Category: Quaker stuff

I found a wonderful blog today, written by a Quaker from Sacramento, California who pursues a QiGong-based prison ministry inside some of the state’s biggest and most inhumane prisons. It’s called Qigong Prison Ministry. (How hard is that?)
The blog’s author, Judy Tretheway, writes in a very straightforward, intimate , and inspiring way about her work. I particularly enjoyed the following recent posts:

Let my life preach
How do I… protection
Cell visits and holiday cards
The value of prison work (and the download there)
“Do we matter?” an inside student asks, and
Holiday Prayer.

Also, this one from November, which says:

The Ultimate form of Worship is Silence.
After meditating Saturday evening, preparing for Sunday Meeting for Worship.
I can not offer myself in a greater way
to the service of another,
to God,
than to listen silently,
setting my own ideas and needs aside,
to wait upon their direction;
to hold them in highest esteem,
to be in Worship.
To be in awe
is to be wordless.
Not words, nor music; no scent, nor image
can reflect God, name God or approach God.
They are self-serving scratches
at a keyhole so vast
only the unbounded silence of expectant waiting
might have a chance at opening the lock,
that was never locked,
And open the door
that has always been open.
Come put your silence into the lock,
Open the door into the heart of God,
Lay yourself in the doorway.
Offer all that you might ever be
And always have been.

Thanks so much for everything you do, and everything you have put on this blog, Judy.

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…

Tomorrow afternoon, I get the huge pleasure of leaving town and joining many friends (Friends) from my Quaker meeting here in a weekend-long retreat over near Richmond. I’m really looking forward to it. I know many of my Jewish friends have spent the time since sundown yesterday fasting and praying as they “take account” of all their actions over the past year, which I gather is the main point of the Yom Kippur observances. I sort of feel in need of some of the same moral and existential stock-taking… Though mind you, the main focus of this retreat is on “community building”, so it might end up a little different. Who knows?
Last week, I got to teach two classes at the Quaker school we have here in Charlottesville– Tandem Friends School. I was working with a group of 15-year-olds, leading them in two 70-minute explorations of some of the key teachings of John Woolman. They are great young people. Many of them were deeply engaged in thinking through the tough challenge of how to make the world a better place using only life-affirming and non-violent means.
We talked a lot about how, back in the 1750s, John Woolman traveled up and down the east coast of (what would later become) the US, talking to the many Quakers living and farming here then who did so on the basis of their reliance on slave labor. He and a small bunch of other Philadelphia-area Quakers had become opposed to the practice of slavery, but their dilemma was how to persuade all the other members of their beloved Religious Society of Friends that participating in the institution of slavery was not– as some Quakers still held– the ethical thing to do in those times, but was indeed an abomination.
Gradually, over the years, Woolman, Anthony Benezet, and other anti-slavery activists won more and more (Quaker) converts to their cause. Quaker shipowners in Newport RI gradually turned away from their previous, often very lucrative, engagement in slave-capturing expeditions across the Atlantic. Quaker farmers in Virginia and the Carolinas gradually found ways to manumit (free) their slaves– which often wasn’t an easy thing to do. And then, finding that there was no way to make a living on this poor soil if you had to actually pay your farm labor, most of them ended up selling up and moving either to the “new” lands of the west, or to cities, to take up various trades. (And yes, Woolman had a lot to say about the colonists’ taking of the lands from the Indians, too.)
Anyway, my fascination with Woolman stems from this. He and his allies did the slow, steady work of persuasion which over time transformed the Quakers into a solidly anti-slavery body, and was the foundation on which in the 19th century they started to build a nationwide anti-slavery movement. I would like to think that today, we American Quakers could do the same with our opposition to war and global domination. (And by and large, we don’t even have to start where Woolman did, by persuading our own co-religionists that those things are an abomination.)
Quakers are generally (and imho, quite rightly) very wary of self-aggrandisement. If we weren’t, I would have suggested my local Quaker meeting (church) or one of our bigger bodies should take out huge ads all over the country saying something like: Quakers! We were right about slavery so listen to us on war!
Nah… I guess that’s not how we do things… Just telling other people that you’re right and they’re wrong is not, after all, a very successful strategy of persuasion. In fact, as I well know, it can really put people’s backs up…. A strategy based on listening and building relationships is still– now, as always– the best way to win real attitudinal change.
Okay, I know I practice it only very imperfectly here on the blog. But I try, I try.
In Woolman’s journal (the full text of which is available online) he shows that he has listened very carefully to the arguments made by the Quaker slaveowners and slavetraders of his day, and he recounts those arguments in impressive detail– and with an impressive lack of judgmentalism– in the journal. Nowadays, reading it, you’d be more inclined to be aghast… “They believed they were actually doing the Africans a favor by bringing them here to ‘Christendom’!?!?!” “They actually used Biblical stories to try to justify slavery!?!?!” “They believed what?!?” And maybe at the time, Woolman was inwardly pretty aghast, too, given his very different view of the ethical quality of slavery. But the way he describes those forms of argument– and then, methodically, lists the responses he’d given to them– is all written in very straightforward prose. (With never an exclamation point in the whole text, as far as I can recall. Come to think of it, had they invented them then?)
So why am I writing all this here? I’m not entirely sure. I am in a Yom Kippur-ish kind of a mood. Also, the burden of just closely following the whole horrible disaster of this war every so often starts to get to me, and I need to take some time out. Re-reading Woolman, as I have done recently, helps to give our present set of struggles some good perspective. Going to the retreat should be another way to do the same thing.
There is this pesky fact that I’ll be there, Quaker-retreating away like nobody’s business, at the very same time the Iraqi referendum is being held. Oh well.. It’s not as if the referendum is going to change a huge number of things in the greater scheme of things. There will still be plenty to write about– in Iraq, in the rest of the world, when the retreat finishes, Sunday.
But before I go, I’ll post an ‘Iraq open thread’ here so y’all can have a good conversation about it in my absence. This post here, however, is not yet that thread.

