abuse Posts

As the evidence accumulates on the Follieri/Galante church-for-beach-house developer scandal, it's become something of a parlor game around the kitchen table to speculate on who will play all the characters in the upcoming mini-series. It's only a matter of time really. We've got a glam Eurotrash huckster, a Hollywood actress, the Sopranos-like mob vice president, Bill Clinton shady dealings with his all-but-pedophile drinking buddies--and of course the Diocese of Camden's Bishop Galante and at least one diocesan priest with a fondness for playing dress-up. It will only become more truth-is-stranger-than-fiction when a few more details work their way from open secret to FBI documentation and NY Post headlines.

So while it's not a surprise, there is a certain satisfaction in the latest media rumor that "Law & Order" is planning one of their classic "ripped from the headlines" dramatization of the scandal:

Raffaello's arrest was and still is the buzz in New York City's social circles....He was the ultimate con man; handsome, rich, smooth and with a celebrity girlfriend to make him seem legit. I'm sure this will be the highest-rated Law & Order episode next season.

There's enough angles to this story to fill an entire season of television so we don't know how prominent the Bishop's part will be. But L&O creator Dick Wolf grew up an altar boy at St. Patrick's cathedral in New York and the L&O costume department has more clerical outfits that Raffaello Follieri's closet. Wolf rarely misses the chance to throw a priest into the script. Whole seasons of the show were devoted to ripped-from-the-headlines pieces on the priest/bishop sex abuse scandal in the early 2000s and I'm sure a follow-up look at the web of financial fraud fueled (or at least justified) by the settlement payouts would be a big ratings hit.

I just wish Lennie Briscoe was still around to make the collar. BOMP BOMP.

Sometimes it seems as if moderns are looking back at history through the wrong end of the telescope: everything seems soooo far away. The effect is magnified when we're talking about spirituality. The ancients come off as cartoonish figures with a complicated set of worked out philosophies and prohibitions that we have to adopt or reject wholesale. The ideal is to be a living branch on a long-rooted tree. But how do we intelligently converse with the past and negotiate changes?

Let's talk Friends and music. The cartoon Quaker in our historical imagination glares down at us with heavy disapproval when it comes to music. They're squares who just didn't get it.

Getting past the cartoons

Thomas Clarkson, our Anglican guide to Quaker thought circa 1700, brings more nuance to the scruples. "The Quakers do not deny that instrumental music is capable of exciting delight. They are not insensible either of its power or of its charms. They throw no imputation on its innocence, when viewed abstractly by itself." (p. 64)

"Abstractly by itself": when evaluating a social practice, Friends look at its effects in the real world. Does it lead to snares and tempations? Quakers are engaged in a grand experiment in "christian" living, keeping to lifestyles that give us the best chance at moral living. The warnings against certain activities are based on observation borne of experience. The Quaker guidelines are wikis, notes compiled together into a collective memory of which activities promote--and which ones threaten--the leading of a moral life.

Clarkson goes on to detail Quaker's concerns about music. They're all actually quite valid. Here's a sampling:

• People sometimes learn music just so they can show off and make others look talentless.
• Religious music can become a end to itself as people become focused on composition and playing (we've really decontextualized: much of the music played at orchestra halls is Masses; much of the music played at folk festival is church spirituals).
• Music can be a big time waster, both in its learning and its listening.
• Music can take us out into the world and lead to a self-gratification and fashion.

I won't say any of these are absolute reason to ban music, but as a list of negative temptations they still apply. The Catholic church my wife belongs to very consciously has music as a centerpiece. It's very beautiful, but I always appreciate the pastor's reminder that the music is in service to the Mass and that no one had better clap at some performance! Like with Friends, we're seeing a deliberate balancing of benefits vs temptations and a warning against the snares that the choice has left open.

Context context context

In section iv, Clarkson adds time to the equation. Remember, the Quaker movement is already 150 years old. Times have changed:

Music at [the time of early Quakers] was principally in the hands of those, who made a livelihood of the art. Those who followed it as an accomplishment, or a recreation, were few and those followed it with moderation. But since those days, its progress has been immense... Many of the middle classes, in imitation of the higher, have received it... It is learned now, not as a source of occasional recreation, but as a complicated science, where perfection is insisted upon to make it worth of pursuit. p.76.

