decades Posts

Warning: this is a blog post about blogging.

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!

Earlier today I posted an excerpt of an interesting article on Anabaptism on my Tumblr blog and it's engendered quite a conversation on Facebook about testimonies and empty forms, etc. It's true that any form of spiritual discipline can get twisted into look-at-me heroism or lets-talk-anything-but-God group conformity.

The answer isn't to give up testimonies or to hold onto them even tighter, but instead to constantly remind ourselves about their purpose: to learn how to live as an attentive people of God. Here's what I wrote on Facebook:

I've been a mostly bicycle-riding vegan for decades, an outspoken pacifist and a frequent plain dresser. All of these practices have aided my spiritual growth but also have unearthed new sources of pride for me to wrestle with. The self-examination has been practice in discernment.

I often think back to the story of the Good Samaritan. What mattered wasn't how he was dressed or whether he was riding a bicycle. No, what mattered is that he knew enough to know he was being called to sacrifice something: to get covered in a strangers blood, to aid someone who might resent him for it, to lose money he had earned to put someone up for the night. Maybe he had practiced this discernment of self-sacrifice by living a testimony that had challenged him to navigate between loss and pride, and maybe he had been brought up in a community where the value of love was prized above all. The important thing is he knew to stop and be a true neighbor.

Apologies to Ralph DiGia, RIP, for the morbid link title. I met him a number of times in my associations with the War Resisters League (first through co-publishing books with New Society Publishers, then through a two year stint on the WRL National Committee). Ralph was an oasis in meetings packed to overflowing with outsized egos and self-important agendas. He was a warm guy, curious, always willing to lend a hand, a hard-working gem in the pacifist world.

• Derek @ Speaking truth: Burundian evangelical Quake jump boogie gospel (Video)
  DeRich Mullin's much loved '93 hit: "Our God Is An Awesome God" is also loved in Bujumbura, Burundi, central Africa.
  (tags: quaker quaker.videos quaker.africa)
• New DVD: Finding Our Voices
  Eight stories of civil dissent and resistance are woven together in 80 minutes of action to remind us that passionate individuals can take stands to persuade others to follow.
  (tags: nonviolence)
• Lifelong war resister Ralph DiGia, 1914-2008
  An associate of A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Dave Dellinger, Barbara Deming, and many others. While Ralph was not a public speaker or a writer, he played a key a role and was central to many of the major antiwar actions of the past six decades.
  (tags: nonviolence)
• New Blog: a quaker's flourishing faith
  I am currently working on a Ph.D. in which two of my passions intersect - Quaker history and Christian higher education. How do we navigate the postmodern matrix as Christians? How do we live as disciples of Christ today and into tomorrow?
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs)
• LizOpp on mixed weddings and Qr peer pressure
  Recently I shared with a committee on which I serve that as a Quaker, I'm not called to be faithful to other Friends in the meeting: I am called to be faithful to how God leads me, and I seek support to help me in my faithfulness and obedience.
  (tags: quaker quaker.convergent)

The bullets and bombs have finally found their mark. It is no surprise to learn of yet another assasination attempt against Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. Details are still sketchy and conflicting but the only thing we really need to know is that this attempt was successful and that Bhutto is dead less than two weeks before Parliamentary elections that might well have brought her into power for the third time.

Pakistan is a country who's top government scientist exported atomic bomb-making across the world for decades. It still hosts Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan's Taliban are still more-or-less headquartered in its Western provinces. The standoff with India has spawned war after war over the decade, now nuclear-enabled should either country get so emboldened. Billions of dollars of United States money has left Washington for Islamabad since 9/11 and a popular politician can't even campaign there without deadly assassination attempts. Pakistan is one of the world's hot spots, a nexus of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, religious extremism. It is a very sad day today indeed.