I belong to the “unprogramed” strand of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which means that when we come together to worship we do so very simply indeed. We have a square, undecorated worship space that every Sunday is opened up twice for people who want to come to pray or meditate together for an hour while we wait for the leadings of the Spirit of Love. Nothing “programed” or pre-planned happens during that hour at all. Sometimes, we’ll sit there for the full hour and no-one will feel led to speak. Sometimes, several people will speak.
In my early experiences of this way of worshiping I found it rather strange, since I’d grown up in the Anglican church. What, no music? No stained glass? No incense? No liturgy? No priest? No ‘communion’? Just– us?
Then, I really started to love unprogramed Quaker worship– for its simplicity, its inclusiveness, its surprises and riches, and its continual, experienced affirmation of the ability of every person to dig deep and discover the workings of love inside themselves.
One part of the way we worship and are organized is that we don’t have any priests, or– as George Fox, the founder of Quakerism in England in the 17th century, called them– “hireling ministers”. Nor do we have churches (“steeple houses”). This helps us to live out the Quaker testimony of simplicity. We don’t have to raise huge amounts of money to pay for the upkeep of grandiose palaces of worship or the salaries of church officials. We are a network of worship communities (“meetings”), each of which governs itself through a monthly “Meeting for worship with a concern for business.”
Another part of the way we worship is that we don’t stick to–or indeed, have any need for– a liturgical calendar. Not for us the massive Christmas-related extravaganzas that many Christian churches here and elsewhere organize. Our Quaker meeting here in Charlottesville, Virginia does have a tradition of having someone open our meeting house for worship twice on Christmas Eve– once at 7:30 p.m., and once at 11 p.m.– and inviting anyone who wants to join a special , one-hour-long meeting for worship at those times to do so. In what some of us think is a slightly un-Quakerly, possibly even liturgical, gesture, participants traditionally each take a candle to the worship; and the candles are placed together in a group on the floor in the middle of the bare, square meeting space…

Continue reading “Quakers, simplicity, and Christmas”

The Friends Committee on National Legislation is a public interest lobby founded by American members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), that for more than 60 years has sought to “[connect] historic Quaker testimonies on peace, equality, simplicity and truth with peace and social justice issues which the United States government is or should be addressing.”
On November 14, FCNL’s governing committee adopted two important documents. The first sets out the “Legislatve Priorities ” on which FCNL will focus during the term of the upcoming (109th) U.S. Congress. The second is a Minute on Moral Values. You can find both texts here.
The Legislative Priorities build directly on the historical testimonies of Quakers– against war, and for a radical commitment to human equality and human wellbeing. So here, after all the deliberation that the FCNL decisionmakers engaged in, are the five top priorities that they identify:

