British mark bicentennary of their slave trade abolition

Here in London, many people are making a pretty big deal out of an Act passed by Parliament in March 1807 that outlawed the involvement of British ships in the slave trade. Just a block or two from I’m staying, the British Museum has a lot of special events relating to this bicentennial (e.g., this one, on Sunday.) There’s a movie coming out called Amazing Grace, that is based on the life of the abolitionist MP William Wilberforce. I see the British Quakers have put together an interesting little on-line exhibition to mark this bicentennary, featuring some texts and other items from the collections of Friends House Library.
I think it’s excellent to remember this anniversary, and to find ways to reconnect with the strong ethical and religious sense of all those who worked and organized to end the transatlantic slave trade. As far as I understand the long, long global history of that ghastly institution, the enslaved persons in the Americas were about the first slaves in history whose condition of bondage and status as chattel was passed down from parent to child. And in fact, in a cruel irony, as the transatlantic trade in enslaved persons of African origin died out– due to laws being passed against it on both sides of the Atlantic, not just one– the value of the slaves who were already in place, working under horrendous conditions in the US, many Caribbean islands, and some South American nations, merely rose… And there was a strong incentive, until the whole institution of slavery was outlawed, which took many further decades, for slave-“owners” to try to breed their slave-stock as much as much possible, a matter to which many white men in slave-owning communities made a big personal contribution.
If you look at the (US Census Bureau-derived) demographic table in this section of the relevant Wikipedia page, you can see that between 1810 and 1860 the number of enslaved persons in the US rose from 1.2 million to nearly 4.0 million– despite the fact that the importation of additional slaves had been outlawed by Congress in 1808.
Imagine how many enslaved women were raped by white men and boys as part of that “breeding” program. Yes, another proportion of them doubtless bore children from relationships with enslaved men, and I hope that many of those relationships were marked by affection… But whether there was affection or no, the practitioners of the institution of slavery gave almost no recognition to ties of marriage or any other kinds of family ties among the “slaves” whom they owned. As many slave testimonies told, husbands and wives among the enslaved persons could be (and were) as easily separated as parents and children. A man, woman, or child could be “sold down the river” at a moment’s notice; or whole families could be split up when the “property” of a deceased slave-“owner” was divided among his heirs…
I started traveling towards becoming a Quaker some ten-plus years ago, spurred overwhelmingly by my reading of the journal of John Woolman, who was a mid-18th-century Quaker who grew up in a strongly Quaker community near Philadelphia. Woolman pursued many very important ministries of justice and conscience during his life, including by calling attention to the status of the native Americans, and by agitating against Pennsylvania’s raising of a war tax. (This was in the 1750s– quite a long time before the secessionist UDI movement called by its participants the “American Revolution.”)
But one of the most important ministries he pursued was undoubtedly the one against the institution of slavery.
By that point, many, many portions of the white settler community in the US were heavily involved in the institution of slavery… including some portion of just about all the many Christian denominations that had proliferated in the settler communities by then– and yes, that included the Quakers— and also a portion of the Jewish settlers. As far as I know it was only the Mennonites, among the Christians (and perhaps the other Anabaptists?) who had never participated in the owning or trading of enslaved persons. But many, many Quakers certainly had.
Actually, if you go back and read what the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, had written about the institution of slavery in the 1670s, you will see it is far from being any kind of forthright protest against the whole institution. See what he wrote, for example, here:

    ‘…if you were in the same condition as the Blacks are…now I say, if this should be the condition of you and yours, you would think it hard measure, yea, and very great Bondage and Cruelty. And therefore consider seriously of this, and do you for and to them, as you would willingly have them or any other to do unto you…were you in the like slavish condition.’

