Search Results for: circle of hope

The Quaker Art of Dying?

· Martin Kelley
Hopewell Ceme­tery, Winslow Town­ship N.J. One of the many South Jer­sey Quak­er bur­ial grounds on long-bypassed coun­try roads. The meet­ing­house that was here is long gone.

We’re now cast­ing about for arti­cles for a Friends Jour­nal issue on “The Art of Dying and the After­life.” I’m inter­est­ed to see what we’ll get. Every so often some­one will ask me about Quak­er belief in the after­life. I’ve always found it rather remark­able that I don’t have any sat­is­fy­ing canon­i­cal answer to give them. While indi­vid­u­als Friends might have var­i­ous the­o­ries, I don’t see the issue come up all that often in ear­ly Friends theology.

As extreme­ly atten­tive Chris­tians they would have signed off on the idea of eter­nal life through Christ. Since they thought of them­selves as liv­ing in end times, they total­ly emu­lat­ed New Tes­ta­ment mir­a­cles. George Fox him­self brought a man back from the dead in a town off Exit 109 of the Gar­den State Express­way. Strange things afoot at the Cir­cle K!

Fox’s biog­ra­phers quick­ly scaled back the whole mir­a­cle thing. Appar­ent­ly that was an odd­ness too far. The cut-out parts of his biog­ra­phy have been repub­lished but even the repub­lish­ing now appears out of print (nev­er fear: Ama­zon has it used for not too much).

But Friends has folk cus­toms and beliefs too. The deceased body wasn’t undu­ly ven­er­at­ed. They recy­cled grave plots with­out much con­cern. I can think of a cou­ple of his­toric Quak­er bur­ial grounds in Philly that have been repur­posed for activ­i­ties deemed more prac­ti­cal to the liv­ing. The phi­los­o­phy of green bur­ial is catch­ing up with Quak­ers’ prac­tice, a fas­ci­nat­ing coming-around.

It also seems there’s a strong old Quak­er cul­ture of face imped­ing death with equa­nim­i­ty. That makes sense giv­en Friends’ mod­esty around indi­vid­ual achieve­ments. There’s a prac­ti­cal­i­ty that I see in many old­er Friends as they age. I’d be curi­ous to hear from Friends who have had insights on aging as they age and also care­tak­ers and fam­i­lies and hos­pice chap­lains who have accom­pa­nied Friends though death.

Writ­ing sub­mis­sions for our issue on “The Art of Dying and the After­life” are due May 8. You can learn about writ­ing for us at:

https://​www​.friend​sjour​nal​.org/​s​u​b​m​i​s​s​i​o​ns/

How do Friends approach the end of life? We’re liv­ing longer and dying longer. How do we make deci­sions on end-of-life care for our­selves and our loved ones? Do Quak­ers have insight into what hap­pens after we die? Sub­mis­sions due 5/8/2017.

ps: But of course we’re not just a dead tra­di­tion. There are many heal­ers who have revived ideas of Quak­er heal­ing. We have a high pro­por­tion of main­stream med­ical heal­ers as well as those fol­low­ing more mys­ti­cal heal­ing paths. If that’s of inter­est to you, nev­er fear: Octo­ber 2017 will be an issue on healing!).

The bully, the Friend and the Christian

· Martin Kelley

Lazy guy I am, I’m going to cut-and-paste a com­ment I left over at Rich the Brook­lyn Quak­er’s blog in response to his post “What This Chris­t­ian Is Look­ing For In Quakerism”:http://brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2006/04/what-this-christian-is-looking-for-in.html. There’s been quite a good dis­cus­sion in the com­ments. In them Rich pos­es this analogy:
bq. Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion and World War II, I have been told that Franklin Roo­sevelt ral­lied the spir­its of the Amer­i­can peo­ple with his “fire­side chats”. These radio broad­casts com­mu­ni­cat­ed infor­ma­tion, pro­ject­ed hope, and called for spe­cif­ic respons­es from his lis­ten­ers; includ­ing some acts of self-sacrifice and unselfish­ness… Often peo­ple would gath­er in small groups around their radios to hear these broad­casts, they would talk about what Roo­sevelt had said, and to some extent they were guid­ed in their dai­ly lives by some of what they had heard.

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Where’s the grassroots contemporary nonviolence movement?

· Martin Kelley

I’ve long noticed there are few active, online peace sites or com­mu­ni­ties that have the grass­roots depth I see occur­ring else­where on the net. It’s a prob­lem for Non​vi​o​lence​.org [update: a project since laid down], as it makes it hard­er to find a diver­si­ty of stories.

I have two types of sources for Non​vi​o​lence​.org. The first is main­stream news. I search through Google News, Tech­no­rati cur­rent events, then maybe the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Wash­ing­ton Post.

There are lots of inter­est­ing arti­cles on the war in iraq, but there’s always a polit­i­cal spin some­where, espe­cial­ly in tim­ing. Most big news sto­ries have bro­ken in one month, died down, and then become huge news three months lat­er (e.g., Wilson’s CIA wife being exposed, which was first report­ed on Non​vi​o​lence​.org on July 22 but became head­lines in ear­ly Octo­ber). These news cycles are dri­ven by domes­tic par­ty pol­i­tics, and at times I feel all my links make Non​vi​o​lence​.org sound like an appa­ratchik of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty USA.

