1990s Posts

There's a nice remembrance of George Willoughby by the Brandywine Peace Community's Bob Smith over on the War Resisters International site. George died a few days ago at the age of 95 [updated]. It's hard not to remember his favorite quip as he and his wife Lillian celebrated their 80th birthdays: "twenty years to go!" Neither of them made it to 100 but they certainly lived lives more full than the average people.

I don't know enough of the details of their lives to write the obituary (a Wikipedia page was started this morning) but I will say they always seemed to me like the Forrest Gump's of peace activism--at the center of every cool peace witness since 1950. You squint to look at the photos at there's George and Lil, always there. Or maybe pop music would give us the better analogy: you know how there are entire b-rate bands that carve an entire career around endlessly rehashing a particular Beatles song? Well, there are whole activist organizations that are built around particular campaigns that the Willoughby's championed. Like: in 1958 George was a crew member of the Golden Rule (profiled a bit here), a boatload of crazy activists who sailed into a Pacific nuclear bomb test to disrupt it. Twelve years later some Vancouver activists stage a copycat boat sailing which became Greenpeace. Lillian was concerned about rising violence against women and started one of the first Take Back the Night marches. If you've ever sat in an activist meeting where everyone's using consensus, then you've been influenced by the Willoughby's!

Max Carter gave the Bible Association of Friends this past weekend at Moorestown (NJ) Friends Meeting. Max is a long-time educator and currently heads the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program at Guilford College, a program that has produced a number of active twenty-something Friends in recent years. The Bible Association is one of those great Philadelphia relics that somehow survived a couple of centuries of upheavals and still plugs along with a mission more-or-less crafted at it's founding in the early 1800s: it distributes free Bibles to Friends, Friends schools and any First Day School class that might answer their inquiries.

Max's program at Guilford is one of the recipients of the Bible Association's efforts and he began by joking that his sole qualification for speaking at their annual meeting was that he was one of their more active customers.

Many of the students going through Max's program grew up in the bigger East Coast yearly meetings. In these settings, being an involved Quaker teen means regularly going to camps like Catoctin and Onas, doing the FGC Gathering every year and having a parent on an important yearly meeting committee. "Quaker" is a specific group of friends and a set of guidelines about how to live in this subculture. Knowing the rules to Wink and being able to craft a suggestive question for Great Wind Blows is more important than even rudimentary Bible literacy, let alone Barclay's Catechism. The knowledge of George Fox rarely extends much past the song ("with his shaggy shaggy locks"). So there's a real culture shock when they show up in Max's class and he hands them a Bible. "I've never touched one of these before" and "Why do we have to use this?" are non-uncommon responses.

None of this surprised me, of course. I've led high school workshops at Gathering and for yearly meeting teens. Great kids, all of them, but most of them have been really shortchanged in the context of their faith. The Guilford program is a good introduction ("we graduate more Quakers than we bring in" was how Max put it) but do we really want them to wait so long? And to have so relatively few get this chance. Where's the balance between letting them choose for themselves and giving them the information on which to make a choice?

There was a sort of built-in irony to the scene. Most of the thirty-five or so attendees at the Moorestown talk were half-a-century older than the students Max was profiling. I pretty safe to say I was the youngest person there. It doesn't seem healthy to have such separated worlds.

Convergent Friends

Max did talk for a few minutes about Convergent Friends. I think we've shaken hands a few times but he didn't recognize me so it was a rare fly-on-wall opportunity to see firsthand how we're described. It was positive (we "bear watching!") but there were a few minor mis-perceptions. The most worrisome is that we're a group of young adult Friends. At 42, I've graduated from even the most expansive definition of YAF and so have many of the other Convergent Friends (on a Facebook thread LizOpp made the mistake of listed all of the older Convergent Friends and touched off a little mock outrage--I'm going to steer clear of that mistake!). After the talk one attendee (a New Foundation Fellowship regular) came up and said that she had been thinking of going to the "New Monastics and Convergent Friends" workshop C Wess Daniels and I are co-leading next May but had second-thoughts hearing that CF's were young adults. "That's the first I've heard that" she said; "me too!" I replied and encouraged her to come. We definitely need to continue to talk about how C.F. represents an attitude and includes many who were doing the work long before Robin Mohr's October 2006 Friends Journal article brought it to wider attention.

