palm pilot Posts

I've finally done it. I've read John Woolman's Journal. Here I've been an activist among Quakers for almost two decades and I've read one of our Big Books.

I have tried before. Many's the time over the years where I cracked open Moulton's edition to settle myself down. Chapter one read, chapter two read. Then to chapter three, opening with:

About this time, believing it good for me to settle, and thinking seriously about a companion, my heart was turned to the Lord with desires that He would give me wisdom to proceed therein agreeably to His will, and He was pleased to give me a well-inclined damsel, Sarah Ellis, to whom I was married the 18th of Eighth Month, 1749.

And that's it. One run-on sentence about courting and marrying his wife. I always put the book down here. I tuck a bookmark in with all good intentions of continuing after dinner. But the book sits on the coffee table till a week or so goes by, whereupon it's moved to the library area for a month or so until it's finally reshelved. The bookmarks stays put until a year or two passes and I re-start the Journal with renewed determination.

I know why the sentence stops me. Throughout my twenties and early thirties a lot of my emotional energy was drained in the (mostly Quaker) dating scene. In theory I thought it a good time "for me to settle" and would have been quite content with a well-inclined damsel. But the chaos of my personal family history combined with the casual dating culture I was part of combined to keep me distracted with the largely-manufactured drama of relationship roller-coasters. For better or worse, if and when I ever write a journal I will have to find a way to talk about the ways this dating era both fed and stunted my spiritual growth.

One of the lesson I learned back in the early 90s when I was editor at New Society Publishers was that I should pay attention when I put a manuscript or book down. The temptation is to chalk it up to tiredness or a busy life but I found there was usually something going on in the text itself that caused me to drop it. When I picked the manuscript back up and re-read the passages on either side of my abandoned bookmark, I found some sort of shift of tone that weakened the book.

I appreciate that Quaker journals are not racy memoirs; they have a specific religious education purpose. But I think it's natural to look to them for clues about how to live our lives. Samuel Bownas talks a bit about his engagement and David Ferris turns meeting his future wife into quite a humorous story. Perhaps Woolman was such a saintly aesthete that Sarah was simply presented to him with no futher questions. But still, there's a level of privacy in Woolman's writings that separates him from us; I'll return to this is part three.

Before I go: so how did I get through the journal this time? Two things are different now: first, my five year wedding anniversary is only a few weeks away; and second: Woolman's Journal is now always with me inside my Palm Pilot (courtesy the Christian Classics Etherial Library). A few weeks ago I found myself on the train without reading material and started reading!

Next: The Last Safe Quaker

Reading John Woolman:

• Part One: "The Public Life of a Private Man" (this page)
• Part Two: The Last Safe Quaker
• Part Three: The Isolated Saint
• Part Four (forthcoming)

Over the past few weeks I've been kind of proud of myself for a better discipline of spiritual study. My train commutes have been full of Quaker reading and regular Bible reading. This morning's ride made the reason for that now-lost discipline clear: two weeks ago I lost my Palm Pilot. Today's commute was the first with all my software finally reloaded into a new one and I found myself replacing Brian Drayton for the New York Times, Isaiah for Liz Phair's "Why can't I sneeze whenever I think about you" somehow sneaked into some mix I downloaded (rest assured, there's no Christian Rock pretense that the "you" was "Him" when she belts out the lines). Oh, for the snares of modernity!

In the bookstore today a customer called in and asked about "Let your lives speak," a phrase frequently attributed to George Fox (it's the source of a book title, "Lives that Speak"). While a quick Google search finds lots of pages where people say things like "as George Fox said, you should 'let your lives speak,'" no one actually gives details of when and where he said it. The phrase seems to sit only by itself, with no passages before or after it. A few sites claim it was part of his message on Firbank Fell but no one cites a source. Sitting on the same Palm Pilot as the Yardbirds MP3s is Fox's Journal (Jones edition) and a keyword search doesn't pick up "lives that speak" or "let your lives speak" anywhere. Smells fishy, like another one of those too-good-to-be-true Fox quotes. Can anyone document that it's real?

PS: I fly bright and early tomorrow morning for this year's Quakers Uniting in Publications meeting, in Oregon. I don't know what internet access I'll have so my apologies if new comments have to sit for a few days.

More word games at the Pentagon. They've recently denied reports that they used napalm against troops in Iraq. Reporters have claimed they did and so to have Air Force pilots "We napalmed both those bridge approaches":www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20030805-9999_1n5bomb.html said one. Turns out the weapons used were "remarkably similar" to napalm, "the firebombing agent used extensively during the Vietnam War":http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm. Those burning Vietnamese kids running from giant orange balls of fire in the classic pictures were being "napalmed." Highly controversial, it was banned by a United Nations convention in 1980 that the United States refused to sign. The U.S. did claim to have destroyed its napalm arsenal two years ago but here it is napalming Iraqi troops. When is napalm not napalm? When you switch gasoline for for jet fuel apparently. The new not-napalm has the happy name of "Mark 77," which sounds more like the latest boy band than the latest firebombing agent. Marine spokesperson Col. Michael Daily explained the difference between the gasoline of napalm and jet fuel of Mark 77 in a recent email: bq. This additive has significantly less of an impact on the environment. Nice to know the Pentagon is environmentally-senstive when it's roasting people alive.