Appreciation of Quakers

Thank you to those of you who held me and my neighborhood in the Light as we met to discuss my city’s plans to build at least 66 units of housing for the formerly homeless here. Your and my Meeting’s support made it so much easier for me to stand up and say to my neighbors that I welcome formerly homeless men and women into housing here, knowing that many of my neighbors will be very, very angry with me.

As I have advocated for homeless men and women in my neighborhood, I have met many people who see the world very differently from what I do. The responses to my op-ed piece in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and discussions with neighbors who oppose mixed-income housing here have opened my eyes to just how common it is in this society to operate with gradations of people: some people are good and some people are bad. Many of my neighbors seem to see homeless people as unworthy and harmful to their surroundings, and most people in houses as deserving and beneficial to their surroundings (except for housed people like me who welcome homeless people, I guess we are traitors?). I have a brand new appreciation of how unique it is that Quakers insist that EVERYONE is a beloved child of God, that each person is the bearer of “that of God”.

Knowing that I have a whole faith community, both past and present, that stands with me has been a great source of comfort to me as I have faced my neighbors’ wrath. I was flooded with gratitude when I asked for my Meeting’s prayers and my on-line community’s support, and in so doing became aware that I was presuming that my fellow Quakers would be supportive. I would not presume that in any other setting, and I know other homeless advocates do not presume that their faith community will stand with them on this issue.

I am grateful to be a Quaker today. 

Query for prayerful consideration:

What aspects of Quakerism fill me with gratitude?

Prayer Request

Dear reader,

I spent a large portion of the day yesterday (Saturday May 31) at a neighborhood meeting where we discussed the plans for some surplus military land that hopefully will be turned over to the city of Seattle. One of the federal requirements is that this land be used in part to serve the needs of the homeless. Many of my well-to-do neighbors in Seattle are not pleased with the prospect of having some 300 new units of housing added, about 30% of them subsidized/affordable, and I have felt called as a Quaker to be a pastoral presence in the discussions. In this hostile environment, I feel called to be 

• a calm, loving, and non-anxious presence to my neighbors to let them know that we have nothing to fear
• an affirming and encouraging presence to the facilitators and presenters when they are met with hostility from my neighbors
• someone who encourages listening, discussion, and persuasion (as opposed to hostility and name-calling)
• someone who speaks about the beloved-of-God nature of the men, women, and children who are at a financial disadvantage

And I CAN do and be all these things, and I can do it effectively, but I have discovered over the years that it comes at a high personal cost. It’s not so much that I feel hurt by being called names and being yelled at. The part that does damage to me is that I seem to soak in the energy of the room, and my mind gets tangled up in trying to figure out how people so casually can put others down, call them names, twist, and distort their intentions, and actively try to make another person look bad. I don’t sleep well, I become sad and my thoughts about the interactions and the situation race on at uncomfortable speeds. My world as a Quaker, chaplain and spiritual director is lived in environments where most people commit to seeking to hear, acknowledge, affirm, and respect the validity of another’s perspective. I don’t have much exposure to adversarial environments. I know in general that I am not called to participate in those kinds of adversarial political processes – the personal cost to me is too high – but since I bear the Quaker mark, this is my neighborhood, and no-one else from the neighborhood seems to be willing/able to take on this role now, it falls to me to do it.

So I ask for your prayers for my spiritual safety and protection at these meetings, dear reader. 

The next neighborhood meetings are scheduled for

• Monday June 2, 6.30 pm – 8.30 pm Pacific Daylight time (GMT + 9 hrs)
• Monday June 16, 6.30 – 8.30 pm
• Saturday June 21, 9.00 am – 1.00 pm
• Saturday July 12, 9.00 am – 1.00 pm
• Saturday July 19, 9.00 am – 1.00 pm

My Meeting is already holding me and my neighbors in prayer, and I ask you to join in and hold us in the Light.

Query for prayerful consideration:

What does prayer mean in this context?

My joy is in God

I arrived late, so I may have missed it. It is possible the presenters talked about it and I just didn’t arrive in time to hear it. But I don’t think so, because the Quaker presenters on building peace talked about how easily peacemakers can become discouraged and then they led us into an activity designed to generate hope and joy. The source to which they led us to find joy and hope was our own accomplishments.