There were huge hyper-profits to be made in the business; and some were made by Quaker plantation owners in the southern states or Quaker slave-traders in Rhode Island and other states to the north.
Eighty years after George Fox was writing, John Woolman came along. He saw at first hand the misery and inequity of the institution of slavery. He heard all the allegedly “do-gooding” claims of the slave-holders and slave-traders among the Quakers… that they were “saving these poor souls from the misery of wars in Africa”, etc etc… and he slowly confronted them with his witness, one-by-one, and also in small groups and at impassioned meetings for worship and business.
He was not alone. There were other American Quaker abolitionists who joined him in his campaign. But he was the one who kept an extremely moving journal of all his efforts… And between them, these Quaker men and women made a big difference. They managed to persuade all the Quakers of the US to dissociate themselves from the institution; and it was on the basis of that achievement that many Quakers of later decades then became leaders in the broad national movement against what the Americans have often called the “peculiar institution.”
Too bad that, come the 1860s, it was only through the waging of an extremely fierce and bloody war that slavery was finally ended forever in the country. (More on that, perhaps, later: I really think that war was the biggest test for the pacifism of US Quakers– much more so than the distant war against Hitlerism some 80 years later.) Anyway, I guess the ferocity with which the southern whites fought in that war was a marker of just how very profitable the whole institution had been for them…
Back home in Charlottesville, Virginia,my good friend Bill Anderson– who’s an Anglican peace activist and an African-American— has a couple of times said to me, “Helena, I always have a soft spot for Quakers: Your people freed my family back in the 1830s.” I never know what to say. I feel much more ashamed that back at one point, Quakers in Virginia may well have actually “owned” some of Bill’s ancestors, than I feel happy that they eventually helped to “free” some of them.
I guess I wish the events here in Britain being held to mark the bicentennary of this country’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 had a little less smug self-satisfaction, and a little more real reflectiveness to them. After all, should we really be doing much celebrating if someone stops beating his wife??
When I say “reflectiveness”, I just want to note that I’ve seen nothing in all the many newspaper articles and other items of commentary on this anniversary which looks at how many of the fine institutions of the “Enlightenment” here in Britain, as in the rest of Europe and also, certainly, in the Americas, were financed with the hyper-profits from the slave trade… And then, absolutely no reflection at all on the degree to which the legacies of the slave trade and other crimes of colonialism still live on in Africa; or, on whether these very rich and settled former slave-trading societies of northern Europe should not take seriously the task of effecting some real form of reparations to those ravaged home-communities of Africa.
… I do just want to put in links to two really excellent resources for anyone studying this subject. One is this book, Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews With Virginia Ex-Slaves, reprinted by the University of Virginia Press from a series of excellent interviews made by (generally) African-American interviewers, with some of the last living ex-slaves in the 1930s. The other is Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade, The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870.
But what I really want to say here is this. By the time John Woolman got around to visiting his fellow-Quakers up and down the east coast of America in the 1750s, many of those he visited had succeeded in becoming quite strongly convinced that the institution of slavery was not just acceptable, but also good and ethical. It took Woolman and his friends many years of persistent persuasion to convince them of the error of their ways.
From today’s perspective, the error of their ways seems blindingly obvious!
So what practices are we engaged in today– practices that we may well think are not just acceptable, but beyond that, actively good and ethical– that future generations will look back and say “Unbelievable! How could people back then do such terribly damaging things???”

