morning time 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!

Over on Quaker Oats Live, Cherice is fired up about taxes again and proposing a peace witness for next year:

My solution: Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and whomever else wants to participate refuses to pay war taxes for a few years, and we suffer the consequences. I think we should campaign for a war-tax-free 2010 in all Quaker meetings and Mennonite/Brethren/etc. communities. What are they going to do--throw us all in jail? Maybe. But they can't do that forever. No one wants to pay their taxes for a bunch of Quakers and other pacifists to sit in jail for not paying taxes. It doesn't make sense.

A commenter chimes in with a warning about Friends who were hit by heavy tax penalties a quarter century ago. But I know of someone who didn't pay taxes for twenty years and recently volunteered the information to the Internal Revenue Service. The collectors were nonchalant, polite and sympathetic and settled for a very reasonable amount. If this friend's experience is any guide, there's not much drama to be had in war tax resistance. These days, Caesar doesn't care much.

What if our witness was directed not at the federal government but at our fellow Christians? We could follow Quaker founder George Fox's example and climb the tallest tree we could find (real or metaphorical) and begin preaching the good news that war goes against the teachings of Jesus. As always, we would be respectful and charitable but we could reclaim the strong and clear voices of those who have traveled before us. If we felt the need for backup? Well, I understand there are twenty-seven or so books to the New Testament sympathetic to our cause. And I have every reason to believe that the Inward Christ is still humming our tune and burning bushes for all who have eyes to see and ears to listen. Just as John Woolman ministered with his co-religionists about the sin of slavery, maybe our job is to minister to our co-religionists about war.

But who are these co-religionist neighbors of ours? Twenty years of peace organizing and Friends organizing makes me doubt we could find any large group of "historic peace church" members to join us. We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. The way most of our established bodies couldn't figure out how to respond to a modern day prophetic Christian witness in Tom Fox's kidnapping is the norm. When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee's pay anyway. There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn't mind loosing their liberty or property in service to the gospel. Early Friends called our emulation of Christ's sacrifice the Lamb's War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn't brought back the old fire. Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.

But what about these emerging church kids?: all those people reading Shane Claiborne, moving to neighborhoods in need, organizing into small cells to talk late into the night about primitive Christianity? Some of them are actually putting down their candles and pretentious jargon long enough to read those twenty-seven books. Friends have a lot of accumulated wisdom about what it means the primitive Christian life, even if we're pretty rusty on its actual practice. What shape would that witness take and who would join us into that unknown but familiar desert? What would our movement even be called? And does it matter?

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Anyone interested in thinking more on this should start saving up their loose change ($200 commuters) to come join C Wess Daniels and me this November when we lead a workshop on "The New Monastics and Convergent Friends" at Pendle Hill near Philadelphia. Methinks I'm already starting to blog about it.

Hey all, the Reclaiming Primitive Quakerism workshop at California's Ben Lomond Center wrapped up a few hours ago (I'm posting from the San Jose airport). I think it went well. There were about thirty participants. The makeup was very intergenerational and God and Christ were being named all over the place!



I myself felt stripped throughout the first half, a sense of vague but deep unease--not at how the workshop was going, but about who I am and where I am. Christ was hard at work pointing out the layers of pride that I've used to protect myself over the last few years. This morning's agenda was mostly extended worship, begun with "Bible Reading in the Manner of Conservative Friends" (video below) and it really lifted the veil for me--I think God even joked around with me a bit.

As always, many of the high points came unexpectedly in small conversations, both planned and random. One piece that I'll be returning to again and again is that we need to focus on the small acts and not build any sort of movement piece by piece and not worry about the Big Conference or the Big Website that will change everything that we know. That's not how the Spirit works and our pushing it to work this way almost invariably leads to failure and wasted effort.