Sigh. I could get discouraged.

Friends, I agree that we often do wonderful things. And the presenters to whom I am referring gave a good presentation, and I found myself stirred to join in their efforts at the Air Force base an hour or so down the road – after spending an hour by myself in the woods to re-find my hope and joy following their presentation. So there is lots of good stuff happening. I do not wish to complain. And yet I have to ask, what happened to the joy of faith?

When I look back at my blogging and other writing and speaking during the past 6 months, I discover that I have started preaching. Me - preaching? I feel like I owe my liberal friends an apology: “Honestly, I swear, I didn’t mean to become a preacher of the joy I find in God. It just … happened.”

But seriously, here is the anatomy of my transformation to becoming a preacher of the Good News of faith in God:

The first movement was God lifting me out of the deep trough of depression in 1994. I had been passively suicidal for months following the end of an abusive relationship. And suddenly, after daring to yell angrily at God in a private prayer time, God filled me with love. I began to know the power of God for good, and I began to talk about God as our source of hope, just a little bit. But I still looked to prophetic, righteous anger as our source of energy for transforming the world. 

The second movement was attending worship at West Hills Quaker church whenever I was in Portland to visit my in-laws. I had Ffriends there from my seminary days. What I noticed was how little time attenders at the church spent expressing righteous anger over the shortcomings of the world around them and how much time they spent doing things like cooking meals together for homeless people.

The next step was in the days after September 11, 2001, when mental health counselors suggested that we limit our intake of bad news. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003, when depression began to set in again at the hopelessness of everything, I heeded their advice for the first time. I took a few weeks off from intense reading of newspapers and only took in enough to be informed about the big picture. To my amazement, I found an upsurge of energy to be engaged in resisting the war!

At some point after becoming a Good News Associate in the summer of 2003, I noticed how joyful I usually feel after being with my fellow Associates, most of them evangelical Quakers, and how joyless liberal Quakers often seem to be.

While teaching Ignatian spirituality last fall to men and women in recovery from addictions, many of whom are homeless and have lost their jobs and family relationships as a result of their substance abuse, I noticed that many of them nonetheless expressed gratitude, time and time again. They were grateful for things like waking up in the morning; for being free from the dehumanizing effects of their addictions; for God’s love; for the kindness others showed them. Their gratitude stood in stark contrast to the fears, worries, and cautious planning I would hear at Quaker Meeting from all those of us who have houses, food, and family life.

My next step was a simple decision to be more joyful. I felt embarrassed to be spending time worrying and fretting about the stuff in my life when women and men who have nothing can be so grateful, generous, and compassionate. It was clearer to me than ever before that joy does not arise out of having a sufficiency – if that were the case, homeless people would be unhappy and liberal Quakers would be happy. My AHA! was that joy comes from entrusting one’s future to God. So yes, it is as easy as deciding to be joyful.

So, Friends, I decided to be joyful. I prayed to God that I would feel gratitude for all the amazingly wonderful things and people that surround me. I prayed that my worries and sadness about the problems of the world would simply fade away. I decided to tell people about my discoveries, and my early blog entries (look at October, November,and December entries) give more details about my journey to joy. It began to feel burdensome to listen to comfortably-off people worry and be sad.

Since deciding to be grateful, I keep discovering more and more reasons to be joyful. It is no longer merely a decision now. More and more, I feel it rising up within me. I still work in a hospital where I see death and illness, and I still work with homeless men and women whose material futures seem bleak, and I still read of conflict and troubles in the world. Suffering is still real. What’s different is that I now know hope and joy are not waiting for us on the other side of attaining world peace, eliminating physical pain, or eradicating poverty. Peace of mind is not waiting for us on the other side of securing the future for our children or securing work or our own retirement. Hope is not based on seeing the exact route to the happy ending at the end of the story. Trust in the future is not based on seeing the societal developments that will lead to a peaceful settlement between conflicting sides.

I can no longer keep myself from telling everyone who wants to listen that hope, joy, peace, and feeling safe arise out of being in the hands of a God who promises to be with us in whatever we encounter. How can I keep from proclaiming what I know to be true – that this God of ours has plans of peace for us? That God is actively at work, using even the bad things that happen for good.

