It’s a series of questions that has dogged Friends since we did away with clergy and started calling baptism a “sprinkling,” and it has been an issue of contention in every Quaker schism: Are we Christian? Are we really Christian? Does it matter if we’re Christian? What does it even mean to be Christian in the world?

One reason we began publishing more themed issues beginning in 2012 was so we use the topics to invite fresh voices to write for us. While we’ve long had regulars who will send us a few articles a year on miscellaneous topics, themes allow us to tempt people with specific interests and ministries: reconciliation from war, climate activism, workplace reform, mentorship, ecumenical relationships, the wider family of Friends, etc.

More recently I’ve started these “Editor’s Desk” posts as a way of sharing some of the ideas we have around particular upcoming issues. The post also gives us a URL that we can share on social media to drum up submissions. I also hope that others will share the URL via email.

The absolute best way of reaching new people is when someone we know shares an upcoming theme with someone we don’t know. There are many people who by chance or inclination seem to straddle Quaker worlds. They are invaluable in amplifying our calls for submissions. Question: would it help if we started an email list just for writers or for people who want to be reminded of upcoming themes so they can share them with Friends?

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Friends Journal

Within the last month I became aware of the “Hometown Heroes” program. Hanging from lampposts in our downtown, and other downtown districts in the region, are banners with the pictures and names of former military personnel. I was looking at one of the banners hanging outside of my bank and I started thinking to myself. “Why is it always soldiers?

Off the top of my head I can think of plenty of other members of the community that are heros from my standpoint. Activists for justice and conscience. Civic-minded gadflies. Shopowners who provide so-called “third places” for for people to congregegate. Traffic engineers who push back against corner-cutting in safety issues. The most important heros are often everyday people who simply do the right thing when chance puts a dangerous moral dilemma right in their path.

I push back against a simple military-are-heros narratives because in times of authoritarianism the military often become the enforcers. There’s the jingoistic nonsense you hear that the military is protecting our freedom to protest. No: in most cases our liberty has been preserved by people standing up and practicing their liberty despitee intimidation by authoritarian bullies and their police forces. I have friends in the military and I respect their choices and honor their commitments. I know heros can be found throughout the enlisted ranks and in our police forces but so are scoundrels. We need to recognize hometown heroism wherever it happens and resist the mindset that it’s exclusive to state forces.

https://quakerreturns.blogspot.com/2018/05/hometown-heroes.html

I love the intentionality of a roomful of people agreeing to settle into silence together as much as the next Friend, but I’m tempted to wonder whether the coverage would have quite so effusive if someone had interrupted part of the podcast’s silence to give a message. From daffodil ministry to top-of-the-hour newscast updates to disquisitions on the gospel, pretty much anything would have popped the silence’s “moment of Zen,” to use NPR’s head-scratching description.

The best part of it all so far, in my opinion, is that one of the podcasters, host Jessica Hubbard-Bailey, got a chance to use the buzz to write her story of being a Quaker for i (an online spin-off of the Independent): Life is tough for young people, but being a Quaker has given me hope.

When a friend came to me last year and suggested the Young Quaker Podcast record a silent Meeting for Worship I was intrigued. But given that most people are not quite so enamoured with silence as Quakers, I couldn’t have anticipated the interest and response that followed.

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/women/life-is-tough-for-young-people-but-being-a-quaker-has-given-me-hope/

The Quaker Queries are a wonderful invention of asking ourselves some simple questions… I’ve heard it said that throughout much of our history, we were shopkeepers and business people, and we were used to doing inventory all the time. And the queries are a kind of spiritual and moral inventory that Friends do well to keep track of.

It’s become kind of easy to make fun of queries. The classic use was as questions formally asked and formally answered in Quaker meetings for business. As Gwyn says they were a form of accounting. Local congregations would go though a set list and send them to quarter meetings to sift and answer so they could in turn send it up to yearly meeting sessions. I’ve seen this process followed at Ohio Yearly Meeting. It’s fascinating if a bit tedious.

I could imagine the process being useful if for no other reason that it gave Friends a chance to pry a bit into one another’s lives. Do all the members of our community have their alcohol use under control? Are we really committed to peace in our communities?

These days a form of over-simplistic query is are written on the fly, with an implicit “or” that I don’t always find particularly helpful. “Do Friends avoid the use of styrofoam cups?” [or do you all hate the Earth?]. Used this way, queries risk becoming a list of busybody norms to followed. We congratulate ourselves for not using paper napkins at a conference we flew to.

As Doug points out, it helps to have a little humility when it comes to queries. They’re one of the more useful items in the Quaker toolbox. A good query will have something to say to each of us, no matter where we individually are in our spiritual journey.

Friends in the past used “Truth” in ways that went well beyond a simple proposition or assertion of fact, a “truth claim,” some specific content. “Truth” instead connoted something of the action and the reality of God’s work in the world, as we experience and try to live it.

