At 95, Ned Rorem Is Done Composing. But He’s Not Done Living

October 23, 2018
· Martin Kelley

The Times has a nice pro­file of the not-dead Pulitzer Prize com­pos­er and gay icon. The piece doesn’t men­tion his Quak­er roots (he was born in Rich­mond, Indi­ana and raised as a Friend) but an embed­ded playlist includes “Mary Dyer did hang as a flag,” a piece from his 1976 com­po­si­tion A Quak­er Read­er.

I don’t know much about Rorem or the extent or ongo­ing­ness of his Quak­er iden­ti­ty (if any­one wants to share more in the com­ments that would be great). I keep a list I call “Sur­pris­ing Unex­pect­ed Unlike­ly Quak­ers” for names peo­ple give me of famous’ish peo­ple with Quak­er con­nec­tions. Who’s your favorite unlike­ly Quaker?


At 95, Ned Rorem Is Done Composing. But He’s Not Done Living. (Published 2018)

At 95, Ned Rorem Is Done Com­pos­ing. But He’s Not Done Liv­ing. (Pub­lished 2018) 

As the com­pos­er, writer and gay icon lives qui­et­ly on the Upper West Side, his music and books…

www.nytimes.com www​.nytimes​.com

What is the Quaker community we’d like to see?

October 23, 2018
· Martin Kelley

On the Quak­erQuak­er forums, Kir­by Urn­er sets out a vision for a future Quak­er community:

My spec­u­la­tions, there­fore, cen­ter around around what a Quak­er Vil­lage might look like, under­stand­ing “vil­lage” to mean “small com­mu­ni­ty” (hun­dreds or thou­sands, but not mil­lions). How do these peo­ple live? How do they put their Chris­t­ian val­ues into practice?

Let’s say it’s a hun­dred years from now, when all of us are safe­ly dead. Or maybe we’d like to accel­er­ate the timeline?

For me, a hall­mark of Quak­erism is its egal­i­tar­i­an­ism and com­mit­ment to rotat­ing roles. That’s not a fea­ture of every branch I real­ize, and those who decry “out­ward forms” may con­sid­er Over­sight, Prop­er­ty Man­age­ment, Chil­dren’s Pro­gram etc., to be the oppo­site of “prim­i­tive” by def­i­n­i­tion. Per­haps such infra­struc­ture seems too com­pli­cat­ed, too much like every­day life. I real­ize we use our words differently. 

I like the qual­i­fi­ca­tion to imag­ine this 100 years from now. It gives us a bit of time to sort out all of the incon­ve­nient road­blocks of cur­rent apa­thy and resis­tance to change. One of the tech­niques Ama­zon is said to use is to start any new project ideas with a press release as a way to make sure the final prod­uct is focused on actu­al cus­tomer needs. Kir­by’s piece reminds me of this. What would it look like to have a strong vision of the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ties we’d like to live in someday?
http://​www​.quak​erquak​er​.org/​f​o​r​u​m​/​t​o​p​i​c​s​/​w​h​a​t​-​i​s​-​p​r​i​m​i​t​i​v​e​-​c​h​r​i​s​t​i​a​n​ity

Redefining rude

October 23, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Mol­ly Shee­han, one of a small “gray wave” of Quak­ers who ran for Con­gress this year (she lost her pri­ma­ry bid):

When the mar­gin­al­ized cry out for com­pas­sion, they are not cen­sor­ing any­body. They are fight­ing for their very right to exist. Non­vi­o­lent dis­obe­di­ence and rewrit­ing the rules of civil­i­ty is for these groups. It is our job, espe­cial­ly as white peo­ple, or those with more soci­etal pow­er and time to protest, to ampli­fy the voic­es of the most marginalized.

https://​mil​len​ni​alpol​i​tics​.co/​r​e​d​e​f​i​n​e​-​r​u​d​e​-​e​m​b​r​a​c​e​-​d​i​s​r​u​p​t​i​ve/

The end of religious liberty?

October 23, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Is it time to give up var­i­ous paci­fist calls for reli­gious lib­er­ty giv­en the way the con­cept has been coopt­ed by those try­ing to insti­tu­tion­al­ize discrimination?

At a time when the things that bind us togeth­er as a soci­ety are so frag­ile, I’m wary of efforts that smack of iso­lat­ing one­self from the sins of the world, rather than build­ing sol­i­dar­i­ty in hopes that, God will­ing, those sins might be overcome.

The dead end of reli­gious liberty

Ministers, elders, and overseers

October 22, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Jnana Hod­son, a list­ing of three types of offices in tra­di­tion­al Quak­er meetings:

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, Quak­er meet­ings rec­og­nized and nur­tured indi­vid­u­als who had spir­i­tu­al gifts as min­is­ters, elders, or over­seers. These roles could be filled by men or women, and their ser­vice extend­ed over the entire congregation. 

Many Friends have dropped the term “over­seers” in recent years, out of con­cern for how the word is so asso­ci­at­ed with slav­ery. As I under­stand it, ear­ly Friends’ use of the word came from its use as an Eng­lish trans­la­tion for Episko­pos in the New Tes­ta­ment. They con­sid­ered them­selves to be re-establishing ear­ly Chris­t­ian mod­els. For exam­ple, Acts 20:28:

Take heed there­fore unto your­selves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you over­seers, to feed the church of God, which he hath pur­chased with his own blood. 

Bible trans­la­tions that were geared toward a Catholic audi­ence tend­ed to stick to Latinized words and went with “bish­op” over “over­seer.” Quak­ers wor­ried about the con­no­ta­tion of the word could pro­pose that we just start nam­ing bish­ops. It’s not as nut­ty as it might seem, as there are anabap­tist church­es who use the term to talk about roles with­in indi­vid­ual church­es. Of course, some­times name changes also mask changes in the­ol­o­gy and I noticed that some of the more lib­er­al Quak­er meet­ings dropped “over­seer” with a speed which they are not oth­er­wise known for. Friends today are a lot more indi­vid­u­al­is­tic than Friends were when our insti­tu­tions were set up — there are many good rea­sons for this in our his­to­ries. But I do hope we’re con­tin­u­ing to find ade­quate ways to notice and care for our members.
 

We need all three – and more

Why Do Quakers Worship in Silence?

October 22, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Catch­ing up with last week’s Quak­er­S­peak, which was a great one with Lloyd Lee Wil­son explain­ing how Quak­er silence is dif­fer­ent from indi­vid­ual meditation:

From the exte­ri­or, there may not appear to be very much dif­fer­ent between a group of indi­vid­u­als doing indi­vid­ual med­i­ta­tion or indi­vid­ual con­tem­pla­tion in the same room and a group of Quak­er wor­ship­ing togeth­er. But there are a num­ber of things that are, as we expe­ri­ence them, dif­fer­ent. One is that these prac­tices that have as their goal achiev­ing still­ness of mind or per­fect qui­et or single-pointed aware­ness, as a goal, are actu­al­ly quite dif­fer­ent from what we are attempt­ing and achiev­ing in meet­ing for wor­ship. For Friends, this point of still­ness is only a way sta­tion, and we pass though that. It is not our goal, but it is how we get to a point of encounter with God.
 
http://​quak​er​s​peak​.com/​w​h​y​-​d​o​-​q​u​a​k​e​r​s​-​w​o​r​s​h​i​p​-​i​n​-​s​i​l​e​n​ce/

Somberly dressed men astride horses

October 12, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Colonial-era Quak­ers weren’t all saints when it came to oppos­ing slav­ery but there are some moments we afford to look back to with a smidge of pride. In 1783, a del­e­ga­tion from Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing walked into the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress to make good on all that “cre­at­ed equal” language.

Prince­ton vil­lagers and mem­bers of the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress beheld the arrival of an unusu­al del­e­ga­tion of somber­ly dressed men astride hors­es. They had come from Philadel­phia to raise an issue that the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress did not wish to address: the plight of half a mil­lion Amer­i­can res­i­dents — one-fifth of the peo­ple — who had been lis­ten­ing to mem­o­rable words about inalien­able rights and how Amer­i­ca would ush­er in a new age of free­dom and jus­tice, but who were con­demned along with their chil­dren to life­long slav­ery. The four men car­ried a parch­ment titled “The Address of the Peo­ple Called Quakers.” 

The author, Gary Nash, has a book out about Wal­ter Mif­flin, one of the four, which Friends Jour­nal reviewed this April.

As I recall, the transat­lantic slave trade went into over­drive in the new­ly inde­pen­dent Unit­ed States. If the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress has lis­tened, the com­plex­ion and char­ac­ter and his­to­ry of the U.S. would be far different.
 
https://​paw​.prince​ton​.edu/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​m​o​m​e​n​t​-​n​a​s​s​a​u​-​h​all

“Two Faces of Liberty,” by Lilith Quinlan

October 5, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Quak­er Uni­ver­sal­ist Fel­low­ship has reprint­ed a 1984 Friends Jour­nal arti­cle by Lil­lith Quin­lan that sounds way too con­tem­po­rary despite the three and a half decades:

While school chil­dren in New Eng­land are sell­ing can­dy to rebuild the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty, we have a large and quite dif­fer­ent project going on here in Louisiana: the “alien deten­tion cen­ter” in Oak­dale. This $17.1 mil­lion facil­i­ty with a pro­ject­ed bud­get of $6-$7 mil­lion per year will be able to imprison 1,000 “aliens” ini­tial­ly, then 2,000.

It has been described by Immi­gra­tion and Nat­u­ral­iza­tion Ser­vice (INS) offi­cials as a longterm hold­ing facil­i­ty and is the first such prison admin­is­tered joint­ly by the unholy alliance of the Bureau of Pris­ons and the INS. A new cen­ter is also being built in Alexan­dria to train 1,000 peo­ple for the bor­der patrol, dou­bling the present capacity.

https://​uni​ver​sal​ist​friends​.org/​w​e​b​l​o​g​/​l​i​b​e​r​t​y​-​q​u​i​n​lan