The mystery of it all is that as I allow this joy and gratitude to bubble up within me, I can hardly keep myself from throwing myself into work for peace and justice. The more I trust God, the more I also see God at work in societal developments, too. It looks like peace, abundance, and safety are just waiting to be birthed into the world, and I want to be part of it!

Query for prayerful consideration:

What is the source of hope in my life?

Liberal Quaker Heresies: Part I

My Easter and resurrection reflections have drawn my attention once again to one of the peculiarly American liberal Quaker/Christian heresies: we are prone to making an idol of “sensitivity”, taking our desire to avoid hurt feelings to an unhealthy extreme. This idol has a companion sin: we commit acts of verbal violence against people if we think they are hurting another’s feelings. We feel justified and righteous in verbal attacks even when it flies in the face of our peace testimony and our belief in ”that of God’ in every person. We seem to think we shouldn’t be loving of people who have hurt another’s feelings or are intolerant. We are tolerant of everything, except intolerance.

I write this with fondness and humor, Friends, because I am, ahem, intimately acquainted with this particular heresy and sin. I could write this as a confession of the times when I have been out of balance in my own understanding of what justice required me to do. “Balance” is the key word here: I am absolutely in favor of sensitivity and clearly naming the injustices we see. Quakers are good at being sensitive and speaking truth to power, although as with most groups, there are a few injustices we ourselves commit, to which we are still blind! I’m proud of our commitment to justice, incomplete as it is in some areas, and though we take it a little bit too far in others.

We love and desire justice, and that is good. But these good things can become idolatrous and harmful when taken too far. They become demonic when they arise from an inability to accept the flaws of humans, human institutions, and the world in which we live.

And oh, what joys we miss out on when we put too much emphasis on achieving complete justice instantly! So let me write about the theological components that I believe could bring our desire for justice into balance and give us a taste of God’s own sweet consolation. I came to these conclusions reluctantly. Resisting, kicking, and screaming, to be precise. All of the following statements used to offend my sense of justice. But much as I disliked them, I have found a deeper joy, greater sense of purpose, and more energy for action in accepting them! I encourage you to meditate on each one of these statements:

1. Life is not fair. In fact, as Buddhists would say, “life is suffering”. I think we have an easier time accepting this when it comes to earthquakes and sickness and death. Unfortunately, I suspect this to be the case with human-made injustices, too. No sooner have we done away with one injustice than another arises in its wake, oftentimes as a result of an over-correction in addressing the first injustice (examples: excessive penalties placed on Germany after World War I may have led to the social conditions that laid the foundation for the rise of Hitler and World War II; the UN’s good desire to create a safe haven for Jews after WWII led to excessive demands on Palestinians, whose land and homes were taken away). God still requires us to do justice and love mercy, so acceptance of the inevitability of injustice is not an excuse for inaction. Acceptance of injustice as the way of the world merely allows us to be generous and merciful as we seek to eradicate injustice.   

2. We humans are all fundamentally flawed, and God seems to be able to work with us anyway. Robert Barclay, in his Apology, challenged the theology of original sin and formulated a Quaker theology that says we aren’t sinners until we have sinned. Still, he claims that humans have “the propensity to sin” – not a one of us will avoid sinning. Knowing that God only has flawed human beings to work with is liberating! We don’t need to be perfect, nor do we need to insist that others be perfect. We know God’s work will get done with whatever raw material God has to work with. Jesus routinely despaired at the limitations of his disciples, yet they were his beloved companions and founded the church. Saul was a persecutor of Jesus’ followers - until he was blinded, turned around, and became a leader of the church! So we can be kind and merciful with a person who falls short, knowing it is only a matter of time until we ourselves fail and want to be met with kindness and forgiveness.

3. Brokenness, sin, and death can be sources of new life. When someone suffers, God finds a way to redeem the suffering and bring forth new life. I recently wrote about my daughter’s experience of injustice on the basketball courts here. Not a major injustice in the grand scheme of things, but to me a small-scale illustration of how character and compassion grow forth out of adversity. In my own life, I became deeply depressed and miserable when I learned I was pre-diabetic, but made changes in my life that ultimately made me healthier, more energetic, and more respectful and appreciative of my body than I was when I thought I was healthy. Sometimes we can even do damage if we insist on justice before the process of resurrection has come to completion. 

