A community empowered by spiritual gifts is not culturally narrow. This assertion is backed by vast hopes and very little experience. Many Friends meetings and churches yearn for cultural and racial diversity, but seem to be stuck arguing about theoretical ideals rather than choosing to examine hurdles: location, unintended or unexamined “we-they” messages (no matter how benevolent or progressive the intention), and a tendency to see non-members as objects of service rather than co-equal participants already part of “us” in God’s story. But most of all, I believe that spiritual power unites while cerebral analysis divides.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2019/01/what-is-our-vocation.html

The three-fort tour from Ft Mott near Salem, New Jersey, to Ft Delaware on Pea Patch Island (de facto Delaware), to Delaware City, Delaware and adjacent Ft DuPont.

A few weeks ago Yummygal at Southjerseyexplorer.com wrote up a trip report on The Three Forts Ferry Tour. It didn’t take more than two minutes of texts before my wife and I decided we would recreate this.

It’s wasn’t so easy at first. I spent way too long on the park system’s website trying to figure out how to board the ferry at Ft Mott on the New Jersey side. Every option I tried had me board in nearby Salem, N.J. It wasn’t till I was home that I read that the Ft Mott stop had been out of commission until early this summer because of Sandy and that Salem had been the alternate boarding location. The website hadn’t been updated.

Once we got to the dock we saw there was no ticket kiosk. Once the ferry came in we found they couldn’t swipe a credit card onboard (really? can’t any modern smartphone handle that?, but I digress…). The only place they could handle a credit card was the far end, in Delaware City. We’d have to dock on Fort Delaware/Pea Patch Island but stay in the boat and continue to this city. We’d hadn’t even really planned to necessarily go to Delaware City but we ended up spending much of our day there.

Delaware City was a small port town whose claim to fame was its location as the eastern terminus of the original nineteenth century Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. The modern canal bypasses it a few miles to the south, so Delaware City is a bit frozen in time.

First stop: Crabby Dick’s, one of three eateries recommended to us (the others being a pub and an Italian restaurant). Being a vegetarian I don’t get into this sort of a restaurant very often but they had veggie burgers and creative sweet fries (cinnamon-covered with an apple butter dip–yum!). Luckily it was nearly empty around noon in a Sunday so our troublemaking kids didn’t cause too much commotion.

Next door was a small ice cream shop. The temperatures were in the 90s so this was an obvious stop.

What we should have done next is wander the town until the next ferry to Pea Patch Island and its fort. One of our party was determined to see all three forts so we set out for Ft DuPont. It’s adjacent to Delaware City’s dock and downtown as the crow flies. But we aren’t crows, or fish. DuPont’s on the other side of the old canal. You have to walk about a mile to the first bridge that crosses it, a rickety one at that, then make a sharp left to travel in the same direction you had just come from, only on the canal’s south side.

There’s no signs for the fort. Even Yummygirl had gotten lost on her trip so I knew to rely on my phone’s maps. Most of Ft DuPont’s acreage is a large campus dotted with an odd assortment of run-down early twentieth century military buildings surrounding an old parade field. The camp had been a major deployment center during WW II and had also served as a POW camp for Germans. The state’s been trying to repurpose it in recent years but it’s an odd assortment of halfway house services and national guard associations, stuck in between crumbling buildings that will never find a new role.

At the far end of all this a nature trail going through what remains of the nineteenth century Ft DuPont. Walking it is a bit like touring a jungle-covered Aztec city: every so often a ruin sticks out of the trees and tangled vines. It’s an interesting-enough trail but not worth a four mile round-trip hike with four kids in 90 degree heat. We were able to beg a ride back from a park ranger finishing her shift thank goodness but much of our day was sitting under trees drinking the last of our water.

Back at the Delaware City ferry office, we bought a small fortune of water from the vending machine till the next (and final) boat to Pea Patch Island. This is typically the destination of the tourists but by this time we only had about 45 minutes before the last boat from the island to Jersey. We had an extra half hour as the boat waited in dock for a spectacular storm to pass over the river.

We’ll definitely return but probably skip Delaware City except for possibly a meal.

Links:

• Ft Delaware ferry info (and on Wikipedia)
• News story on the Ft Mott dock reopening
• Fort Delaware, Confederate Hellhole on Roadside America
• Yummygal’s trip report

Readers will probably be unsurprised to learn that I use Technorati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quaker blogosphere. I act as a kind of community organizer and my searches are for interesting posts talking about Quakers (until reading Eileen’s post I hadn’t check my Technorati “rank” in months). Many people’s first introduction to QuakerQuaker.org is getting linked from it, and I suspect I’ve accidentally outed a few beginning bloggers who hadn’t told anyone of their new blog!