New affiliation with the Friends Committee on (US) National Legislation

I am very happy to announce the start of a new affiliation I have taken up, as “Friend in Washington” with the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), which is the very experienced lobbying organization that US members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) maintains on Washington’s Capitol Hill.
Longtime JWN readers should be well aware of the importance that my membership of a Quaker Meeting (congregation) has for me, and for my writings and other activities on social and political issues. Actually, having this blog has allowed me to do a lot to start “coming out” as a fairly public Quaker over the past few years. Now, taking up this affiliation with FCNL seems like a good next move in this direction, and I am extremely moved by their invitation to me to do this.
The Quakers are one of the historic “peace churches,” having upheld their (our) testimonies against war and violence, and in support of the equality and wellbeing of all human beings, for more than 350 years. FCNL describes itself as “A Quaker lobby in the public interest.” It is a very well-run, Quaker-led organization that focuses on trying to build the kinds of principled and respectful relationships with legislators in Washington in which “friendly persuasion”– exercised both in Washington and by FCNL’s nationwide network of Quaker and other supporters– will bring these legislators closer to working for such important public-interest goals as ending war, reducing military budgets, extending health-care coverage to all Americans, respect of Native American rights, and ending torture.
FCNL has done a lot of very productive work on issues that I care deeply about, including most definitely the whole US engagement in Iraq; and I’ve had many good conversations over the past 2-3 years with their Executive Secretary, Joe Volk, and members of his staff. So I’m looking forward to seeing where this new affiliation, which in the first instance has a term of six months, can lead all of us.
I understand it’s paradoxical that I start this affiliation while being in Cairo at the beginning of a three-month sojourn outside the US! But FCNL says in the announcement they issued about my new affiliation, “We will keep in close touch with her, and are confident that her experiences there will only strengthen the contribution she is able to make.”
Also, to mark this new relationship I have put the “Friendly (Quaker) links and concerns” section of my sidebar up near the top there, and I’ll keep it there for the next few weeks… So if you want to find out more about FCNL and other aspects of (mainly US) Quaker life, please go and explore some of those links.
The largest numbers of Quakers in the world are, actually, in Africa, and I’ll try to get some African links into that section when I can.
In the Middle East there has been a 120-plus-year presence of Quakers in both Palestine and Lebanon. In both those countries Quakers have maintained excellent schools and have small congregations of worshipers. In addition, in 1948 the American Friends Service Committee took on responsibility for providing all the international relief services that were given to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who had flooded into Gaza during the Palestinian-Jewish/Israeli fighting of 1947-48; and it continued to do that work for ten months until the UN had finally organized itself enough to establish UNRWA, which has done the job there, and elsewhere, ever since then.
You can find out more about Quakers’ involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian issue if you read When the Rain Returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel a group-authored Quaker book that I helped work on, that came out in 2004.
Anyway, now I guess I need to get used to thinking of myself as a “Friend in Washington (on Assignment).”

A few random notes from Cairo

1. We’re staying in “Garden City”, a portion of the near-downtown that used to be filled with very gracious 1930s-style Art Deco homes. Now, few of those remain, and they’re dwarfed by massive and nearly all very ugly concrete tower blocks. The ugliest by far is the ghastly, 15-story block-house of the (new-ish) US Embassy, whose builders apparently made no attempt whatsoever to take into account any esthetic considerations. Luckily, we can’t see it from the window. When I do my morning yoga workout I look out of our 10th-floor window and can see some little peeks of the Nile, some fascinating scenes in the shanties built atop some of the lower buildings around, a few Art Deco gems, and some really precarious high-rise construction underway.
2. From here, I can walk almost anywhere I want. Yesterday, Bill and I walked to the mosque of Sayeda Zeinab. She was a grand-daughter of the Prophet and is supposedly entombed there. The two youngish (male) guardians of the women’s side of the mosque tried to rip me off so I didn’t hang around. Instead, Bill and I walked through the amazing street market down the side of the mosque. Note to self: next time try to get some audio of the incredible street-barkers there.
3. Today I walked along to the Egyptian Medical Union and interviewed the former Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson– and current “Guidance Committee” member– Dr. Issam al-Arian. (More, later.)
4. Friday, I got my best-ever score at One-Minute Perquackey. It was 4,350. On to 5,000…
5. Last night we watched the amazing Indian movie “Earth”, by Deepa Mehta. It was about the Partition of India in 1947 and was (very loosely) based on a book called “Cracking India” that I read several years ago. It’s a gut-wrenching look at what happens inside a mixed, Muslim-Hindu-Sikh-Parsee, group of friends in Lahore as Partition approaches. Some aspects of it I think Mehta didn’t get quite believably– mainly, the fact that all the members of this group of friends seemed to participate in it only as monads, and didn’t have much discernible life at all outside it… they just sat around talking all day. But some aspects I think s/he got brilliantly; mainly, the way friends can turn on each other “on a dime” once the cancer of divisiveness and sectarianism takes root. Of course, watching it at the same time that we know a very similar form of ethnic cleansing is underway in Iraq made it even more horrific.
6. Earlier this evening we had a Quaker meeting for worship here, with just two of us taking part. Bill isn’t a Quaker so it was me and one other person, the guy who lives here and whose name is listed as the “contact person” for Quakers in Cairo in all relevant directories. We sat together for just about an hour and then joined Bill for dinner. It felt good to re-center as a Quaker. As I sat I thought a bit about how much I love my home Quaker Meeting (congregation) and all the people in it; how much I’ve learned from them and how much they sustain me. I thought about the Quakers I’ve worshiped with in South Africa and Rwanda, and about all the many Quaker Churches there are in East and Central Africa, and how they’re doing so much good by holding up our peace testimony in often very, very conflicted times… So being here and having a (small) Meeting for Worship right at the north of this great continent felt good. It’s going to be a busy next couple of weeks.
7. By the way, watch for an important announcement here on JWN sometime Monday.