4. We are just sojourners here on earth, visitors in a strange land. Our true home is in God. As long as we wander on earth, we should expect previews and foretastes of heaven, yes. But we cannot expect that we will see the divine order fulfilled here and now. Walter Wink has done a tremendous service in proclaiming that every human institution is 1) created for a divine purpose, 2) fallen, and 3) redeemable. Rather than berate leaders of institutions when their fallen nature is visible, we can call forth the Divine purpose for which they were created and invite them to strive for redemption. But true joy and peace lies in knowing that we can never be fully satisfied with anything or anyone here on earth, and not to place our hopes in institutions or organisations that cannot truly satisfy our deepest longing.

In all of these statements, our good desire for justice becomes idolatrous when we seek to push outside the true nature of Gods’ creation and intentions, when we want people, institutions, or the world to be something they cannot be.

Query for prayerful consideration:

How do I know when my pursuit of justice becomes idolatrous?

Why I’m a Quaker: My Path

There were two reasons I left the anti-apartheid movement in Norway in the late 80s, soon before Nelson Mandela was released from prison and apartheid was dismantled as South Africa’s form of government. The most obvious reason was that apartheid’s days clearly were numbered. There was another reason, too, that evolved as I grappled with my own White South African heritage, changing who I understand myself to be, how I understand God to be at work in this world, and what it means to me to accept God’s invitation to participate in birthing the new Creation. Because of what I learned, I felt personally called away from working by political means and instead started to seek spiritual solutions, and the Religious Society of Friends became my home. 

As it became clearer that apartheid was coming to an end, I started to hear more anger and judgment of Whites in South Africa. Some of my Norwegian buddies in the movement (not so much the South Africans) seemed to joyfully anticipate a time of reckoning for Whites in South Africa, when Whites would pay for what they had done. 

Although I had a lot of anger with the South African government myself, my feelings when considering White South Africans were much more complicated. My father, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, is a White South African who left his home and family because of his resistance to apartheid. I thought of his parents, my Ouma and Oupa, and the time when they stood on the South Africa side of the soundproof glass wall at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg. On the other side, the international transit side of the glass wall, stood my father, my mother, my brother and myself when I was about 7 years old. On either side of the glass divide we stood, pressing our hands against the glass, mouthing words that we hoped those on the other side might understand, until it was time for us to get on the plane to Botswana. The South African government did not allow us into South Africa until Oupa died, almost 20 years after my father left his home country. 

All these years later, as apartheid was drawing to an end, I thought about my divided South African family, about half of them supporting apartheid and benefiting financially from it, and the other half opposing it, at some personal cost to themselves. The separations, conflicts, and emotional costs to my family was, of course, of a different order of magnitude than the price that Black families paid. Nonetheless, apartheid was not a good thing for my father and anyone who loved him.

I also remembered my times together with my South African grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc when they came to visit us in Botswana or Norway, and ultimately in South Africa itself. Many stories come to mind to convey the many layers of how at least some White South Africans functioned within the apartheid system, but I will simply summarize my knowledge in this way: my (White) family members in South Africa are not very different from most people I know.

Most people I have ever met are the same - we are all trying to do the right thing, and we are all limited by our experiences and surroundings. Depending on our personality, character, and God’s grace, we are more or less able to transcend the limitations of our circumstances. People just don’t wake up in the morning trying to figure out how they can do the most harm to some other person. No-one does that – not even those who inflict the greatest damage. I say this not to excuse or diminish the importance of the damage that is done, damage that people I love have done, or damage that I myself have unwittingly done to others. Quite the contrary. I say this because of what it means for how we do the vital work of repairing the wounds that are inflicted and how we can succeed at preventing future diminishment, injury, or death of any child, woman or man - every one of us God’s Beloved.

But I didn’t feel I could talk about the humanity of White South Africans to my Norwegian buddies. While I saw humanity in White South Africans, I also hated them at some level, and that hatred included my own self. I grew up painfully self-conscious about my white skin because it made me different from everyone else as a child in Botswana. In Norway my skin made me look like I should belong there, but I didn’t feel at home in Norway. I wished my skin would declare to everyone that my insides were African, not Norwegian. I rarely confessed to my South African ancestry out of tremendous guilt at being associated with what White South Africans had done over the centuries. I disliked my own white skin, and I think I was afraid my anti-apartheid buddies would dislike my Whiteness as much as I myself did. 

Amazingly, forgiveness and a warm welcome into a better future were promised to me and all my White South African relatives by Black South African liberation theology and church leaders like Desmond Tutu and Frank Chikane. I could never expect or require any Black South African to love and forgive after what they have experienced, and yet many do. They were the ones who gave White South Africans our humanity back. Can you imagine how sweet their forgiveness is, and how deliciously humbled I feel to have been given my soul’s freedom back by the ones who suffered so much?

Understanding myself to be both a victim of apartheid and a beneficiary, I was strongly drawn to the Quaker belief of “that of God in every person”. I was drawn to the Quaker way of reaching out to the “enemy” in which we work for peace and change by seeking to nurture the Seed of God in those we seek to change. My experience tells me that even those who have more power have some knowledge of suffering, and this knowledge gives hope. Their suffering is a potential source of compassion for those whom they have harmed. Nurturing the Seed, to me, is just another way of stating Jesus’ admonition to “love your enemy”. Knowing the sweetness of being forgiven and accepted, it was clear to me that my pro-apartheid family members would be far more likely to change if they could trust that they would be forgiven and be given a chance to do the right thing. It is a truly amazing thing to be able to promise to wrong-doers that they, too, will get a taste of the same sweet forgiveness and delicious humility that I have known, if they will just lay down their resistance to Truth. This approach to peacemaking is one of the more powerful aspects of Quakerism for me and hold the keys to the Truth about God. This love and forgiveness can only be the workings of God’s amazing grace and it brings me to my knees. Can this be what Jesus’ death and resurrection are about? 

Query for prayerful consideration:

What were the forces at work within me as I was drawn to Quakerism?

Assumptions

I want to celebrate a funny incident with you, dear reader.

A friend of mine, S,  asked yesterday whether I could help her figure out the story behind Muslim youth rioting in Denmark after a newspaper there reprinted an old cartoon illustration of the Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him). I explained it as best I could and later told my husband about the conversation I’d had with S. As I was telling him about it, I realized that her questions would have elicited something other than my matter-of-fact response not too many years ago.  

Friends, I realized at that moment that I had reached a milestone in my life in the USA - I have found freedom from the pain I used to experience when I listened for and expected Americans to reveal bias. In the past, I would probably have been offended that S asked me about Denmark, when I am mostly Norwegian. It would have fit the pattern of Americans not knowing the difference between the three Scandinavian countries and failing to remember which one I am from once they knew me. Or thinking that the three countries are so similar that whatever is true of one country is also true of the two others.

One of the ugly fights my husband and I had early on in our relationship was over the question, “Is Finland part of Scandinavia?” This may sound hilariously trivial to you, but it wasn’t to me. What was at stake was the power to define and name. Who defines what Scandinavia is or isn’t, someone from Scandinavia or someone from the USA? Scandinavians and Finns do not consider Finland to be part of Scandinavia, and my position was and is that he as an American ought to defer to me on this. This was at a time when I experienced discrimination against foreigners as very painful and demeaning. For me, the right for myself as a Scandinavian to define Scandinavia was close to being a life-or-death issue.

And now, my husband and I tell the story of our first big fight as one of the funny stories about our relationship. And S can ask this Norwegian about Denmark without me taking offense.

The truth is that as a Norwegian I do know more about Denmark than most Americans, and S knows that. And S knows perfectly well that I am Norwegian, not Danish.

I don’t hear anywhere near as much prejudice as I used to, and I humbly confess that much of the difference is in me, not in what people say. When I was sensitized to prejudice, I heard a lot of it. Each time I heal a little more, I hear a little less prejudice and am wounded just a little less even when I do. And so I find myself a little more able to forgive when someone does make a discriminatory statement. It is also clear to me that, as I heal and find the ability to forgive, it is because of God’s grace, not my own accomplishment. I know experientially that, left to our own devices, there probably wouldn’t be a whole lot of forgiving going on in this world.