I have a professional blog on web design and analytics (with a somewhat off-topic but satisfying post on top at the moment) and separating that out has allowed me to use this personal blog, QuakerRanter, for whatever I like. Most regularly readers would say it focuses on Quakerism and cute kid pictures and while those are the most common posts, the most read posts are the minor fascinations I indulge myself with occasionally. Quaker plain dress is something I practice but don’t think about most of the time (806 readers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfairly unpopular baby names (627 visits). I’ve also detailed some outings to semi-legendary South Jersey haunts (317) and score high on searches to them.

The conventional wisdom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would probably say these off-topic posts are distracting my core audience. Perhaps, but they’re infrequent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps people to know I’m not just obsessed with one topic. Being a part of a real community means knowing each other in all of our quirks. I’m more tender and forgiving of other Quaker bloggers when I know more of their story: it puts what they say into a context that makes it sound more lived, less ideological. There’s certainly good reasons for tightly-focused professional blogs (I’d drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they started posting kids pictures!), but as more people read posts through feeds and aggregators I wonder if there’s going to be as much pressure for personal, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus.

We all have diverse, quirky interests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pander to particular audiences and boy, are they boring! A certain degree of idiosyncrasy and subjective orneriness is probably essential. Personality is at least as important as focus.

PS: I’m also interested in making sure I don’t loose the core audience with all my side trips, hence the “latest Quaker posts” at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will eventually get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Reader after Eileen’s is Avinish Kaushik’s Blog Metrics: Six recommendations for measuring your success. Parts of it are probably a bit technical for most QR readers but it’s useful for thinking about blogs as outreach.

On April 23 I flew to Oregon to serve on an editorial board for a book that QUIP is putting together of young Friends’ experiences of Quakerism. After arriving in Oregon but before I met with the editorial board for this, I served on a panel with the other young Friends on the editorial board in a QUIP meeting (as we had arrived at the end of a QUIP conference for our meeting) about how media, printed or otherwise, inspired us spiritually. As we related our experiences as young Friends (and growing up as Quakers), a number of issues surfaced rather quickly.

As young Friends move through high school and enter the [young] adult world, there is often a general lack of communication between young Friends and adults in Meetings, as if there’s some tension about it. Personally, as a young Friend in Durham Friends Meeting (NCYM(Cons.)), I’ve found that I know certain adults — ones with whom I have interacted more specifically over the years as I have grown up. Often these are parents of other young Friends in the Meeting or people who have been involved in youth group events. What’s missing is the connection to the rest of the adults in Meeting; I’ve been attending Durham Friends Meeting since I was born (with a period during middle school where I was mostly absent, but for the last few years I’ve been quite regular in attendance) and I feel like most of the meeting has no idea who I am. In addition to that, I’ve not known how to communicate my involvement and dedication in various national Quaker communities, such as being chosen as one of six co-clerks of the HS program at FGC Gathering this summer, my participation in Young Quakes, my attendance at a Pendle Hill Clerking workshop last fall, my involvement in this QUIP book, or how I have been reading many Quaker books over the last few months, all of which have been VERY integral in my spiritual development. Even Friends in Durham Friends Meeting with whom I do converse sometimes after Meeting do not know of all these things with which I am involved.

Also, when I stopped attending First Day school in January of my junior year in high school (a little over a year ago) and began attending the full hour of Worship, I spoke to two youth leaders about it briefly so they would understand, and then there was no further response. Looking back on this, I feel that the Meeting should be more involved in such a transition for all young Friends — not just those adults directly involved in the youth group/First Day school, but everyone should be more aware and attentive of the young Friends in Meeting and their involvement in Quaker communities outside of Meeting.

One thing that each of us felt is very important yet very lacking is mentorship within Meeting for Worship. There need to be adults who are not necessarily First Day school teachers, youth group leaders, or parents who are willing to have a relationship with a young Friend as someone who has had more experience with Quakerism and can nurture a young Friend’s spiritual development. A young Friend who was in Oregon with me related her experiences with a mentor she has at Earlham (she is a second-year there, currently), and how she sees him about once a week; often she even receives books to read from him.

As the only active young Friend at my school (I’m sort of the ‘token’ Quaker around), I usually do not have anyone to talk to about my spiritual findings and leadings. As I have continued to develop spiritually, I find more and more I need other Friends to talk who are familiar with my struggles.

These are issues not only within Durham Friends Meeting, but in Meetings across the country. I recognize that there are efforts to improve youth programs everywhere, but it never hurts to start locally.

As a graduating senior this year, and as an involved Friend, I would like to improve my relationship with the Meeting as a whole and make way for better relationships between members and young Friends in the future. This, however, needs to be fully a double-sided effort.

