For many of us, our predicament today seems most like the soil with the thorns: We want to draw closer to God and walk in God’s ways, but there is so much bad news, so many obligations, so many distractions. We can be led astray, sometimes without even knowing it. The founder of our movement, George Fox, once said that “whatever ye are addicted to, the Tempter will come in that thing; and when he can trouble you, then he gets advantage over you, and then ye are gone.” We can be addicted to many things: not just, say, alcohol or gambling, but ideas, both about the world and about ourselves.

Alone, none of us can do much to change the world. But we can allow ourselves to be instruments of peace, reconciliation, love. It’s easy to get stuck and tempting in those times to get defensive or look toward others. I’ve found the old Quaker take on “The Tempter” to be personally very useful. I’ve learned to question and go inward whenever I feel too much pride in something or find myself part of a group that seems self-satisfied with its work.

Good soil

I fell in love with Lebanon: with the people, the sound of the language, the tastes of the food, and smells of the spices. Views to the Lebanon mountains from Beirut’s seaside boulevards and rooftops are enticing. Mountain villages have preserved their charm by keeping older homes with the blonde stone and red tile roofs. The hard-working and earnest teachers and the smart, business-minded shop owners are always glad to see foreigners. There is an industriousness, resilience, and pride in the Lebanese that contribute to the repeated risings from so many destructions of the city.

Sandy also gives us histories of times in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews have lived together in peace. It is possible. Today Sandy is clerk of the Middle East Collaborative of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which is working  on reconciliation in the region.

What Once Was Can Be Again — Friends Journal

Working on a shared vision of equality and a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

Friends Journal

The answer isn’t to give up testimonies or to hold onto them even tighter, but instead to constantly remind ourselves about their purpose: to learn how to live as an attentive people of God. Here’s what I wrote on Facebook:

I’ve been a mostly bicycle-riding vegan for decades, an outspoken
pacifist and a frequent plain dresser. All of these practices have
aided my spiritual growth but also have unearthed new sources of pride
for me to wrestle with. The self-examination has been practice in
discernment.

I often think back to the story of the Good Samaritan. What mattered
wasn’t how he was dressed or whether he was riding a bicycle. No, what
mattered is that he knew enough to know he was being called to
sacrifice something: to get covered in a strangers blood, to aid
someone who might resent him for it, to lose money he had earned to put
someone up for the night. Maybe he had practiced this discernment of
self-sacrifice by living a testimony that had challenged him to
navigate between loss and pride, and maybe he had been brought up in a
community where the value of love was prized above all. The important
thing is he knew to stop and be a true neighbor.

I myself felt stripped throughout the first half, a sense of vague but deep unease–not at how the workshop was going, but about who I am and where I am. Christ was hard at work pointing out the layers of pride that I’ve used to protect myself over the last few years. This morning’s agenda was mostly extended worship, begun with “Bible Reading in the Manner of Conservative Friends” (video below) and it really lifted the veil for me–I think God even joked around with me a bit.

As always, many of the high points came unexpectedly in small conversations, both planned and random. One piece that I’ll be returning to again and again is that we need to focus on the small acts and not build any sort of movement piece by piece and not worry about the Big Conference or the Big Website that will change everything that we know. That’s not how the Spirit works and our pushing it to work this way almost invariably leads to failure and wasted effort.

Another piece is that we need to start focusing on really building up the kind of habits that will work out our spiritual muscles. Chad of 27Wishes had a great analogy that had to do with the neo-traditionalist jazz musicians and I hoped to get an interview with him on that but time ran out. I’ll try to get a remote interview (an earlier interview with him is here, thanks Chad for being the first interview of the weekend!)

I conducted a bunch of video interviews that I’ll start uploading to my Youtube account and on the “reclaiming2009” tag on QuakerQuaker. When you watch them, be charitable. I’m still learning through my style. But it was exciting starting to do them and it confirmed my sense that we really need to be burning up Youtube with Quaker stuff.

I need to find my boarding gate but I do want to say that the other piece is putting together collections of practices that Friends can try in their location Friends community. Gathering in Light Wess led a really well-received session that took the Lord’s Prayer and turned it into an interactive small group even. We took photos and a bit of video and we’ll be putting it together as a how-to somewhere or other.

Pictures going up on Flickr, I’ll organize them soon. Also check out ConvergentFriends.org and the Reclaiming Primitive Quakerism workshop page on QuakerQuaker.

“With Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi”

Meanwhile in my hometown of Philadelphia four teenagers listened to the Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ over forty times before attacking and beating to death one of their friends.

Horrific as both stories are, what strikes me is the choice of music. ‘Helter Skelter’ and most of the music on ‘Apocalpse Now’ were written in the late 1960 and early 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today’s teenagers picking the music of their parents to plan their attacks? Can’t you kill to Radiohead or Linkin Park? Couldn’t the Philly kids have shown some hometown pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seriously, there have been some topsy-turvy generational surprises in the support and opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?

In 1995, I worked on one of my last books for New Society Publishers,

In this book, Paul Kivel is taking on a lot. He’s speaking to white people as a fellow white person about a hush-hush subject: racism. He’s speaking with an honesty that allows for confusion and for admission of his own inner prejudices. In an era when many whites express pride of the advancement of the civil rights movement, he asks why so much of our world is still racially proscribed.

Our society has been built upon a foundation of racism for so long that it’s become part of the landscape: always there, seldom acknowledged. In this book, Kivel acknowledges and he questions. He asks us where we came from, he asks us what we know. He’s resisted the temptation to make this a manual of political correctness, and has instead allowed us to share our own prejudices with him as we read.

Kivel challenges us to look at our place in society. Just because we’ve begun to unlearn racism doesn’t mean the person washing the dishes of a favorite restaurant isn’t still African American. Or that the editor of a favorite magazine isn’t still a white person. Or that the taxi driver we hail isn’t still classified an illegal alien by a government restricting immigration from darker-skinned regions of the world.

Paul Kivel doesn’t give us pat answers to these dilemmas. He knows there will be no point at which we can sit back and consider our job completed. We must continue to wrestle with these questions, and in the confusion find moments of connection and clarity.

Uprooting racism is of course a large task, much larger than any one of us. But by working in our communities, and by engaging with our neighbors, workmates, and friends, we can make a difference. May this book inspire and confuse you!

Martin Kelley, for the New Society Publishers

June 2016: Found in the Pendle Hill library: