Christmas in our Quaker meeting

Quakers generally hold that every day is as holy as any other, every place is as sacred as any other, and every person equally as much a child of God as any other. So we don’t have a “liturgical year” with Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, etc. But we US Quakers do live here in our surrounding culture, with the kids and all of us subjected strongly to the winds of the surrounding culture. And since it’s good to build our community with special gatherings when we can, our Quaker Meeting (church) here in Charlottesville usually has one just before “the time known as Christmas” when our kids tell us some about the things they’ve been learning and lead us in some singing.
This year’s children’s performance was today.
We have the most amazing kids in our children’s program. Ever since 9/11, new families with young children have been coming to our Quaker meeting– looking, I think, for a congregation dedicated to peace, understanding, and nonviolence in which they can raise their kids. And we also have many families who’ve been Quakers for a long time, who have kids of various ages.
Today, at 10 a.m., the under-12s all came into the middle of the square room in which we hold our twice-weekly worship sessions. They were wearing a variety of costumes and had an excited air. Julian Waters, aged about 5, started out by reading some of the account of the Christmas story from one of the Gospels. He was very serious about it. When he got to a place talking about the birth of the “Prince of Peace”, he looked up and– still following his stage directions– asked loudly, “Why are we celebrating Christmas if we’re at war?”
One of the adult friends (Quakers) then led the kids in singing John McCutcheon’s “Christmas in the Trenches”, which is a lovely song about the “Christmas truce” in the World War 1 trenches, in 1915. (John, who’s a great folk musician, is also a member of our Quaker Meeting, but he wasn’t there today.)
The kids have been studying ‘comparative religions’ in their Sunday school. So most of the half-hour program that followed consisted of various quotations about peace and brotherly love taken from a wide variety of different religions. These were interspersed with other songs, including “This is my song“, which is sung to the haunting “Finlandia” melody, by Sibelius.
Oh and I forgot to mention: at the beginning, a bunch of the adults welcomed the kids in by singing a Sufi chanted version of “La illahi- illallah”, which is very meditative.
In our Meeting we have some really great parents and Sunday school teachers, and we all work hard to raise caring and self-confident kids who have a strong commitment to nonviolence. Lots of us adults were sniffling as we watched our kids this morning– and thinking, too, of the violence of the culture in which we’re trying to raise them.
Talking of our responsibilities as parents… that reminded me about the great job my daughter Lorna Quandt (then 17) and her friends did back in March 2003, when they organized a walkout from Charlottesville High School to protest the launching of the war. You can still read about it, here. I was so proud of her and her friends that day. Later, the Principal gave all those who had participated a couple of extra detentions. (Or was it an “in-school suspension”? I forget.) Anyway, a non-trivial punishment. But that was okay. They knew they would get some punishment– but thought it was important to make their feelings known, all the same.
250 kids walked out of the high school that day. That was around 25% of the entire student body.
Now, we really need to start planning a good public action for March 18, 2006…

13 thoughts on “Christmas in our Quaker meeting”

  1. May I say “God bless you”?
    (I’m still busy. See my new blog. Given here as my URL. Today’s message explains how it’s all supposed to work.)

  3. Wow, Dominic, all the different thngs you’re trying to do on the web at the same time look very ambitious and complex. You must have a lot more energy than I do (or, assistance from others?)
    I browsed around a little. I found lots of what you have– especially the links– really interesting. Especially the links to the Benderman Defense Committee, etc. Also, a report from Venezuela. Was that your son writing it?
    But re the Marxist theorizing, I must confess that these days, I find most of that stuff really hard to read…
    Good luck with the big educational project, though. (Maybe we could slip a few nonviolence texts into your curriculum?)

