The new issue of Friends Journal is up. I wrote the Among Friends intro this month, waxing lyrically on the “sonic landscape” of my meeting in August:

The sounds of our August silence are far from pure. Although the calls of red-shouldered hawks can be a bit harsh, hearing them reminds me that a family shares the trees of our burial ground. The crunch of the gravel in the driveway reassures me that one of our perpetual late-comers is about to join our fellowship. Not all the sounds are natural, of course. Once or twice in the hour someone will redline a motorcycle on the street outside, the whiny revs and gear changes drifting over to bounce inside our worship space. I usually try to tune out this sound, but sometimes I smile instead, knowing that someone is having fun on a hot summer day. I say a little prayer for their safety and wish them well.

I’ve also recorded a new episode of my author video podcast with John Helding, who wrote How Can I Keep from Singing? The Marvelous Mystery of Worship-Fluid Meetings. He tells a great story of going from a very died-in-the wool unprogrammed meeting to Lopez Island Worship Group (now full Quaker meeting) that scheduled monthly singing worship and worship sharing. I think I’m always going to prefer the model of sitting down quietly and waiting for the Holy Spirit but I do appreciate that it’s hard to build up a meeting culture that invites ministry. I’m happy that the worship sharing at Lopez Island helped uncork nascent ministry in the standard, open worship.

As I wrote a few years ago, I think ministry should be an expected miracle and not have quite so high a bar that people are intimidated from speaking. It takes practice to know when ministry is Spirit-led and maybe part of that practice is not always getting it right. I know some meetings face the opposite problem: ministry that is perhaps too frequent and too headstrong and inappropriate. But a Friends Meeting is a bit like a choir in that it is always needing creative renegotiation to find the sweet harmony. We are a chosen family that just shows up every week, with people experienced and new working and learning how to hold the body together.

The whole issue is really powerful and I hope you find it as enlightening as I did.

Where I live, in one of the colonial-era Quaker colonies of the Mid-Atlantic United States, there has long been a benevolent portrayal of Quakers’ relations with the local Indigenous Peoples. We are told that early Friend William Penn negotiated the Treaty of Shackamaxon with Lenape leader Tamanend, a moment memorialized by parks, statues, and a famous painting by Benjamin West. The great French philosopher Voltaire declared it “the only treaty never sworn to and never broken.” The new settlers bought each plot of land from the local Lenape bands. Violence in the first half-century of Quaker governance was rare; cooperation and good will were the norm.

And yet: there is no federally recognized Indigenous Nation left in this former Lenape territory. Every boatload of Quakers that sailed up from Delaware Bay brought the threat of another round of deadly smallpox. Every creek dammed to power a mill cut off the spawning fish runs that stocked upland creeks. Every pig let loose from an English farmstead ate through nearby Lenape maize and squash plantings.

We now talk about the era in which Quakers were slaveholders but Jim goes a step further to talk about the enslaved Africans’ resistance to Quaker enslavers. In an era in which we’re once more apparently debating if violence against property is okay, the story of two enslaved women, Grace and Jane, burning a plantation tobacco barn seems almost quaintly direct action.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

Great detail at the end:

In the late 1980s, his son said, John Robbins reconciled with his father: Irv Robbins, suffering from weight issues, heart disease and diabetes, was given a copy of “Diet for a New America” by his cardiologist. The doctor had no idea that the book had been written by his patient’s son.

Veg News also has an article on his life and impact.

As Quakers, we seek to live out our faith through everyday actions, including the choices we make about where to put our money. We believe strongly in the power of legitimate, nonviolent, democratic tools such as morally responsible investment to realise positive change in the world. We want to make sure our money and energies are instead put into places which support our commitments to peace, equality and justice.

As you’d might expect, there’s been backlash. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has condemned Britain Yearly Meeting’s decision as a “biased and petulant act.”.

Quakers will not profit from the occupation of Palestine

Quakers in Britain has today become the first church in the UK to announce it will not invest…

Quakers

I believe that people will respond to love, because I believe people respond to God. And if God is love, that is what people will respond to, is love. I think that’s the key to a lot of things and to a lot of problems in the world, because if we truly believe in God and we truly believe that God is love as we were taught, and we act on that–and I believe that we are God’s hands here–then everything we do needs to be rooted in love.

http://quakerspeak.com/being-gods-hands/

Society’s values are so often in opposition to God’s purposes. Slavery used to be legal. Love between two people of the same sex was illegal in our lifetimes. Our economic system is based on greed and pays no heed to God’s creation. Nation states exist and act for their own enrichment rather than loyalties lying with the Kingdom of Heaven and working for the enrichment of all humanity. When being loyal to God’s purposes runs counter to what society expects it can get pretty rough. There may be persecution, though it varies a lot: from tutting, telling you off for being vegetarian, being given white feathers, right through to imprisonment, jails and the lions of the Colosseum.

Putting the protest back in Protestant

If Friends can see new truth from the Light as coming in love, we will be emboldened to act on our leadings and live lives worthy of our callings. We will also be more open to conflict in our meetings and yearly meetings.