Tag Archives ⇒ integrity

Truth and integrity retreat

February 14, 2023
· Martin Kelley

My week­end online retreat went well, I think, at least many of the 15 par­tic­i­pants said they appre­ci­at­ed it. It’s the first multi-day event I’ve led in awhile and as I wrote here ear­li­er, I felt strong­ly led to plan a flex­i­ble, Spirit-led event. It was a bit ter­ri­fy­ing to be work­ing so from-the-seat-of-my-pants, but it was a great group of peo­ple, who could main­tain the pac­ing on their own. There was a lot of very deep shar­ing (I set con­fi­den­tial­i­ty as a val­ue ear­ly on) and we let peo­ple share for longer or share some­thing dif­fer­ent than asked if they felt it impor­tant. There were a few moments when it felt like a long state­ment might be bring­ing in too much cen­trifu­gal force but it pulled back and we were the rich­er for it. The hard­est time for me was around 4pm Sat­ur­day but that’s such a hard time to be alert. 

The two-day, three-part retreat was part of Windy Cool­er’s “Tes­ti­monies to Mer­cy” series, co-sponsored by New York’s Pow­ell House and Ben Lomond Cen­ter. Some ran­dom phras­es and ideas:

  • Integrity=Love, Integrity=Faithfulness, Integrity=Presence.
  • Truth with­out love is bru­tal­i­ty, and love with­out truth is hypocrisy: the much-quoted adage, attrib­uted to War­ren W. Wiers­be on sketchy quote websites.
  • Dis­ci­ples are fol­low­ers who aren’t moti­vat­ed by punishment.
  • The image that truth can chase us.

One of the more sur­pris­ing moments was when I brought in Hugh Bar­bour’s Five Tests for Dis­cern­ment. Par­tic­i­pants had been talk­ing about the mean­ing of Truth — Is there only one? Are there many? How do we know to con­tin­ue when oth­ers dis­agree? — and I thought Bar­bour’s list would be an easy one to lean on. He devel­oped it in the ear­ly six­ties as find­ings for research for his 1964 book, The Quak­ers in Puri­tan Eng­land and I remem­bered it as a rev­e­la­tion when I first came across it prob­a­bly twen­ty years ago. But the insis­tence on “moral puri­ty” and “inward uni­ty” did­n’t sit well with a group with mem­bers that have some­times had to buck Quak­er cul­tur­al mores and insti­tu­tion­al iner­tia to fol­low a lead­ing. We start­ed brain­storm­ing dif­fer­ent tests we’ve devel­oped more expe­ri­en­tial­ly. I’d love to tease these ideas out more someday.

When testimonies come drifting in

March 16, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Steven Davi­son asked what the tes­ti­mo­ny of com­mu­ni­ty even meant or whether it was spelt out any­where. No one could answer but no ine want­ed to omit it.

I sus­pect a process may be at work sim­i­lar to the one that has made “that of God in every­one” the puta­tive foun­da­tion of all our tes­ti­monies: an unself­con­scious thought-drift in a cul­ture increas­ing­ly impa­tient with intellectual/theological rig­or, or even atten­tion of any seri­ous kind, not to men­tion care for the tes­ti­mo­ny of integri­ty. These ideas arise some­how, some­where, and then get picked up and dis­sem­i­nat­ed because they sound nice, they meet some need, and they don’t demand much. They appar­ent­ly don’t require dis­cern­ment, anyway. 

The “Tes­ti­mo­ny of Community”

How a Small Group of Quaker Activists Took on PNC Bank and Won

July 26, 2018
· Martin Kelley

One thing I love about the Friends move­ment is its abil­i­ty to live with­in the ten­sions of a being both a deeply spir­i­tu­al ascetic prac­tice and a strate­gi­cal­ly focused world-changing social action toolk­it. Some­times the two come togeth­er in won­der­ful ways. Quak­er­S­peak has a mini-documentary about the Earth Quak­er Action Team’s cam­paign to stop PNC Bank from financ­ing moun­tain­top removal mining:

George Lakey: So any way you look at it, this is an offense against the plan­et. It’s an offense against peo­ple. It’s where eco­nom­ic jus­tice and cli­mate jus­tice coin­cide. Let’s tack­le it.