Again we see Clarkson's Quakers making distinctions between types and motivations of musicianship. The laborer who plays a guitar after a hard day on the field is less worrisome than the obsessed adolescent who spends their teen years locked in the den practicing Stairway to Heaven. And when music is played at large festivals that lead youth "into company" and fashions, it threatens the religious society: "it has been found, that in proportion as young Quakers mix with the world, they generally imbibe its spirit, and weaken themselves as members of their own body."

Music has changed even more radically in the suceeding two centuries. Most of the music in our lives is pre-recorded; it's ubiquitious and often involuntary (you can't go shopping without it). Add in the drone of TV and many of us spend an insane amount of time in its semi-narcotic haze of isolated listenership. Then, what about DIY music and singalongs. Is there a distinction to be made between testoterone power-chord rock and twee singer-songwriter strums? Between arenas and coffeehouse shows? And move past music into the other media of our lives. What about movies, DVS, computers, glossy magazines, talk shows. Should Friends waste their time obsessing over American Idol? Well what about Prairie Home Companion?

Does a social practice lead us out into the world in a way that makes it hard for us to keep a moral center? What if we turned off the mediated consumer universe and engaged in more spiritually rewarding activities--contemplative reading, service work, visiting with others? But what if music, computers, radio, is part of the way we're engaging with the world?

How to decide?

Finally, in Clarkson's days Friends had an elaborate series of courts that would decide about social practices both in the abstract (whether they should be published as warnings) and the particular (whether a particular person had strayed too far and fallen in moral danger). Clarkson was writing for a non-Quaker audience and often translated Quakerese: "courts" was his name for monthly, quarterly and yearly meeting structures. I suspect that those sessions more closely resembled courts than they do the modern institutions that share their name. The court system led to its own abuses and started to break down shortly after Clarkson's book was published and doesn't exist anymore.

We find outselves today pretty much without any structure for sharing our experiences ("Faith and Practice" sort of does this but most copies just gather dust on shelves). Monthly meetings don't feel that oversight of their members is their responsibility; many of us have seen them look the other way even at flagrantly egregious behavior and many Friends would be outraged at the concept that their meeting might tell them what to do--I can hear the howls of protest now!

And yet, and yet: I hear many people longing for this kind of collective inquiry and instruction. A lot of the emergent church talk is about building accountable communities. So we have two broad set of questions: what sort of practices hurt and hinder our spiritual lives in these modern times; and how do we share and perhaps codify guidelines for twenty-first century righteous living?

More from the U.S. War of Terror. Two years ago officials of the Central Intelligence Agency purposefully destroyed taped evidence of its torture program.

They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The CIA guys were put in a difficult position: more or less ordered by their President to torture prisoners suspected of belonging to al Qaeda in an moment of history--the tapes were made in 2002--when many Americans were willing to look the other way. But it should go without saying that torture is never okay, never justified. Many studies have proven it generally doesn't provide reliable information as the victim says whatever they think their captor wants to hear just to end the pain. How many court cases against real al Qaeda agents are going to have to be thrown out now that we know the evidence is a product of abuse?

There are times when men and women of honor have to say no to their superiors, no to their President and no to the American people, when they must draw a line in the sand for the sake of decency and humanity. That would have been hard enough in 2002. But to destroy the evidence is 2005 is pure obstruction of justice. The CIA is hiding the acts it performed in our name from us. Everyone involved in the cover-up and destruction belongs in jail. Let's hope for democracy's sake that they end up there.

There's some interesting follow-up on the Cindy Sheehan "resignation" (see yesterday's post). One fellow I corresponded with years ago gave a donation then sent an email urging us not to fall into despair. It's hard.

Go beyond Democratic Party fronts like MoveOne and you'll find the most of the peace movement is a ridiculously shoestring operation. Nonviolence.org's four month "ChipIn" fundraising campaign raised $50 per month but the sacrifice isn't just short-term--just try applying for a mainstream job with a resume chock full of social change work!