But it’s not just the tone that makes main­stream news arti­cles a prob­lem – it’s also the gen­er­al sub­ject mat­ter. There’s a lot more to non­vi­o­lence than anti­war expos­es, yet the news rarely cov­ers any­thing about the cul­ture of peace. “If it bleeds it leads” is an old news­pa­per slo­gan and you will nev­er learn about the wider scope of non­vi­o­lence by read­ing the papers.

My sec­ond source is peace move­ment websites

And these are, by-and-large, unin­ter­est­ing. Often they’re not updat­ed fre­quent­ly. But even when they are, the pieces on them can be shal­low. You’ll see the self-serving press release (“as a peace orga­ni­za­tion we protest war actions”) and you’ll see the exclam­a­to­ry all-caps screed (“eND THe OCCUPATION NOW!!!”). These are fine as long as you’re already a mem­ber of said orga­ni­za­tion or already have decid­ed you’re against the war, but there’s lit­tle per­sua­sion or dia­logue pos­si­ble in this style of writ­ing and organizing.

There are few peo­ple in the larg­er peace move­ment who reg­u­lar­ly write pieces that are inter­est­ing to those out­side our nar­row cir­cles. David McReynolds and Geov Par­rish are two of those excep­tions. It takes an abil­i­ty to some­times ques­tion your own group’s con­sen­sus and to acknowl­edge when non­vi­o­lence ortho­doxy some­times just does­n’t have an answer.

And what of peace blog­gers? I real­ly admire Joshua Mic­ah Mar­shall, but he’s not a paci­fist. There’s the excel­lent Gut­less Paci­fist (who’s led me to some very inter­est­ing web­sites over the last year), Bill Connelly/Thoughts on the eve, Stand Down/No War Blog, and a new one for me, The Pick­et Line. But most of us are all point­ing to the same main­stream news arti­cles, with the same Iraq War focus.

If the web had start­ed in the ear­ly 1970s, there would have been lots of inter­est­ing pub­lish­ing projects and blogs grow­ing out the activist com­mu­ni­ties. Younger peo­ple today are using the inter­net to spon­sor inter­est­ing gath­er­ings and using sites like Meet­up to build con­nec­tions, but I don’t see com­mu­ni­ties built around peace the way they did in the ear­ly 1970s. There are few peo­ple build­ing a life – hope, friends, work – around pacifism.

Has “paci­fism” become ossi­fied as its own in-group dog­ma of a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion of activists? What links can we build with cur­rent move­ments? How can we deep­en and expand what we mean by non­vi­o­lence so that it relates to the world out­side our tiny organizations?

Catch Yourself Thinking: A 1997 Tribute to Allen Ginsberg

· Martin Kelley

Allen, words go off through emails, phones, whis­pers on trol­leys, sad lost souls wan­der­ing beat neigh­bor­hoods telling the news: you’re dead.

I walk around, tears in eyes, look­ing look­ing for a changed world. See stu­dents in goa­tees, so beat, but they’re smil­ing, they don’t know, don’t care, you’ve been reduced to a fash­ion. But you’re here, in the air we breathe, that smell of lib­er­a­tion, of just stand up and laugh and prank and lis­ten to the soul sex spir­it burst­ing with­in. Smile through the soli­tary puri­tanism that keeps every­one apart.

But where are you remem­bered? Where’s the drum cir­cles? Need­ing some­thing now, I buy the lat­est Wald­man anthol­o­gy in book­store, thir­ti­eth street train sta­tion, full of time mag­a­zine, hus­tler, romance nov­els, lot­tery tick­ets. Cashier looks at book, says some­one else just bought it too. Oh joy, no drum cir­cles but at least oth­er lost souls not know­ing how to share the loss but to remem­ber the immor­tal words, the words now his­to­ry, set for­ev­er in twelve point times to be read as anoth­er Dead White Male poet.

I tell cashier, friend­ly mid­dle aged black woman that he — points to your out-of-focus head in pho­to of Cor­so, the Orlovskys, Ker­ouac — is dead. “Who is it?” “Allen Gins­burg.” “Oh, that’s him, hmm?” I say, I hope, that there’ll be a lot of peo­ple buy­ing these books now, but know yet anoth­er illus­trat­ed his­to­ry of Viet­nam will be their best seller.

Nigh­t­ime now. I can’t help it, I look to the sky to see if there’s a new star in the fir­ma­ment. But over­cast, smog­gy, orange-skied Ger­man­town does­n’t open to the cliché.

I miss you. You taught so much. How to com­bine poet­ry and lib­er­a­tion and pol­i­tics and the search for won­drous love­ly spir­it. Since I first saw you speak — 1988 Rut­gers, Rad­i­cal Stu­dent Con­fer­ence — I’ve become activist non­vi­o­lence pub­lish­er, Quak­er seek­er. You spoke to me, told me I could spin my own life of joy if only I could be open and hum­ble, ready to laugh, but also ready to take light­en­ing bolts upon my head for stand­ing up in row-after-row movie the­ater Amer­i­ca, watch us per­form, give us six bucks America.

In new book you say pre­scrip­tion for this Amer­i­ca is:

more art, med­i­ta­tion, lifestyles of rel­a­tive penury,
avoid­ance of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion that’s
burn­ing down the planet.

To that I say mere­ly, ‘a‑okay,” let’s get back to work. I love you Allen. Peace be with you.

 

Recov­ered via Archive​.org cache.