* Remove all U.S. military forces and bases from Iraq, and fulfill U.S. moral and legal obligations to reconstruct Iraq through appropriate multinational, national, and Iraqi agencies.
* Promote a framework for national and international security that includes peaceful prevention and resolution of deadly conflicts, active pursuit of arms control and disarmament, adherence to international law, support for the United Nations, and participation in multilateral efforts to address the root causes of war and of terrorism.
* Restore and assure full civil liberties for all persons in the United States or under its jurisdiction, and promote human rights around the world through international institutions and treaties.
* Change federal budget, tax, and fiscal policies to reduce military spending, meet pressing human needs, and address structural economic violence.
* Promote long-term protection of the environment and eliminate a critical cause of violent conflict by reducing oil consumption and accelerating development and use of renewable energy sources.

I am so happy and energized by the clarity of this listing! Quakers may be small in number, but throughout the 350-year-long life of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), they– we– have often played a crucial catalytic role in bringing about real structural change in the societies in which we live.
And now, we are all citizens of the world…

Continue reading “U.S. Quaker activism against war”

I got back home from my trip to China and California yesterday and managed to get to Quaker meeting this morning.
It was SO good to be back. Quakers frequently call Sundays, “First-day”. It takes a bit of getting used to. So two weeks ago I totally didn’t even have a first-day! It always amazes me, flying west across the Atlantic, how you can fly along through one single unbroken night and lose a whole day in there somewhere.
Last first-day, I was in California with Bill and Lorna. We’d spent the night before in SF, and then drove three hours northward to see Granny in the small town of Willits. I guess I could have gotten to a Quaker meeting if I had tried hard enough. But I’d only flown in from China the day before and I was still fairly badly jet-lagged (or jet-ragged, as my Japanese friends say, which always strikes me as even more graphic).
So today, I was determined to go. I made it to the Charlottesville Meeting’s later (11 p.m.) worship session. The moment I walked in the door of the meeting-room I had the same strong sense of warmth, of spirit-power, and of existential homecoming I had the very first time I walked into this simple, square room some seven years ago.
Our meeting room was built from scratch as an addition onto an older wood-frame house some ten years or so ago. It has a lightly pitched, scissor-joisted ceiling with two (?three) long, thin skylights in one side of it, and windows around three sides of the room that look out mainly onto trees, but also onto some houses, a school, and a packing-warehouse. We have twelve or more long, old-fashioned wood benches arranged in three concentric squares on the heathered blue carpet. The walls are white.

Continue reading “The planet as rickety boat”

In many of the places I went to during my recent visit to Beijing–and certainly,
throughout the whole of Incheon airport, in South Korea–I found massive,
very obtrusive manifestations of a certain view of “Christmas”. In
the Wangfujiang shopping district of Beijing there were huge inflatable Santas.
Tinsel hung from every eave.

In the lobby of our hotel, the smell of industrial-strength glue rose endlessly
from a specially constructed little Christmas “hut”, topped off with the requisite
sheets of cotton-wool “snow”. At its door, quite inexplicably, one
or sometimes two young Chinese women stood in a glamorized version of a
“Santa” outfit– red satiny mini-dress, Santa hat, black boots– doing as
far as I could tell just about nothing except stand there self-consciously
amidst the piles of pre-wrapped “Christmas presents” for hours on end. Were
they also on offer as merchandise? Who knows?

From the PA system, meanwhile, endless streams of Fa-la-la-la-la or Hark
the Herald made up just about the entire repertoire of the week’s muzak offerings.

On one of my last days there, the CNN went out from the hotel-room cable
offerings so I started flipping channels. Came on the local channel
CCTV with a 20-minute rendering in English of local and world news. Quite
well done, I thought. Afterwards, a magazine-type piece on the theme
of “the growth of Christmas observance in today’s China.”

“More and more Chinese people are learning about the spirit of Christmas,”
the earnest announcer said, over shots of department store Santas, and of
shoppers picking out red-and-green Christmas doodads from the shelves.
“This enables us to learn more about western culture.”

Continue reading “China, and the ‘meanings’ of Christmas”