Techniques for Teaching the Bible and Quakerism

The most useful part of Max's talk was the end, where he shared what he thought were lessons of the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program. He

• Demystify the Bible: a great percentage of incoming students to the QLSP had never touched it so it seemed foreign;
• Make it fun: he has a newsletter column called "Concordance Capers" that digs into the derivation of pop culture references of Biblical phrases; he often shows Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" at the end of the class.
  
• Make it relevant: Give interested students the tools and guidance to start reading it.
• Show the genealogy: Start with the parts that are most obviously Quaker: John and the inner Light, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.
• Contemporary examples: Link to contemporary groups that are living a radical Christian witness today. This past semester they talked about the New Monastic movement, for example and they've profiled the Simple Way and Atlanta's Open Door.
• The Bible as human condition: how is the Bible a story that we can be a part of, an inspiration rather than a literalist authority.

Random Thoughts:

A couple of thoughts have been churning through my head since the talk: one is how to scale this up. How could we have more of this kind of work happening at the local yearly meeting level and start with younger Friends: middle school or high schoolers? And what about bringing convinced Friends on board? Most QLSP students are born Quaker and come from prominent-enough families to get meeting letters of recommendation to enter the program. Graduates of the QLSP are funneled into various Quaker positions these days, leaving out convinced Friends (like me and like most of the central Convergent Friends figures). I talked about this divide a lot back in the 1990s when I was trying to pull together the mostly-convinced Central Philadelphia Meeting young adult community with the mostly-birthright official yearly meeting YAF group. I was convinced then and am even more convinced now that no renewal will happen unless we can get these complementary perspectives and energies working together.

PS: Due to a conflict between Feedburner and Disqus, some of comments are here (Wess and Lizopp), here (Robin M) and here (Chris M). I think I've fixed it so that this odd spread won't happen again.

An update to Save St Mary's campaign Julie's gotten so involved with. She's now finished typing in a 1990s-era church history and put up a report of today's rally, along with some pictures. Very cool.

My friend Peter Blood is part of a group organizing a Young Friends North America camp in Barnesville, Ohio this June and he asked that I help get word out about it. The first few days are a reunion for not-so-young-anymore Friends (YFNA more or less wound down in the late 1990s). The second part is the camp, which hopes "to bring together Friends from all branches of Quakerism, to share what Spirit-led Quakerism is about at its core--and to experience it together." Check out the Camp's schedule for details on what this looks like.

The handy-dandy Friends Historical Dictionary says YFNA started in the mid-1950s. I've heard enough stories (and met some YFNA couples) to know it was a very important touchstone for a few generations of young Friends. I've been involved in a couple of failed YFNA resuscitation attempts over the last few years and can't tell you why none of them took. It could be economics (high gas prices and high college loans keeping most 20-somethings from being too free-range) or simple demographics (too few Gen X Friends). Perhaps other events like the FGC Gathering fulfilled the young Quaker hook-up function well enough.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad to see that reunion is tied into a free-form camp that doesn't seem to be trying to be a YFNA organizing meeting (at this point reviving YFNA has the same empty guffaw punch as the kids now nostalgically calling themselves the new SDS). It seems like there's more Quaker youth organizing going on, which is great, and I hope the camp helps that momentum.

Update: I've put up an YFNA Reunion/Camp page up over in the events section of QuakerQuaker to follow any of the blog chatter about the gathering.

Getting right back on the horse, I'm teaching Quakerism 101 at Moorestown NJ Meeting Wednesday evenings starting in a few weeks. The original plan was for the most excellent Thomas Swain to lead it but he's become rather busy after being tapped to be yearly meeting clerk (God bless 'im). He'll be there for the first session, I'll be on my own for the rest. A rather small group has signed up so it should be nice and intimate.

For the last year I've been pondering the opportunities of using mid-week religious education and worship as a form of outreach. Emergent Church types love small group opportunities outside of the Sunday morning time slot and it seems that mid-week worship is one of those old on-the-verge-of-death Quaker traditions that might be worth revitalizing and recasting in an Emergent-friendly format.