Another piece is that we need to start focusing on really building up the kind of habits that will work out our spiritual muscles. Chad of 27Wishes had a great analogy that had to do with the neo-traditionalist jazz musicians and I hoped to get an interview with him on that but time ran out. I'll try to get a remote interview (an earlier interview with him is here, thanks Chad for being the first interview of the weekend!)

I conducted a bunch of video interviews that I'll start uploading to my Youtube account and on the "reclaiming2009" tag on QuakerQuaker. When you watch them, be charitable. I'm still learning through my style. But it was exciting starting to do them and it confirmed my sense that we really need to be burning up Youtube with Quaker stuff.

I need to find my boarding gate but I do want to say that the other piece is putting together collections of practices that Friends can try in their location Friends community. Gathering in Light Wess led a really well-received session that took the Lord's Prayer and turned it into an interactive small group even. We took photos and a bit of video and we'll be putting it together as a how-to somewhere or other.

Pictures going up on Flickr, I'll organize them soon. Also check out ConvergentFriends.org and the Reclaiming Primitive Quakerism workshop page on QuakerQuaker.

Today is the extended deadline for forced flu shots for young children in New Jersey, the day schools across the state threaten to kick students out if they haven't taken the mercury-laden vaccine. Every year sees more forced and/or pressured vaccinations, many dozens now in New Jersey. The flu shot is particularly unnecessary. An average of two kids a year die from flu in the state and this flu season has only seen two pediatric deaths in the entire country. Yes, every death is a shame but why are we kicking kids out of school and spending billions of dollars in flu shots for a largely non-lethal disease.

New Jersey is also known as the state with the highest concentration of autism. I've met sane-seeming parents of special-needs kids who say the symptoms started right after a vaccination. I'm no expert but I've read enough to know the doctors and pharmaceutical companies have no clue about the cumulative effect of all these vaccinations. They took our little one Francis in to school this morning despite not having the shot. We're keeping our fingers crossed.

Other New Jersians wanting to know more can check out the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccination Choice for more about the movement to have parents these choices for their kids.

Not something I'll do every day, but over on QuakerQuaker I cross-referenced today's One Year Bible readings with Esther Greenleaf Murer's Quaker Bible Index. Here's the link to my post about today: First Month 20: Joseph rises to power in Egypt; Jesus' parable of wheat & tares and pearls. It's a particularly rich reading today. Jesus talks about the wheat and the weeds aka the corn and the tares, an interesting parable about letting the faithful and the unfaithful grow together.

As if knowing today is Inauguration Day, Isaac Penington turned it into a political reference: "But oh, how the laws and governments of this world are to be lamented over! And oh, what need there is of their reformation, whose common work it is to pluck up the ears of corn, and leave the tares standing!"

Margaret Fell sees the wheat and tares as an example of jealousy and false ministry: "Oh how hath this envious man gotten in among you. Surely he hath come in the night, when men was asleep: & hath sown tares among the wheat, which when the reapers come must be bound in bundles and cast into the fire, for I know that there was good seed sown among you at the first, which when it found good ground, would have brought forth good fruit; but since there are mixed seedsmen come among you & some hath preached Christ of envy & some of good will, ... & so it was easy to stir up jealousy in you, you having the ground of jealousy in yourselves which is as strong as death."

We get poetry from the seventeen century Elizabeth Bathurst (ahem) when she writes that "the Seed (or grace) of God, is small in its first appearance (even as the morning -light), but as it is given heed to, and obeyed, it will increase in brightness, till it shine in the soul, like the sun in the firmament at noon-day height."

The parable of the tares became a call for tolerance in George Fox's understanding: "For Christ commands christian men to "love one another [John 13:34, etc], and love their enemies [Mat 5:44];" and so not to persecute them. And those enemies may be changed by repentance and conversion, from tares to wheat. But if men imprison them, and spoil and destroy them, they do not give them time to repent. So it is clear it is the angels' work to burn the tares, and not men's."