At the same time, it is still true that many Americans seem remarkably unknowledgeable of the world when you consider how much power this country wields in that same world. Another factor is that during the run-up to war and during election season, this Norwegian suffers through daily doses of media communication to the effect that the USA is the best country in the world, is the most free, the most democratic, has the best constitution, the best education system, and has sacrificed the most for the rest of the world, is the best country for women to live in, etc. The funny thing is, many Americans – including some of those close to me or in my community - also seem to feel perfectly free to tell me about an aspect of American life that they consider superior, knowing full well that I am not American. Since my experience is that Americans in most other respects are among the most socially graceful people I know, I can only presume that they are unaware that to citizens of other countries, almost all of whom DO love and miss our home culture, history, family, and traditions (whether we miss the socio-economic and political structures or not varies widely), those statements can be insulting – and we are exposed to them through one aspect or another daily.

In the spirit of “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good”, I think internal US criticism of the war in Iraq has helped my wounds to heal. It is a paradox for me to lament the war and yet see that others’ resistance to the war gives me relief. As I heal, I am aware that I can’t neglect the suffering of others, even though my healing is not the cause of their suffering.

So I celebrate my new freedom, recognizing that part of it has to do with actually being subjected to fewer discriminating statements, and part of it is that God’s grace works to release me from the pain I might so easily experience. In the same way that I have freely received God’s spirit, I become responsible for doing what I can to bring God’s spirit to others who suffer. God’s Spirit makes me one with them.  

Query for prayerful consideration:

How does pain I experience in my life affect what I hear? Are there signs of improvement externally in areas of pain for me? Are there any paradoxes in that situation – is new suffering arising as one group’s situation improves? What implications does any of this have for me as I consider injustices in the world, in the Religious Society of Friends, and lowering the barriers that currently exist?

Little Boxes

This is my blog with Quaker-specific musings, while musings on liberal Christian faith more generally continue on my other blog.

As a little girl, I remember listening to a song Pete Seeger sang, Little Boxes. It was composed by Malvina Reynolds on her way to an FCNL meeting (Friends Committee on National Legislation is the Quaker lobby organization), and it is about conformity, especially the White suburban kind of conformity.

During one part of my Botswana childhood, I was one of 2 White children in a school of about 500 Black children. At other times in Botswana, I didn’t stick out quite as much, but I didn’t fit in. Back in Norway at 11, my parents refused to pay what it would cost for the Levi 501’s with the red tab that I needed to be OK in one of Oslo’s finer suburbs, where we now lived. My parents would only get inexpensive orange tab Levi’s for me, and I knew that anyone could spot the orange color and my “uncoolness” from a mile off. And indeed, the other kids did think I was very uncool and they frequently told me about this truth, just to make sure I didn’t forget.

So I longed to conform. I could think of nothing more wonderful than living in a little box on the Norwegian hillside, indistinguishable from all the other little boxes. If only the verse about the children could have been true about me:

And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,…
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

As a kid who grew up between 3 cultures but not at home in any one of them, being “the same” as all the others sounded heavenly to me. 

About at this point in my blog post I usually ask a rhetorical question along the lines of “What does this have to do with …?” After blogging since October, I’m discovering that this is how I write a blog on faith: I start with the personal (not private) story that informs my faith, then I engage in theological reflection on what I learnt from my experience in ways that I hope will speak to others, and I conclude with a query that encourages my reader to explore that aspect of faith based on your own life experience. This particular story will hopefully tie in with lowering barriers to worship and how we work for a just world.

In my teens, I found rebellion. I came to terms with the fact that I was doomed not to fit in, and by then the cruelty of some of those kids was making me think that – if that was what fitting in meant – I wasn’t sure I really wanted it. As class focus in history and social studies started to move outward from Norway to include more of the reality of other parts of the world, I saw that my classmates really were clueless. I say that as a sympathetic statement of truth now, but at that time it filled me with rage. They were born into astonishing levels of material comfort, and they seemed neither to have any awareness of how lucky they were nor the compassion and sense of moral responsibility that a comfortable person – in my mind – has to have in relationship to those who live a life of material deprivation.