More Light!

We’ve now gone through the period of the shortest day, here in the northern hemisphere. From now on, we will have more light.
We Quakers frequently use the term “Light” to refer to the divine, or to the sense of general spiritual enlightment on which we wait, expectantly, whenever we worship together.
Please G-d, let the there be a lot more of it in the world.
Ethiopia sending its army and air force against Somalia? Where are the powers in the world that will stop this madness?
George Bush planning to increase the size of the US occupation force in Iraq? Where is the powerful citizens’ movement here in the US to say “No way! Get them out now!”
Yes, we all need more Light.
… As we stood at our street-corner peace demonstration here in Charlottesville on Thursday, I had a sense for the first winter solstice-time since we’ve been maintaining this peace presence every week that now, finally, the tide in our country has begun to turn deeply in our direction.
(Though we still have a long, long way to go, in order to (1) Get all of our troops out of Iraq, and (2) find a new, more egalitarian balance in our country’s relations with the rest of the world.)
Personally, though, I’m feeling a sense of being deeply blessed. My three kids, aged 21 through 28, are all back with us for Christmas, along with two of their three significant others. We have a warm home full of fun and laughter. We have plenty– far too much!– to eat. It was pretty easy for all the kids to get back here.
Over this past year I’ve visited with families and communities in northern Uganda and Palestine who most certainly don’t have these blessings. In both places, the perpetuation of a decades-long state of war, and the associated restrictions and movement controls imposed by governmental authorities, have reduced entire communities to deep poverty. In both places a large proportion of the people don’t have the basic physical things required for human flourishing. In both places, too, the imposition of draconian movement controls separates cultivators from their lands and people from their birthplaces; these movement controls also impose huge social wounds by splitting families and wrecking livelihoods.
So yes, let there be a lot more Light in the weeks and months ahead. For the peoples of northern Uganda, the Palestinians, the Iraqis, Somalis, and Ethiopians– and all the others of our brothers and sisters bent low under the burden of bitter conflict… And for US Americans and the other peoples who both suffer from conflict and also bear a disproportionate responsibility for its perpetuation and sometimes its extreme exacerbation. (Being violent is also a sickness of the soul.)
Perhaps if the United States can now start to creep back down off its self-erected pedestal of global unilateralism and toengage more respectfully and more thoughtfully with the other nations of the world that action itself might have a much broader demonstration effect, or ripple effect, as well?
After all, if pursuit of a policy of militarism, unilateralism, and arrogance has not succeeded for the world’s most heavily armed power, then surely everyone, everywhere can see the extreme limits on the usefulness of such a policy?
Oh wait. Most of the world’s other peoples and governments understood that a long time ago. Now, we US Americans just need to catch up…

Quakers in America for 350 years

After arriving back in the US from Uganda, I spent most of last week at the
Annual Sessions of
Baltimore Yearly Meeting

of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).  For those who don’t
know much about the practice of Quakers (Friends), I should
note that here along the east coast of the USA, we still organize our
congregations in much the same way that they have been organized since the
denomination was founded, during the whole ferment of religious innovation
and expression that welled up during the civil war in mid-17th century Britain.
 That is, we don’t have any “hireling priests”, or indeed any power-wielding religious hierarchy or fixed liturgy, at all.  Our internal organization
is extremely egalitarian.  Our local congregations are called “Monthly
Meetings”, because while they gather once or more per week to worship together,
they (we) conduct the business of the congregation during a special “Meeting
for Worship with a Concern for Business” that is held once a month.  And
then, most of the Monthly Meetings are grouped together in geographically
larger organizations called “Yearly Meetings”, which do their business together–
you guessed– once a year.