A century later, Sarah Tuke Grubb read and worried about religious education and Quaker drift: "But for want of keeping an eye open to this preserving Power, a spirit of indifference hath crept in, and, whilst many have slept, tares have been sown [Mat 13:25]; which as they spring up, have a tendency to choke the good seed; those tender impressions and reproofs of instruction, which would have prepared our spirits, and have bound them to the holy law and testimonies of truth."

I hope all this helps us remember that the Bible is our book too and an essential resource for Friends. It's easy to forget this and kind of slip one way or another. One extreme is getting our Bible fix from mainstream Evangelical Christian sources whose viewpoints might be in pretty direct opposition from Quaker understandings of Jesus and the Gospel (see Jeanne B's post on The New Calvinism or Tom Smith's very reasonable concerns about the literalism at the One Year Bible Blog I read and recommend). On the other hand, it's not uncommon in my neck of the Quaker woods to describe our religion as "Quaker," downgrade Christianity by making it optional, unmentionable or non-contextual and turning to the Bible only for the obligatory epistle reference.

This was first made clear to me a few years ago by the margins in the modern edition of Samuel Bownas' "A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Ministry," which were peppered with the Biblical references Bownas was casually citing throughout. On my second reading (yes it's that good!) I started looking up the references and realized that: 1) Bownas wasn't just making this stuff up or quoting willy-nilly; and 2) reading them helped me understand Bownas and by extension the whole concept of Quaker ministry. You're not reading my blog enough if you're not getting the idea that this is one of the kind of practices that Robin, Wess and I are going to be talking about at the Convergent workshop next month. If you can figure out the transport then get yourself to Cali pronto and join us.

I'm a big user of both Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking system (it powers QuakerQuaker and the daily posts of links) and Twitter, the "micro-blogging" system that puts mini-messages into Quaker Ranter (currently with a brown woodsy boxes). They both serve different purposes for me and have different styles. Well, I just realized I had written a Deli.icio.us post in a Twitter style.

I was bookmarking a new post by Dave the "Quaker Agitator," who's looking for help writing a small grant. I left a minor comment and bookmarked the post in Del.icio.us. I try to do that for most comments so that I can go back later and see if any interesting conversation took place in the meantime. This time though I made an appeal for readers directly through the Del.icio.us description: "The Quaker Agitator is looking for help writing a small grant. Any Ranter readers able to lend a hand?" I did this knowing that a few hundred sympathetic readers will see this tomorrow morning when the links go up. It's probably a moot point as the Quaker Agitator has a much larger audience of sympathetic readers.

But stylistically it's an example of a culture of a new media form starting to change an older form. This is a common phenomenon in this fast-moving Web 2.0 world. Whether my Del.icio.us style will adapt or not I don't know. It's just an observation for now.

Tags: twitter, del.icio.us, web 2.0, styles,

The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote an article on Julie's traditionalist Catholic church this week and even produced a video that gives you a feel of the worship. Because of the two little ones we try to alternate between her church and Friends meeting on First Day mornings (though my crazy work schedule over the past few months have precluded even this). I'm in no danger of becoming the "Catholic Ranter" anytime soon (sorry Julie!) but I do appreciate the reverence and sense of purpose which Mater Ecclessians bring to worship and even I have culture shock when I go to a norvus ordo mass these days. Commentary on the Inquirer piece courtesy Father Zuhlsdorf. That blog and the Closed Cafeteria are favorites around here. Here's a few pictures of us at the church following baptisms.

PS: I wish the Catholic Church as a whole were more open-minded when it comes to LGBT issues. That said, the sermons on the issue I've heard at Mater Ecclesiae have gone out of their way to emphasize charity. That said, I've occasionally heard some under the breath comments by parishioners that weren't so charitable. Yet another reason to stay the Quaker Ranter.

PPS: And please, no comments on why the Catholic church is wrong, why Julie left Friends, why the Tridentine Mass is a step backwards, yada yada yada. I'm posting these links to share something of our lives. Thanks.