Michael Westmoreland-White over on the Levellers blog talks about keeping going through the despair:

This is a cautionary tale for the rest of us, including myself. Outrage, righteous indignation, anger, public grief, are all valid reactions to war and human rights abuses, but they will get us only so far. They may strain marriages and family life. They may lead to speech and action that is not in the spirit of nonviolence and active peacemaking. And, since imperialist militarism is a system (biblically speaking, a Power), it will resist change for the good. Work for justice and peace over the long haul requires spiritual discipline, requires deep roots in a spirituality of nonviolence, including cultivating the virtue of patience.

Michael's answer is specifically Christian but I think his advice to step back and attend to the roots of our activism is wise despite one's motivations.

Sheehan's retirement didn't stop her from talking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now this morning. She talks about cash-starved peace activists and contrasts them with the tens of millions presidential candidates are raising, most of which will go to big media TV networks for ads. Sheehan says we need more than just an antiwar movement:

Like, ending the Vietnam War was major, but people left the movement. It was an antiwar movement. They didn’t stay committed to true and lasting peace. And that’s what we really have to do.

More Cindy Sheehan reading across the blogosphere available via Google and Technorati.

And for those looking for a little good news check out the brand new site for the Global Network for Nonviolence. I designed it for them as part of my freelance design work but it's been a joy and a lot of fun to be working more closely with a good group of international activists again. Their nonviolence links page includes sites for some really committed grassroots peacemakers. This long-term peace work may not give us headlines in the New York Times but it's touched millions over the years. If humanity is ever going to grow into the kind of culture of peace Sheehan dreams of then we'll need a lot more wonderful projects like these.

Everyone can now add posts to the QuakerQuaker category listings. Simply bookmark the post in Del.icio.us, list the QQ categories and it will be added to the page.

For example, say you've seen just the coolest post on Convergent Friends. Go to the Convergent Friends page to find the right "tag"--in this case "quaker.convergent". Bookmark the post you like, write a title and description and list "quaker.convergent" as its tag. An hour or so later the post will show up on the Convergent Friends page. How cool is that? Here are instruction on how to use Del.icio.us and title pages.

The UK News Telegraph is confirming what many of us in the peace movement have been worrying about all day: that at least some of the four westerners abducted in iraq over the weekend were members of the Christian peacemakers Teams

A British anti-war activist abducted in iraq was investigating human rights abuses with a group called the Christian peacemakers Team when he was held.

Norman Kember, 74, the only publicly-named abductee, is a former secretary of the Baptist peace Fellowship in England and a board member of the English Fellowship of Reconciliation. He's been an outspoken opponent of the war in iraq. In the April/May 2005 edition of FOR's newsletter (pdf) he talked about challenging himself to do more:

Now personally it has always worried me that I am a ‘cheap’ peacemaker (by analogy with Bonhoeffer’s
concept of ‘cheap’ grace). Being a CO in Britain,talking, writing, demonstrating about peace is in no
way taking risks like young service men in iraq. I look for excuses why I should not become involved with
CPT or EAPPI. Perhaps the readers will supply mewithwith some?

Here at Nonviolence.org, I'm occassionally chatised for being more concerned about western victims of violence (indeed, how many iraqis were abducted or killed this weekend alone?). It's a fair charge and an important reminder. But perhaps it is only human nature to worry about those you know. I've probably met Norman in passing at one or another international peace gathering; I might well know the three unidentified abductees. I suspect a peace movement veteran like Kember would be the first to tell me that pacifists shouldn't sit contentedly in middle-class comfy armchairs simply souting slogans or dashing off emails (Quaker Johan Maurer, wrote an impassioned blog post about this just last week). Part of the reason folks put themselves on the lines for organizations like Christian peacemakers Teams is that they want to do their peace witness among those facing the violence. When the victims aren't just "them, over there" but to "us, and our friends, over there" it becomes more real. This is what the families of the American military casualties have been telling us. Now, with Kember and the three others missing, our worry is made more real. For better or worse, the peace movement is scanning the headlines from iraq with even more worry tonight.

Our prayers are with Kember, as they are with all the missing and all the victims of this horrible war.

The New York Times is reporting that "at least 26 prisoners have died in American custody in iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide, according to military officials."