My monthly meeting, Charlottesville, is part of
Baltimore Yearly Meeting

(BYM).  So what we were doing last week was conducting this group’s
business together. BYM brings together Quakers from Virginia, Maryland, the
District of Columbia, and some portions of southern and western Pennsylvania.
 To our north is Philadelphia Yearly Meeting– a large one, given that
Philadelphia and its surrounding state of Pennsylvania were
founded by Quaker colonists

back in the late 17th century.  There is also New York YM, New England
YM; and other YMs to the south of us.

I’ve been going to BYM annual sessions for four years now.  I really
love Quaker process, which I think is a great gift to the world. For example, we always do our congregational business in a clear spirit of religious worship: what we are searching for together in these meetings is a Spirit-led unity; and often, when the way forward doesn’t seem exactly clear, we will just settle into silent worship together and wait for the guidance of the Spirit. Also,
we never take votes. Instead, it is the job of the person running the meeting–
the “clerk”– to discern what the Spirit-led “sense of the meeting” is on any decision.
 One deeply convinced Friend can hold up the attainment of a decision,
and such a dissenter is always given a close and loving listening. Perhaps
she or he is indeed the one who knows the truth or can provide the best answer!
 As a result, the process of reaching a united “sense of the meeting”
on crucial issues can sometimes feel very slow.  But once
the meeting body has found such unity, then that unity is very strong.

BYM has a Presiding Clerk with great gifts of gentle leadership and spiritual
centeredness.  Her name is Lauri Perman.  It is a joy to watch
her working, and I always try to learn from how she clerks our big sessions
there.

This year, we have been (quietly) celebrating the fact that it is exactly
350 years since the first Quaker “traveling minister” came to north America
from Britain.  Her name was Elizabeth Harris, and where she landed was
in Anne Arundel County on the Chesapeake Bay, which is currently part of
Maryland but was then part of Virginia.  Friend Elizabeth preached a
lot up and down the Chespeake, and soon there were enough Monthly Meetings
founded in these parts to establish the first Yearly Meeting on this continent,
which happened in 1672.  That was Baltimore Yearly Meeting, which this
year was holding its 335th annual session.  We didn’t hold it
in Baltimore, however.  This year we were once again occupying a small
(and air-conditioned) wing of James Madison University in the Shenandoah
Valley area of Virginia, about one hour west of Charlottesville…

Continue reading “Quakers in America for 350 years”

Deborah J. (‘Misty’) Gerner

My dear friend Deborah J. Gerner (also known as ‘Misty’) died yesterday. She’d sustained a hard battle against increasingly invasive forms of cancer for the past eleven years.
She was brave, determined, fair-minded, and a passionate advocate for justice and human equality.
I had known Misty, vaguely, for many years. Then in 2002 we worked together on When the Rain Returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel, a big Quaker book on Israel and Palestine. She was a Light, a peacemaker, and a very spiritual person. At hard times in our work– of which there were more than a few– she was a steady and supportive presence, gently urging us all to find the truth that is greater than any one of us is.
She was a member of Oread Friends Meeting there in Lawrence, Kansas.
I was with Misty and her spouse, Phil Schrodt, in Kansas last month when they were making some very hard end-of-life decisions. I’ve spent the past weeks saying goodbye to her in one way and another.
Kansas University, where she was a professor of political science, put out this news release about her passing. It tells a lot about her life and her many professional accomplishments.
Misty was 50 years old. Life seems miserably unfair sometimes. However, she leaves behind her a very rich legacy of knowledge and caring that will be with the world forever.
I’m writing this in an airport. I’m headed for Europe. I’ve been thinking such a lot about Phil, who’s been caring for her in the most loving and personal way in their beautiful home on a wooded hillside there, ever since they shifted from hospitals to “hospice” care. I know he has a strong network of friends there… Let’s send our comforting thoughts to them all.

