Syrup that Masks the Salt

March 4, 2012
· Martin Kelley

Wor­ship at the Med­ford (N.J.) Meet­ing start­ed this morn­ing with queries for the upcom­ing “Salt and Light” gath­er­ing of world Friends. Med­ford is send­ing a del­e­gate to the Kenyan event, and in prepa­ra­tion they’re read­ing the queries from the Salt and Light mate­r­i­al dur­ing the month of March, along with some pas­sages from the Gospel of Mark(“Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his salt­ness, where­with will ye sea­son it? Have salt in your­selves, and have peace one with anoth­er.” http://​bible​.us/​M​a​r​k​9​.​4​9​.​KJV). I spoke in wor­ship to a recent omis­sion of salt.

A Sat­ur­day rit­u­al in the house­hold is morn­ing pan­cakes. One of the boys likes choco­late chips in his pan­cakes; anoth­er likes vanil­la chips; I myself like blue­ber­ries. What all the pan­cakes have in com­mon is salt: just one and half t‑spoons in the mix­ing bowl is enough to trans­form the batter.

A few Sat­ur­days ago I for­got the salt. The results looked like pan­cakes but when we bit into them we knew they weren’t right. Rather than give them up, we poured them extra-heavy with syrup. Enough syrup masked the bland taste­less­ness of the pan­cakes – the emp­ty form of these almost pan­cakes – and allowed us to eat it.

How many of the reli­gious bod­ies descend­ed from Mark’s ear­ly gospel have masked our salt­less­ness (or a fear of it) with extra heap­ings of syrup? Cer­tain­ly, the cur­rent fash­ion for charis­mat­ic preach­ers and praise rock bands can act as a kind of mask­ing syrup. But there’s all sorts of ways of com­pen­sat­ing for miss­ing salt.

As Jon Watts and Mag­gie Har­ri­son have been remind­ing us though the http://​www​.clothey​our​selfin​right​eous​ness​.com project, ear­ly Friends opt­ed for spir­i­tu­al naked­ness: peo­ple gath­er­ing with­out props or dis­trac­tions, one-on-one and togeth­er wait­ing for the Holy Spir­it to lift up and gath­er the wor­ship. The salt is the Liv­ing Spir­it, here to guide, direct, com­fort and scold. In the qui­et of a Friends meet­ing you’ve either got it or you don’t. We’re work­ing with­out nets and there’s not much room to hide. The ques­tion fac­ing the par­tic­i­pants in Kenya – and the gath­er­ers in every Friends meet­ing­house and church in the world – is whether we have the salt.

There are many types of mask­ing syrup. Even once-radical Friends have found ways to side­step the salt ques­tion, pre-empting the emp­ty naked­ness of our wor­ship with caus­es, busy-ness, his­tor­i­cal fes­tishism, etc. When Friends gath­er in Kenya, I hope they will ask one anoth­er about the salt, the Liv­ing Spir­it. Maybe they can bring back a re-appreciation of naked­ness. For the good news is that Jesus is always ready to bring salt to the sim­plest of meals: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” (http://​bible​.us/​R​e​v​3​.​2​0​.​KJV).

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Wel­come to the World Con­fer­ence of Friends 2012 Website

The largest world­wide con­fer­ence of Friends since 1967 comes togeth­er from 17 – 25 April 2012 in Kenya. The theme is Being Salt and Light — Friends liv­ing the King­dom of God in a bro­ken world. One thous…

Naked Leadership on QuakerQuaker This Week

February 26, 2012
· Martin Kelley

On the blogs, Robin Mohr wrote about Friends lead­er­ship and vision and the “Nakedness/You’re Not a Quak­er” respons­es con­tin­ue with two more follow-up’s among this week’s Edi­tor Picks. Else­where, the Mod­ern Quak­ers and Cloth­ing project has been col­lect­ing some great per­son­al sto­ries. And on a house­keep­ing note, dona­tions for Quak­erQuak­er have been pret­ty light late­ly; please con­sid­er help­ing out.

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Naked Lead­er­ship? [Quak­erQuak­er This Week, 2/26/12] — QuakerQuaker
Naked Leadership?
On the blogs, Robin Mohr wrote about Friends lead­er­ship and vision and the Nakedness/You’re Not a Quak­er respons­es con­tin­ue with two more f… 

Another Saturday at St Nick’s

February 26, 2012
· Martin Kelley

Most Sat­ur­day nights find me fol­low­ing my wife to St Nicholas Ukrain­ian Catholic Church in Mil­lville NJ. I’m often chas­ing kids and this Sat­ur­day was no excep­tion. Tonight I snapped as I chased. Most of these shots have a tou­sled head just off cam­era. It’s a nice lit­tle church. You can learn more at their web­site at http://​www​.stni​cholas​mil​lville​.com.

In album St Nicholas 2/25/12 (8 photos)

The inte­ri­or from the balcony.

Vision and leadership: keeping the long view

February 20, 2012
· Martin Kelley

In her lat­est post at http://​robin​msf​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​1​2​/​0​2​/​v​i​s​i​o​n​.​h​tml, +Robin Mohr asks for “sto­ries of Quak­er lead­ers and committees/organizations that have func­tioned well together.”

