow board meeting. (*sigh* ... The first meeting after the end of my service on that wonderful board.)

Here's more information on the book whose arrival made my day.

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The news from Baghdad continues to provide a constant incentive for prayer. Our friend Maxine wrote last week that a mortar shell landed on her apartment building's roof while she wasn't at home. This happened not long after a nearby restaurant was blown up, and shortly before the terror-bombing of a hotel she'd recently visited.

She concluded her sobering account with these words:

I feel a pattern coming on here. It seems that I'm always just missing these incidents.

Sometimes I wonder why. People who know CPT say that God watches over us, that it seems like the bad things never happen to us. I agree that God watches over us, but I don't believe that nothing bad may ever happen to us. It's part of the risk we take when we come here, when we decide to work in a place where these things happen. It's a conscious decision, for us as a group and for each of us individually (including me). It's not made lightly, and believe me we all struggle with it. The bottom line is we all feel like there is still enough reason to be here that's worth the risk.

That doesn't make it easy, it doesn't answer every question, but it speaks to the commitment of group of people who still think it's possible to change the world.

I'm glad to be part of that group.

So, here's the contradiction I face as her supposed friend: Am I glad she's part of that group? I'm very torn, actually.

Last week I wrote that, when society seems bent on sabotaging God's loving will, we need to take the risk to take our Jesus-centered "NO" to the level of a public phenomenon. That's part of what the Christian Peacemaker Teams do in Iraq and elsewhere. If each Friends church and meeting sent or at least supported a CPT team member, that would be a good start, but that would mean accepting risks, not just to reputation, but to life and limb. The honest truth is that I'd rather be there myself than on my knees here at home, praying for my friends' safety.

For now, here's how I resolve it: I trust the discernment process that Max and her friends used to choose service in Baghdad. Actually, I cling to that trust almost bodily.

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Quieter, but not sugary: Lauren Sheehan. The blues music that I usually favor is thumpy, bass-driven, cutting, and loud. Quieter, more folky variants often strike me as too wholesome to be the real thing. Usually, however, if I press myself beyond my customary ruts, I am pleasantly surprised, or occasionally overjoyed.

That's what happened to me at the Waterfront Blues Festival last summer when I heard Lauren Sheehan the first time. (I mentioned her and several others in this post.) She's both a musician and an educator, and she had both roles going in her Front Porch Stage appearance—for example, demonstrating the wonderful but vanishing genre of blues banjo.

Last week I ran into her in, of all places, a school meeting. I found out two interesting things—her background in Waldorf education (my father went to a Waldorf school in Norway) and the fact that her new CD, Two Wings, is doing well on the folk charts. And it deserves to. I'm so used to being carried by the volume and visceral power of blues music, it really is good for me to listen more carefully and explore, with the help of Sheehan's musicianship, the gorgeous structure underneath that power.

Her voice is just right for this music, too. It's in turns resonant and playful, and never gets mannered in that way that makes me grit my teeth when white musicians get in over their heads.

I like most of the songs on this CD, but a couple of them are especially fine. The traditional "Rising River Blues," is so delicate and beautiful and strong at the same time, it's almost painful. I loved what she did to adjust Robert Johnson's "Kind Hearted Woman" to make it a woman's song. And, wandering outside traditionally-defined blues, her voice collaborates wonderfully with Phil Wiggins's harmonica on her version of "Only One Only."

I spent much of yesterday listening at high volume to an Australian podcast dedicated to Howlin' Wolf. Truly a sonic feast. But after that, listening to Two Wings again was not a downer at all, just a delightfully cleansing contrast.

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Additional commentary not needed: Carol Joy Brendlinger's thoughts on linking producer and consumer through fair trade purchases; Is Frank Viola a Quaker without knowing it?; Quaker Life editor participates in a joint statement on the hotel bombing in Amman, Jordan; Love and fear: Rowan Williams quotes a prayer by Michael Leunig (from Simon Barrow's Faith in Society weblog).

Harvesting the festival

My Norwegian skin can take about five minutes of direct sunlight before burning. Despite all precautions, four days of the open-air Waterfront Blues Festival have had the expected result. Ecstasy has its cost.

It was all worth it. My skin is redder on the outside; inside, I'm still glowing in the dark. The big acts were all I had hoped for ... Charlie Musselwhite, for example, was as classy as ever. His restrained presentation depends on his rich voice and full-bore harmonica, and his great cut-loose band, including (if my eyes didn't deceive me) Frankie Randall on bass.

"Restrained" would not be the word for the very next performer, Buddy Guy, in his white overalls and floppy hat. I think he finished about two of his songs—usually he'd be jumping into the next song pretty much when he felt like it, as usual, with a few editorial comments along the way. You never know with Buddy; at one appearance he just breezes through the material with disappointing casualness, and the next time he's as intense and present as he could possibly be. This time he was somewhere in between, but good enough that I was glad I'd talked my two sons into coming.

Shemekia Copeland held nothing back. Her presence was so powerful that her choice of material—more R&B than blues most of the time—didn't put me off as much as I would have guessed. If I didn't particularly like the song, that just gave me more mental bandwidth to admire her incredible presentation. She was clearly delighted with the warm reception we gave her. I thought it took a lot of courage as well as showpersonship to abandon the microphone, as she did at one point, and sing to the open-air audience with just her amazing unamplified voice.

For the most part, aside from these headliners, I spent my days at the smaller stage where the lesser-known artists perform. Every year without fail some of those artists completely floor me with their excellence or sheer delightfulness. This year was no different.

Two years after Australian Fiona Boyes came, fresh from winning an International Blues Challenge award in Memphis, another IBC acoustic-guitar winner from Australia lit up that stage. Jimi Hocking was as quick-witted as he was quick-fingered.

At least two of the performers were interesting teachers as well as performers, sharing from their knowledge of American roots-music history. Local musician Lauren Sheehan and New Orleans' Spencer Bohren were both absolutely fascinating when they spoke as well as when they played.

And at least three of the bands were able, on a blazing hot midday, to put out that incredible combination of timing, funk, energy, great musicianship, humor (all that goes into the "heart and ass" formula) that transforms a show into a party. Last year's regional representatives to the IBC, the Rose City Kings; the band that should have won that honor this year, the Randy Oxford Band; and Diunna Greenleaf and Blue Mercy.

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It's yearly meeting season

Back in April 1997, I wrote about "an ideal yearly meeting" in my Quaker Life monthly column. I must have been in fantasy land: I wrote, "I hope that, this year, routine business in all our yearly meetings will get the one morning that it deserves (more or less!), and that the rest of the time is devoted to telling Jesus—and each other—in very personal terms what we have taught and whom we have healed. Then let's wait for God to tell us what to do in the coming year."

The whole editorial, for what it's worth, is here.