Last Spring I spent a few months regularly attending one of the few surviving mid-week worships in the area and I found it intriguing and full of possibilities but never felt led to do more. It seemed that attenders came and went each week without connecting deeply to one another or getting any serious grounding in Quakerism.

Reflecting on the genesis of a strong Philadelphia young adult group in the mid-1990s, it seemed like the ideal recipe would look something like this:

• 6pm: regular religious ed time, not super-formal but real and pastoral-based. This would be an open, non-judgemental time where attenders would be free to share spiritual insights but they would also learn the orthodox Quaker take on the issue or concern (Barclay essentially).
• 7pm: mid-week worship, unprogrammed
• 8pm: unofficial but regular hang-out time, people going in groups to local diners, etc.

Unprogrammed worship just isn't enough (just when y'all thought I was a dyed-in-the-plain-cloth Wilburite....) . People do need time to be able to ask questions and explore spirituality in a more structured way. Those of us led to teaching need to be willing to say "this is the Quaker take on this issue" even if our answer wouldn't necessarily pass consensus in a Friends meeting.

People also need time to socialize. We live in an atomized society and the brunt of this isolation is borne by young adults starting careers in unfamiliar cities and towns: Quaker meeting can act as a place to plug into a social network and provide real community. It's different from entertainment, but rather identity-building. How do we shift thinking from "those Quakers are cool" to "I'm a Quaker and I'm cool" in such a way that these new Friends understand that there are challenges and disciplines involved in taking on this new role.

Perhaps the three parts to the mid-week worship model is head, spirit and heart; whatever labels you give it we need to think about feeding and nurturing the whole seeker and to challenge them to more than just silence. This is certainly a common model. When Peggy Senger Parsons and Alivia Biko came to the FGC Gathering and shared Freedom Friends worship with us it had some of this feel. For awhile I tagged along with Julie to what's now called The Collegium Center which is a Sunday night Catholic mass/religious ed/diner three-some that was always packed and that produced at least one couple (good friends of ours now!).

I don't know why I share all this now, except to put the idea in other people's heads too. The four weeks of Wednesday night religious ed at Moorestown might have something of this feel; it will be interesting to see.

For those interested in curriculum details, I'm basing it on Michael Birkel's Silence and Witness: the Quaker Tradition (Orbis, 2004. $16.00). Michael's tried to pull together a good general introduction to Friends, something surely needed by Friends today (much as I respect Howard Brinton's Friends for 300 Years it's getting old in the tooth and speaks more to the issues of mid-century Friends than us). Can Silence and Witness anchor a Quakerism 101 course? We'll see.

As supplementary material I'm using Thomas Hamm's Quakers in America (Columbia University Press, 2003, $45), Ben Pink-Dandelion's Convinced Quakerism: 2003 Walton Lecture (Southeastern Yearly Meeting Walton Lecture, 2003, $4.00), Marty Grundy's Quaker Treasure (Beacon Hill Friends House Weed Lecture, 2002, $4.00) and the class Bill Tabor pamphlet Four Doors to Quaker Worship (Pendle Hill, 1992, $5.00). Attentive readers will see echos from my previous Quakerism 101 class at Medford Meeting.

We're told this week that the sovereignty of iraq has been transfered back to the iraqi people. What if it were true! But sadly, every nation lost some measure of their sovereignty two years ago when the Bush Administration trumped up its flimsy evidence of an iraqi weapons of mass destruction program and began arming for its second war.

It is now American foreign policy to wonder aloud which nation should host the next American war against terror. It's kind of like the Olympics, but for loser countries that don't have American investments. Afghanistan in 2001, iraq in 2003, with a competition between Iran and Libya to host 2005. Cue the uplifting music and roll out the new graphic design. Pretty soon we'll be tag-teaming the Wars on Terror and the Olympics for greater return on investment. How about North Korea's Pyongyang for the 2009 War on Terror and South Korea's Seoul for the 2008 Olympics? The reporter pool could be shared and administrative overhead slashed. The handover of power could be combined with the handover of the torch, which the terrorists could use to set off a series of bombs. Seriously, the Bush Administration has told the world that it will trump up rationales for war against any country that crosses its path. What does sovereignty mean in this kind of world?