“Hope begins in the dark, with the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work; you don’t give up.” — Anne Lamott
It was a late afternoon in mid-August, and I was gathering my thoughts for this piece, when the blackout hit. As news reporters (at least those who could still broadcast) described the chaos in Manhattan and other cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest, our nation’s worst fear–a new terror attack–was reawakened. By the end of the day, the sense of vulnerability that so terrified us two years ago had spilled into every street. As eyes met, uncertainty flickered across every face.
Few people I know have recovered from the shock of the event. They may no longer be talking about it, but privately they’ll admit to a sense of lingering dread. Similarly, in europe and elsewhere, unprecedented killer heat waves and wildfires have left people on edge and wondering at how quickly we are making our planet unlivable.
President Bush was right: the blackout was unmistakably a wake-up call. To me, it is yet another example of the way God is still trying to pry open our hearts and speak into our souls through the tragedy of 9/11. Once again, we are being forcefully reminded that our faith in technology–in ourselves–is badly misplaced. It is clear that the questions we began asking two years ago have not yet been answered.
With this anniversary my thoughts are not so much with those who were snatched from us. They are in a place where we all long to be. My thoughts are with the living–those of us left behind. I think of those hit by the harsh reality that their loved ones are among the victims whose remains will never be identified. I feel their pain as they struggle against the temptation of anger–anger that those they were closest to never received a proper farewell.
ever since 9/11, people have said that things cannot go on as usual; that life will “never be the same again.” For those who lost loved ones, that has been proved to be an inescapable fact. For the rest of us, it ought to be true, too. But has it been, or has it become a cliché? If we truly honored the dead and their families, wouldn’t our words be accompanied by actions? Wouldn’t our attitudes, choices, and priorities show the change?
It’s been said by many others, but it must be said again: we Americans still have it too good. Not even 9/11 could shake the faith we have in ourselves. We believe we are invincible, that the good times are here to stay–no, that the good times will get even better. We have become hardened and indifferent to the needs of the rest of the world. Our success–and our greed for greater success–has solidified into a frightening arrogance. We have become deaf and blind to a growing worldwide resentment against us.
But it is not too late to reverse all this. It is not too late to open our eyes and look squarely at the rest of the world’s misery. It is not too late to dismantle our arrogance and allow ourselves to be taught by the weak, the suffering, and the poor. Perhaps they can teach us what we have avoided learning for so long: that our time on earth is short. Through them we can learn, as Simone Weil once recognized, that “if we accept death completely, we can ask God to make us live again, purified from the evil in us.”
As I recently reflected on the lessons of the last two years, I came across a meditation by Alfred Delp, a priest hanged by the Nazis in 1945. In it he ponders why God keeps us “in this chaos, where all appears endlessly hopeless and dark.” Delp surmises that maybe it is because, again and again, we seek comfort in false security, and in the “false pathos” that makes us think we can “avert any danger.”
We think we can “banish night, halt the internal quaking of the universe, harness everything and fit it into an order that will stand.” If we really wanted to prevent catastrophe, we would wake up and shake off this fog. And yet we slumber on, unshakable and obstinate and superficial. And again and again, God himself must intervene…
To Delp, waking up means realizing how helpless and wretched we are. But it also means something positive: it means becoming aware of “the golden threads that pass between heaven and earth.”
For me, these golden threads are the truly good things of life–the friends and family members we have; the relationships we share with them; the thoughts, words, and deeds of love that make life worth living. And as the second anniversary of 9/11 passes, perhaps we ought to spend more time considering such things, rather than dwelling on collapsing towers and falling planes.
How quickly we forget the treasure we found in each other in those moments of terror! every day offers us countless opportunities to find it again; every day we pass them by. If we took up even one–if we were able to relieve the fear or despair of even one person, we would find such happiness that we would not want anything else from life.
I often wonder how many more tragedies it will take before we learn to truly love each other, and before we grasp how happy we could be if we cared for those around us as well as we care for ourselves.
But I believe that we are slowly learning. There is hope. I saw it the first night of the recent blackout, when the spirit of compassion that transformed Manhattan on 9/11 was reawakened. Strangers asked strangers for help. Businessmen helped old people across the street. Twenty-somethings helped children find shade. People shared water, and taxis, and private cars. Just like two years ago, we found out how much we needed each other. Yes, there were those who took advantage of the situation. There was greed, and desperation. Here and there, price gougers tried to make a fast buck. But they were in the minority, and I am sure that this is a result of 9/11. Before that day, there would have been many more. But now we know better. We have learned something after all, and we are changing.
[Johann Christoph Arnold is an author and minister with the Bruderhof Communities ( “http://www.bruderhof.com”:http://www.bruderhof.com ). Read more of his articles and books at “http://www.ChristophArnold.com”:http://www.ChristophArnold.com .]