Every heart a peace factory!

Whew!! I just finished the painstaking process of going over the page proofs for my upcoming book Amnesty After Atrocity? Healing Nations After Genocide and War Crimes. The page layout looks really good… very readable indeed.
The hardback is priced ways high for my taste. I need to look at the contract to see when Paradigm are planning to put out a paperback…
Anyway, I am really happy to have done it. By and large the text still reads well. (Though of course I have a l’esprit de l’escalier-ish regret regarding some portions where I wish I had expressed myself better. Too late! It is nearly ready to go– and at this stage, changes that I request start costing me heavily– as well as, always, introducing the possibility of further glitches and infelicities. Mainly, I just have to trust the careful wholetext edit I did back in February.)
Anyway, working with the material has also been a great retreading of memory lane, and has once again reminded me why I thought this material and this project was important.
Two of the most inspiring people I interviewed in connection with it– two of the most inspiring people I have ever met in my life– were the (Catholic) Cardinal Alexandre Dos Santos and the (Anglican) Bishop Dinis Sengulane… both in Maputo, Mozambique. They and a small group of other church leaders had all played a key role in starting/enabling the direct Frelimo-Renamo peace talks that in October 1992 brought an end to the 15 years of atrocity-laden conflict that had wracked their country. Dos Santos, who was already nearly 80 years old when I interviewed him in 2003, had an ethereal, almost pure-spirit air about him. Sengulane was probably 20 or so years younger, but also extremely wise.
One of the many memorable things Sengulane said was at the point when he was describing the role the Mozambican churches had played in building popular support for the 1992 peace. He said,

    we from the churches went to the places where the war had happened and we talked with the people there about making our hearts into ‘peace factories’.

What a beautiful concept! It’s so completely Christian, so completely Buddhist, so completely true. Hostile acts start with hostile intent, and peacemaking acts have to start with peacemaking intent.
It’s true, good intent is never enough on its own. But it is an indispensable starting point… and it’s not one that’s necessarily always easy to achieve. In the book of Henri Nouwen’s that I commented on here not long ago, Nouwen pointed out that many people who want to work for a peaceable world use scaremongering (and in his view, counter-productive) ways to do so:

    Panic, fear, and anxiety are not part of peacemaking. This might seem obvious, but many who struggle against the threat of a world war not only are themselves motivated by fear but also use fear to bring others to action. Fear is the most tempting force in peacemaking… We need to be reminded in very concrete ways of the demonic power at work in our world, but when an increase of fear is the main result we become the easy victims of these same powers. When peacemaking is based on fear it is not much different from warmaking… (Peacework, p.35)

The radical Quaker activist of the 1930s A.J. Muste captured something of the same insistence on the organic unity of ends and means when he said, quite simply: There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
But I like Sengulane’s formulation, too. It reminds us (well, me, anyway) of the need to continually audit my own intentions and practices, to try to make sure that my heart really is a peace factory. As the old song goes, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”

Henri Nouwen on atrocity and violence

What a gift today was.
This morning in Quaker meeting I found myself reading a little book called “Peacework” by Henri Nouwen. I don’t usually read during worship, but today I just really felt led to do so. The book had been sitting on my shelf for a while, but today I took it to meeting with me and read the first of the three essays in it: “Prayer”.
Nouwen was a Catholic priest who was a theologian and peace activist before he passed away in 1996. He is the author of the theory of “The Wounded Healer“, which I think is a very powerful way of understanding the possibility (and limitations) of being a peacemaker in the world. I find him not quite as engaging a writer as Thomas Merton, but I think his understanding and explication of the roots and nature of of violence are extremely powerful.
Today in meeting for worship, I was riveted by this (Peacework, pp.28-29):

    When I listen to the sounds of greed, violence, rape, torture, murder, and indiscriminate destruction, I hear a long, sustained cry coming from all the corners of the world. It is the cry of a deeply wounded humanity that no longer knows a safe dwelling place but wanders around the planet in a desperate search for love and comfort.
    Needs that are anchored in wounds cannot be explained simply … This is the pervasive tragedy of humanity, the tragedy of the experience of homelessness that winds through history and is passed by each generation to the next in a seemingly unending sequence of human conflicts with even more destructive tools of rage in our hands. The vicious repetition of wounds and needs creates the milieu of “those who hate peace.” It is the dwelling place of demons. And it is a place that lures us precisely because we are all wounded and needy.

Anyway, he continues by arguing that to escape from these destructive (and multi-generational) cycles of wounds and needs we need to find our own sanctuary in prayer.
I also found this part very powerful (pp.34-35):

    It is not hard to see that the house of those who are fighting is a house ruled by fear. One of the most impressive characteristics of Jesus’ description of the end-time is the paralyzing fear that will make people senseless, causing them to run in all directions, so disoriented that they are swallowed up by the chaos that surrounds them. (Quote from Luke 21:25-26) … The advice that Jesus gives his followers for these times of turmoil is to remain quiet, confident, peaceful, and trusting in God. He tells them not to follow those who sow panic, nor to join those who claim to be saviors, nor to be frightened by rumors of wars and revolution, but “to stand erect and hold your heads high.” (Luke 21:28)…

This is, of course, very similar to the teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh that I wrote about here, back in December 2003.
(It was interesting to go back to that earlier JWN post and read that description of the experience of being in an 11 a.m. worship seession here in Charlottesville Friends Meeting. Today’s was very similar in size and spirit. Today there was a new baby, Theodore Staengl, gurgling and cooing in his baby-carrier on the floor. My friend Linda Goldstein’s dog started barking outside at one point. But the meeting felt extremely gathered to me– to the extent that when the kids came in at 11:45 I was amazed that so much time had passed already… )

RIP Tom Fox

My heart is so heavy I don’t know what to write… about the discovery of Tom Fox’s dead body.
Go the CPT’s website today and you can read the agonized statement they’ve put out about his loss. You can also see a picture of him at one of the recent anti-Wall demonstrations in Palestine.
I never met Tom personally but many of my Quaker friends know him, some quite well.
I hope he didn’t suffer too much.
I hope Jim, Harmeet, and Norman aren’t suffering too much, now. Also Jill Carroll. Also, all people illegally deprived of their liberty in Iraq. I’m praying for them all.
I flew back to the States today, so I’m still feeling a little disoriented and out of it. I’m doing a speaking gig north of Boston tomorrow evening– Gloucester Town Hall, 7 p.m., I think.
The CPT statement starts:

    In grief we tremble before God who wraps us with compassion…

I’m thinking of a God who can wrap us all in mercy and compassion. Bismillahi rrahmani rrahim.

Religion, war, peace, and March 2 event

If you’re in New York City on the evening of March 2, then you can come hear me and some other, much more inspiring folks. We taking part in a public discussion on the topic of Study War No More: Religion and the contemporary peace movement.
Daniel Berrigan will keynote it. Other speakers are Ibrahim Ramey, Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard, and Simon Harak. I shall be the “moderator”, but they’ve also asked me to say a couple of things. (“Read Just World News!” “Here’s the URL for it!” … What? You don’t think that would suffice?)
It’ll be at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (Amsterdam & 112th), at 7 p.m. Come if you can. You can download a flier for it here.
And while I’m writing about religion, war, and peace, I wanted to make sure and get in link here to this fascinating article, which appeared in the NYT last week. It’s by Charlottesville home-boy Charles Marsh. Actually, he’s not a “boy”; he’s a Professor of Religion at the University of Virginia.
The piece is titled Wayward Christian Soldiers, and it documents an important series of utterances made by various prestigious US Christian-Evangelical leaders, between the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2003, about the prospect of the then-imminent war.
Here’s what Marsh found:

Continue reading “Religion, war, peace, and March 2 event”