The situation in iraq is hardly prosperous, stable, free or sovereign. We have a government whose electors, candidates and constitutional process was designed by the American occupation force under L. Paul Bremen III. "Our leaders are just toys" said an iraqi storekeeper quoted by the New York Times and I have to agree. The new iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, worked closed with the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. All of the new leadership will be either former top aids to Saddam Hussein or former CIA agents. How much power really has changed this past week? How much has even really changed these past two years? One of the last laws passed by Bremer on his way out the door was to grant American contractors immunity from iraqi laws. That's the act of an occupier, not a friendly ally about to transfer sovereignty.

Last July President Bush taunted iraqi insurgents: "There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring them on." Insurgents still bomb and kidnap foreign contractors. A year later American tanks and Humvees still rumble through iraqi streets. The much ballyhooed transfer of power is yet more Bush Administration spin, aimed at the American people, whose message is that the war is over. But nothing changed this week. American troops remain in iraq, unable really to either leave or stay: either option brings more instability, chaos and terror to the country. I've campaigned against Saddam Hussein for over a decade--my opposition dates to the era when he was a U.S. ally and could do no wrong. But even I have to wonder if we're leaving the country worse off than we found it.

I've been finding it a bit difficult to comment on all the recent news on the iraq front. So much of it isn't so much news as it is details. We've long known the Bush Administration cooked the data on Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction. It was no secret that key people in his Administration spent the 1990s planning a war against iraq and it's no surprised that they saw the 9/11 terrorist attacks as there way of whipping up war fever against an uninvolved country.

It shouldn't be a surprise that there is a strong iraqi opposition to the American occupation. We could have predicted that Afghanistan would festers largely ignored, mired in lawlessness after the Bush Administration turned it's hungry eyes to iraq. Do we really think American citizens as somehow incapable of the gross human rights violations when put in charge of unmonitored iraqi prisons? Ever since Saddam Hussein's government fell, the U.S. has been puting his key military aids in charge of much iraq, so why are we suprised that the once-fearsome Republican Guard has been reconstitute as an American-controlled force to put down Fallujah's rebellion? Militarism is militarism and the flag on a soldier's uniform doesn't provide any guarantee that a stated desire for human rights or democracy will be put before the military insistance on psychological and physical control.

What then should the peace movement's response to all this be?

We need to not get too caught up in the details. We've known what's been happening for years and we know what happens in military occupations. If there's one theme I come back to again and again on Nonviolence.org, it's that wars start decades before the first shots are fired. Christians will argue that wars are rooted in our lusts (James 4:1-3) but even the most pragmatic secularlist should agree that our S.U.V.-driving, energy-wasting lifestyles are behind our recent oil wars, geopolitical battles fought on territories vital to the resource needs of the U.S. and its allies.

Pacifists need to start focusing on and shouting about the root causes of our wars. We need to stop not only the current ongoing wars in iraq and Afghanistan, but the future wars whose seeds are being sown now in places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Palestine and Indonesia.

We also need to broaden our definition of "nonviolence." While we work with "anti-war" coalitions, we are not the same as them. We are not just against particular wars, but all wars and not just the ones fought with bullets between nation states. We are against the everyday wars of people oppressing other people through economics, sexism, racism, ageism and a thousand other mechanisms. When we speak out about environmental damage, we are stopping war. When we talk about lifestyle choices like vegetarianism and living car-free in transit-friendly cities, we are stopping war. When we fight for minimum wage and for stopping third-world sweatshops, we are stopping war. A few protests in Washington, D.C. won't stop our wars and neither will intricately-argued essays on Bush Administration manipulations. We need to build a culture of pacifism, we need to become conscientious objectors to the consumerism of our society.

I'd be curious to hear what other pacifists are doing these days. Over the past six months I've been focusing more on the roots of my pacifism, the Quaker peace Testimony (and exploring an unexpected expression of anti-consumerism in a re-examination of the Quaker tradition of plain dress). The most exciting essays I've read lately were from a collection of talks in the 1950s. I suspect other nonviolent activists have been looking at roots in the wake of these wars. What are other folks doing?

PS: The eternally-underfunded coffers of Nonviolence.org are dwindling again and we might not be able to pay this month's bill. Donations would be muchly-appreciated, thanks!