Ingrid Lakey: This bank that had Quak­er roots, this bank that called itself the green­est bank in the busi­ness was in fact blow­ing up moun­tains to get coal which is a major con­trib­u­tor to cli­mate change. So we thought, “that’s not cool! We can’t let that slide.” Call­ing on our own belief in our integri­ty, we decid­ed to call them out on it.

I myself could watch a whole video of George Lakey just laugh­ing. I’ve attend­ed a few EQAT actions over the years and wrote a per­son­al sto­ry about my par­tic­i­pa­tion in a pub­lic fast in 2013.

How a Small Group of Quak­er Activists Took on PNC Bank and Won

Mafias and chaos

June 19, 2018
· Martin Kelley

I like this inter­view on the Ital­ian mafia by Isaac Chotin­er in Slate, “The Mafia Is More Pow­er­ful Than It’s Ever Been.”

It seems that this per­pet­u­al cyn­i­cism may be the great­est threat of our era. Is the child of irony? The grand­child of gov­ern­ment con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries? Maybe the cause does­n’t mat­ter as much as the effect.

The mob thrives on chaos. It likes chaos. It likes to be the alter­na­tive author­i­ty that you go to because you can’t get any­thing done through the legit­i­mate state. For that very rea­son, I think there’s no doubt that it pro­motes that chaos. It likes civic dis­trust. It likes cyn­i­cism. It can prof­it from that. I think the great tragedy of Italy is that, to a large extent, it’s kind of succeeded.

I think that if we want­ed to con­struct a Quak­er cri­tique of the cur­rent Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment – and the type of cor­po­ra­tized cor­rup­tion we see in Rus­sia and the pet­rostates, it would best start with the polit­i­cal cul­ture that deny basic facts, gaslight cit­i­zens with ever-changing ratio­nales, and cre­at­ing chaos that can let finan­cial huck­sters reap bil­lions. These are not gov­ern­ments based on integri­ty and fair play­ing fields.


The Mafia Is More Powerful Than It’s Ever Been

The Mafia Is More Pow­er­ful Than It’s Ever Been 

If you think of vio­lent, influ­en­tial orga­nized crime in Italy as a thing of the past, think again.

Slate Magazine Slate Magazine 

The Quaker testimonies as our collective wisdom wiki

November 13, 2008
· Martin Kelley


My sort-of response to Cal­lid’s great Youtube piece on the Quak­er tes­ti­monies, I com­pare the clas­sic tes­ti­monies to a wiki: the col­lec­tive knowl­edge of Friends dis­tilled into spe­cif­ic cau­tions and guides. “We as Friends have found that.…” I do talk about how the recent “SPICE” sim­pli­fi­ca­tion (sim­plic­i­ty, integri­ty, integri­ty, com­mu­ni­ty and equal­i­ty) has robbed our notion of tes­ti­monies of some of their power.

Pew survey on dogma and spirituality

July 1, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Sur­vey: More have dropped dog­ma for spir­i­tu­al­i­ty in U.S. — USATO​DAY​.com

“Every reli­gious group has a major chal­lenge on its hands from all direc­tions,” says [Pew Forum direc­tor Luis] Lugo. When he fac­tors in Pew’s Feb­ru­ary find­ings that 44% of adults say they’ve switched to anoth­er reli­gion or none at all, Lugo says, “You have to won­der: How do you guar­an­tee the integri­ty of a reli­gious tra­di­tion when so many peo­ple are com­ing or going or fol­low­ing ideas that don’t match up?”

Lugo’s ques­tions is par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant for Friends, as many of us are con­verts. But the gen­er­al turn toward a more expe­ri­en­tial reli­gios­i­ty points to pos­si­bil­i­ties for fur­ther out­reach. Don’t have the time to check the sur­vey itself but USATo­day looks to have some good graphs about it.