A few decades ago a little boy named Linus van Pelt sat in a pumpkin patch waiting in vain for the return of the Great Pumpkin (gotta love Wikipedia). Nowadays he might as well sit on his front stoop waiting for the trick-or-treaters. With the two hour "official" time almost at an end we've had only one lonely costumer come to our door. We ourselves went up and down the street (the last showing of the butterfly outfits) but only one in three houses opened their doors. Curiously, the most Halloween-decorated houses on the street were empty. Only one house with kids opened the door--it was grandma, who said her daughter had taken the granddaughter across town to a busy trick-or-treat street.

I used to live on Windsor Avenue, one of West Philly's best trick-or-treat streets, a magnet that drew ghosts, goblins and ballerinas from across that part of the city. It was a lot of fun. Over the years I developed a routine where I'd play a helpless victim on a spider web stretched with string across the back of the porch. I'd moan, "candy candy, give me some candy so I can go free." Eventually some brave little kid would inch up and give me candy, whereupon I'd scream "I'm free, now I can steal your candy, hahaha!" Little kid screams raised in alarm as I lunged at them. I often kept the candy and once counted over thirty pieces in my pockets by night's end! That was a lot of showings for the "candy!" routine, at at least one family of Ethiopian kids would yell out "Candy Man!! Candy Man!!" year-round whenever they'd see me.

When I moved to Jersey I decided I wanted to make this my home and that one way I'd do this is by celebrating Halloween here. A few of the people on my current, way-too-quiet street told me that this street used to be busy on Halloween night and I've heard enough anecdotal stories to think this is just how Halloween has evolved over the last few decades: carnivalesque magnet streets surrounded by miles of dark porch lights. It's kind of a shame, as this is really the only night of the year where I have a good reason to go up to my neighbor's doors and chat a few moments with them. Trick-or-treating is such an iconic small town American tradition and it's death is just another indicator of the way in which geographic locality has been replaced, for better or worse.

Today I posted an appreciation for Dean Freiday up on the Friends General Conference site (I was FGC's webmaster). It's well worth a read: Dean has been "convergent" for at least half a century, long before us internet kiddies started talking amongst ourselves (he's probably the only Friend featured on both the FGC and Barclay Press websites!). Johan Maurer could have easily cited Dean when he recently wrote that Convergent Friends are echoing the kinds of conversations that have been taking place among the leadership of the larger Friends organizations for decades.

The appreciation comes from FGC's Christian and Interfaith Relations Committee, universally called simply "CIRC" (even I had to check that I had the full name right). Now, I think its safe to say that CIRC is not one of FGC's sexiest committees. I mean that as an observation, not a dig, because I think it does fascinating stuff. For one thing it works with the World Council of Churches. Quakers were a founding member of the organization and we've always been something of a theological thorn in its side. Whenever the WCC tries to come up with a definition to unify world Christians it runs up against the peculiarities of Friends. And not just of Friends: I think we implicitly challenge the body to find a definition that would include the early primitive Christian communities. (The second link is to a British text but it gives a sense of this brand of Quaker ecumenical work).

CIRC is also the FGC committee most likely to hang out with Friends from the other branches; for example it appoints FGC's official observers to the Friends United Meeting Triennial. To use the new lingo, it's convergent.

Which begs the question: what's different between the new Convergence and the old Ecumenicalism? Are there points of connection? Are there opportunities for cross-fertilization? There are style differences, to be sure and I wonder if Robber Webber's generational chart (which I posted in my first Emergent Church piece) applies in any way, but any of these could certainly be creatively bridged, no?

The logistical process of putting Freiday's appreciation online involved an email back-and-forth with Tom P., an active committee member of CIRC, and that conversation suggested this post. He sounded quite excited when I gave the briefest overview of the Convergent Friends talk and wants to bring it to the attention of the committee. It could be very interesting.

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More:

• For more on Convergence, see Robin Mohr's coinage and C. Wess Daniel's Quaker Life article, plus of course much of what gets posted up on QuakerQuaker.org.
• Even Swarthmore likes Dean Freiday: this overview of his correspondence shows the breadth of his friendships.