  4. Yes, it’s my son James who wrote the Venezuela article. He is in London.
    I wouldn’t mind having some short non-violence texts. Lenin was quite non-violent in a way. He made a revolution without a military force.
    I don’t want bloodshed. I want peace. It’s true that revolution is necessarily violent, but only in terms of property (i.e. expropriation thereof) and not people.
    The blog/group/sites thing has grown out of work that has been going on for the last two and a half years. So it comes to the Internet well prepared and takes this form quite naturally.
    The “Current News” is stuff I collect daily and that can be laborious if I’m not careful. I have been circulating it by e-mail.
    I’m trying to get a really slick system going, because it is popular and I want to be able to go on doing it. It’s a kind of journalism.
    The Marxism is also popular in SA! A lot of people want to eat it up.
    Yes I have had great assistance. But I have to also admit it’s not all working yet. There is a missing link. We’re working on it. The problem is to get the existing recipients into a Google group, and we’re blocked.
    Otherwise the idea’s not complicated really. It’s logical to combine a blog and a group and a web site, and the wikispace is especially conducive to doing so.

  5. Helena,
    The block is out of the way this morning. This means I can build the Google group with all the means that are available for that – which are considerable and appropriate in our circumstances.
    I really would like something of yours on non-violent struggle. There is a “course” called “Legal and Military struggle” which is designed to bring up this whole matter for discussion. There is room for one or two more papers in there. Five thousand words is a good average length, and it can even be more, but in general the shorter the better. These are supposed to be read during the week prior to a session, and to stimulate discussion, not to indoctrinate.
    Another of the “generic courses” you might like to look at is the one called “No Woman, No Revolution”. Then there is the section on “Critical Pedagogy”, which is only very loosely Marxist, taken as a whole.
    In all cases you probably need to read the last items first. My site is not quite as orthodox Marxist as it at first appears, although I don’t like to boast about that aspect too much.
    The point is not so much where it is coming from but where it is going, as Marx might very well have said.

  7. I’d say you really should have a seminal text from Gandhi and one from the Dalai Lama. Both of those come from a strong faith perspective. If you want something more secular and “instrumental”, get something by Barabara Deming (though I disagree with aspects of her approach.) Let me think some more…

  8. I can’t make head or tail of Gandhi’s writing. That’s the charitable view. The other one is that he was a devious obscurantist. I have never read anything of the Dalai Lama but he has come in for some stick lately along the same lines. A but vague, to say the least, I gather.
    What about the liberation theologists? Helder Camara is a name I know. What others? Pastor Niemoller? Don Cupitt? Who is at the cutting edge of Quaker thinking? Who denounces the Imperialists? Who is prepared to throw the money-lenders out of the temple? What about Kazantzakis? Is there an essay by him? Or about him and his “Christ Recrucified”? What about St Francis? Who of the Dominicans is writing now?
    I don’t know this literature but I’m sure there are some wild men in there who can speak straight to the young blacks of South Africa. Even better would be some wild women. Joan of Arc it can’t be! Not from your point of view. But what do the millions of nuns of this world read and write? Some of them are very tough people. Not Mother Theresa, please! She glorified poverty. That doesn’t go down well here.
    I’ll look up Barbara Deming now.

  9. A speech of Martin Luther King might do it.
    I think what has to be born in mind is how exciting the works of Marx and Lenin and other Communists are, and the tough, direct and uncompromising prose in which they are written, so totally modern even if like Marx’s works, they are up to one and a half centuries old. Whatever is brought in as representative of pacifism, to be given a fair chance, has to be at least as appealing as the revolutionaries in terms of style, apart from content.
    MLK should pass on that count.

  10. Another thing to bear in mind is that our great revolutionary leader was a very religious man, but he was not a pacifist, and he led the ANC through most of its time of armed struggle. I mean O. R. Tambo.

  12. Thanks for this. It would be nice to build up a list over time of ten or twenty short texts of powerful and controversial writers on the frontiers of religious thought. What about the former Anglican Bishop of Durham, name of Jenkins or something like that?
    A strong pacifism that can prevail will have to be a courageous pacifism. It will need braver people than anything else, and their criticism of society will have to be more frank and severe than anybody else’s.

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