Used by individuals as a greeting, some variation of “How does the truth fare with thee?” can be a reminder that the friendships of Friends can be spiritually deeper than “yo, whassup?” informality (at one point Friends would even eschew “Good morning” as a greeting on the chance that the morning might actually not be comparatively good).

When we came here in fifteen or so years ago, Nancy Forrester’s Secret Garden was a magical oasis tucked in the middle of a block in Key West, a small forest said to be the last undeveloped acre in the city’s Old Town neighborhood. Full of winding paths and trees it was the rarest of spaces: loved, carefully tended, and shared with the public as a gift of beauty. But even then it felt besieged. In 2012 taxes and expenses became too much and Nancy sold off parcels to developers. From an article in Key News:

The tucked-away entrance to Nancy Forrester’s Secret Garden off Free School Lane in the 500 block of Simonton Street will be closed to the public after today, as finances and property taxes have forced Forrester to sell the land parcels that have housed an artist’s cottage and gallery, parrots, orchids, rare palms, meandering pathways and a meditative garden for more than four decades.

These days the garden has been reduced to a small backyard on Elizabeth Street which Nancy uses as a rescue parrot refuge. In the mornings she gives educational lectures on the birds, full of facts about their brilliant behavior, the destruction of their native habitats, and gentle lectures about how we can all protect native parrot habitats by living more lightly on the land (hint: no red palm oil or beef). From behind the fence came the sounds of a swimming pool being installed in the cutdown middle of the former garden. Nancy has life tenancy on the ill-repaired house where she lives with the parrots. 

I don’t know the details of the real estate transactions or Forrester’s finances but I find it incredible that Key West couldn’t rally around one of its living treasures. I’m glad that Nancy remains along with her parrots and I’m grateful my kids got a chance to meet her. 

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Nancy Forrester’s Secret Garden, Parrots, Macaws, Key West, FL

The purpose of Nancy Forrester’s Secret Garden as a Parrot sanctuary in Key West, is to inspire and…

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From the Indians who welcomed the pilgrims
And to the buffalo who once ruled the plains
Like the vultures circling beneath the dark clouds
Looking for the rain
Looking for the rain

Just like the cities staggered on the coastline
Living in a nation that just can’t stand much more
Like the forest buried beneath the highway
Never had a chance to grow
Never had a chance to grow
And now it’s winter
Winter in America

Yes and all of the healers have been killed
Or sent away, yeah
But the people know, the people know
It’s winter
Winter in America

And ain’t nobody fighting
‘Cause nobody knows what to save
Save your soul, Lord knows
From Winter in America

The Constitution
A noble piece of paper
With free society
Struggled but it died in vain
And now Democracy is ragtime on the corner
Hoping for some rain
Looks like it’s hoping
Hoping for some rain

And I see the robins
Perched in barren treetops
Watching last-ditch racists marching across the floor
But just like the peace sign that vanished in our dreams
Never had a chance to grow
Never had a chance to grow

And now it’s winter
It’s winter in America
And all of the healers have been killed
Or been betrayed
Yeah, but the people know, people know
It’s winter, Lord knows
It’s winter in America

And ain’t nobody fighting
‘Cause nobody knows what to save
Save your souls
From Winter in America
And now it’s winter
Winter in America

And all of the healers done been killed or sent away
Yeah, and the people know, people know
It’s winter
Winter in America

And ain’t nobody fighting
‘Cause nobody knows what to save
And ain’t nobody fighting
Cause nobody knows, nobody knows
And ain’t nobody fighting
‘Cause nobody knows what to save

Sometimes a news article touches the heart and moves people to reach out to one another in unexpected ways. So it was this winter when the Washington Post published a piece on the rash of fires that have destroyed black churches in the South in recent months… When Friend Harold B. Confer, executive director of Washington Quaker Workcamps, saw the article, he decided to do something about it. After a series of phone calls, he and two colleagues accepted an invitation to travel to western Alabama and see the fire damage for themselves. They were warmly received by the pastors and congregations of the three Greene County churches. Upon their return, they set to work on a plan.

I’m not sure whether Confer’s plan is the right template to follow this time, but it’s a great story because it shows the importance of having a strong grassroots Quaker ecosystem. I don’t believe the Washington Quaker Workcamps were ever a particularly well-funded project. But by 1996 they had been running for ten years and had built up credibility, a following, and the ability to cross cultural lines in the name of service. The smaller organizational size meant that a newspaper article could prompt a flurry of phone calls and visits and a fully-realized program opportunity in a remarkably short amount of time.

A first-hand account of the workcamps by Kim Roberts was published later than year, Rebuilding Churches in Rural Alabama: One Volunteer’s Experience. The D.C.-based workcamp program continues in modified form to this day as the William Penn Quaker Workcamps.

Update: another picture from 1996 Alabama, this time from one of my wife Julie’s old photo books. She’s second from the left at the bottom, part of the longer-stay contingent that Roberts mentions.