It was in col­lege that I first heard Max Weber’s idea that bureau­cra­cies grow to even­tu­al­ly see their own main­te­nance as their prime objec­tive (Wikipedia has a sec­tion on Weber­ian bureau­cra­cy http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​B​u​r​e​a​u​c​r​a​c​y​#​W​e​b​e​r​i​a​n​_​b​u​r​e​a​u​c​r​acy). At the time I assumed we were talk­ing about gov­ern­ments but it did­n’t take long in the non­prof­it world to see the phe­nom­e­non alive there as well. Resources go to the pro­grams that can attract the biggest donor atten­tion. Com­mit­tee dis­cern­ment gets short-circuited. Inter­nal bench­marks become the mea­sure even if the are dis­con­nect­ed from actu­al effect or mis­sion. If a need aris­es from out­side of the bound­aries of the inter­nal struc­tures, it is ignores: there’s lit­tle incen­tive to address it.

The only real solu­tion is to keep remem­ber­ing why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s the prac­tice of self-reflection, it’s the exer­cise of ask­ing what we might be called to. Per­haps this is a lead­er’s real job description.

I’ve been think­ing again late­ly of the way the Soci­ety of Friends respond­ed to the Tom Fox kid­nap­ping, a sto­ry I recount­ed in “Why Would a Quak­er Do a Crazy Thing Like That”(https://​www​.quak​er​ran​ter​.org/​2​0​0​6​/​0​6​/​w​h​y​_​w​o​u​l​d​_​a​_​q​u​a​k​e​r​_​d​o​_​a​_​c​r​a​zy/). I think the under­whelm­ing response was most­ly a fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion. Too many of the orga­ni­za­tions in ques­tion had set­tled them­selves into narrowly-defined mis­sion silos of their own mak­ing. They did­n’t know what to make of the sit­u­a­tion. I’d like to hope that a Rufus Jones or Howard Brin­ton would have cut through the slack, and I am encour­aged at some recent con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had with some emerg­ing lead­ers, but as a stu­dent of his­to­ry I know these are eter­nal prob­lems that are always ready to return.

My the­o­ry of media and social change is that 90% of the time we’re talk­ing amongst our­selves, invit­ing peo­ple in to the con­ver­sa­tion and build­ing an infra­struc­ture of com­mu­ni­ty. It’s one-on-one work, slow, peo­ple inten­sive (but then that’s what makes it enjoy­able, right?). The fruits of this labor become vis­i­ble with unex­pect­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties – those times when we’re called on by a larg­er pub­lic to explain our­selves or describe the world as we see it. If we’ve been doing our back­ground work – plant­i­ng the seeds that is the peo­ple of our com­mu­ni­ty – then we will be ready to step up to the chal­lenge. If we’re not, oppor­tu­ni­ty slips away. 

The his­to­ry of Friends – maybe the his­to­ry of the church uni­ver­sal – is one of missed oppor­tu­ni­ties; the mir­a­cle of faith is that some­times we con­nect with one anoth­er in the love that is God and lay some more bricks and mor­tar for God’s king­dom on Earth.

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What Canst Thou Say?: Vision
With­out vision, the peo­ple per­ish. Most­ly because they get eat­en by tigers they did­n’t see com­ing. Isn’t that a joke from Calvin & Hobbes? I’ve been think­ing a lot about vision lately.… 

Seth Godin on the idea of the “book”

February 17, 2012
· Martin Kelley

Godin tends to be too enam­ored by big ideas for my tastes, but there’s a few ideas in here worth chew­ing over, specif­i­cal­ly how the forced-scarcity of tra­di­tion­al book pub­lish­ing is giv­ing way to near­ly infi­nite elec­tron­ic bookshelves.

The struc­tures of books cer­tain­ly are bound­ed by the forms of their mar­ket­ing. One lim­i­ta­tion Godin does­n’t men­tion is the 64 page min­i­mum – this is what you need to be able to put a spine on the book, am essen­tial fea­ture if it’s to show up book­store shelves. One of my trick­i­est type­set­ting assign­ments back in my non­prof­it pub­lish­ing career was to stretch a 40 page essay to 64 so it could be a book. I used all the tricks of a des­per­ate first year stu­dent with class twen­ty min­utes off (the book went on to become one of our best­sellers, if I could have stretched it 96 pages we might have remained solvent).

This book just exag­ger­at­ed a com­mon phe­nom­e­non. Many of our authors had a few great insights that could be ade­quate­ly shared in the first few chap­ters. The rest of the books would­n’t just be my calorie-free mar­gins. There were enougn words to fill up a book but after 70 or 90 pages the read­er would have read the most orig­i­nal con­tent and could safe­ly put the book down in the “to be fin­ished lat­er” pile.

Free of book lim­i­ta­tions – and book sell­ing lim­i­ta­tions – most of these works would habe been far dif­fer­ent. some of the more basic ques­tions will remain with us: how do we get our works into the hands of read­ers, and how we pay the rent while doing it?

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The end of paper changes every­thing — The Domi­no Project
Not just a few things, but every­thing about the book and the book busi­ness is trans­formed by the end of paper. Those that would pre­fer to deny this obvi­ous truth are going to find the busi­ness they lo… 

Using apps to help kids with autism

February 12, 2012
· Martin Kelley

Sounds like a ther­a­py that can get pret­ty expen­sive pret­ty quick­ly, and the arti­cle shares con­cerns about just how help­ful all of these might be. Still, I have to admit it’s pret­ty amaz­ing to watch my 6yo play­ing the read­ing games on reas​dingeg​gs​.com web­site and he’s pret­ty instinc­tive with the touch­screen of my smart phone.

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Using apps to help treat autism | Macworld
Some par­ents of autis­tic chil­dren see ben­e­fits from the use of apps and tech­nol­o­gy; how­ev­er, experts raise concerns.