Friends, I am ashamed to say that I became the bully. My anger gave me the strength to make “being different” my trademark. I put on a face of pride and I became the one who mercilessly reminded other kids of their cluelessness. And when I came at it from a place of certainty that I was right, some kids joined my “team”, and my days of friendlessness were over.

Still, my inner drama of desiring a little box on the hillside hadn’t changed one bit. But it was a different kind of “box” and “sameness” I was looking for: not sameness with the clueless kids, but sameness with “enlightened” people. Before I had my first kiss, I was deep into feminist literature, which seemed like a good avenue to community with other enlightened people.  

Speaking of kissing… The objects of my desire didn’t consider this angry teenager to be very kissable, but since we as teenagers were all eager to kiss, I did eventually came by one. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s really clear to me that the reason I got a little ahem, mature, before I married, is that while I was still an angry person, I wasn’t really good relationship material, either. My daughters don’t know to be grateful to have an older and less angry mother.

So, now I get into the “applied theology” part. Fellow Quakers, my desire to be in a box on the hillside may be extreme, but I don’t think it’s unique. We all long to belong somewhere, although each person’s ideas of what the group will look like in which s/he will want to belong may vary. I think many of us come to Quaker Meeeting, bruised and bloodied from the culture wars, and we seek a safe haven where we can lick our wounds and be among people with whom we agree. I also think many of us have finally concluded that “the others” in this culture war are clueless, and we can be a little bit brutal with those with whom we disagree. And finally, in our anger we aren’t very desirable company. 

Friends, we say we want our Meetings to be diverse, and I believe that we are speaking with integrity when we say that. But I suspect that we treasure the “safe haven” of likeminded people more. I am convinced that if we got a little more carefree with disagreement and opinions and words, people of all shapes, sizes, colors, and opinions would feel more welcome among us. God calls us to temper our justice with mercy. I think a little humor would be helpful, too.

Query for prayerful consideration:

How can we as Friends temper our desire for justice with mercy and humor?

Waking up to Snow

My father was well into his twenties before he left South Africa for the first time, and he tells me that even now, some 50 years later, there are still mornings when he wakes up in his home in Norway to a snow-covered landscape and his gut reacts with a “What the ….? Where the h**l am I?”

My reactions are usually not quite as strong as his, because the area of North America where I now live, is about as similar to the southern Norway of my adolescence and early adulthood as any place I’ve ever seen. But I still have my moments of culture shock, even after 14 years in this country. They are often followed by homesickness for Norway and then the sad recognition that Norway never really felt like home, either, since I spent my childhood in Botswana. Nor was Botswana home, because we knew we were just guests. So then I do another round of grieving that no place has ever felt like home to me. I’ve always felt lonely, homeless (though not without a physical structure called “home”), like an outsider. This is a common feeling for people who grew up the way I did – raised between cultures, but not in one. (Professional literature refers to us as Third Culture Kids, TCKs.)

What does this have to do with Quaker musings? I just had a “waking up to snow” experience among liberal Quakers. 

Since I was 6 months old, I have lived among people working for a more just society. In Botswana, I always lived in an international mix of people, Batswana, South African refugees, Peace Corps and aid workers from a variety of countries and cultures. In Norway, when I was with my anti-apartheid buddies or just dancing the night away at the Club Tropicana in Oslo with people from every part of the globe, I was made to feel welcome. Mainline Norwegian culture was harder to adjust to, and part of what brought me to Quakerism was that Quakers were the first group of regular Norwegians that didn’t look down on me because I didn’t have the right label on my jeans. The sense of healing was powerful!   

Among people working for change, I have almost always felt welcome. Simply showing up to do the work was enough to gain me acceptance, and I didn’t even have to say that I was friendly to the cause. That was understood. I wouldn’t have been there otherwise. People working for justice are often quick to recognize the gifts of the TCK – if the TCK isn’t too damaged by living in a constant state of spiritual and emotional homelessness. At our best, we have the ability to see things from everyone’s point of view and we don’t take any social structure or custom for granted. We can imagine a better way of doing things, and change is relatively easy for us. We can be change-makers and bridge-builders between groups. (Barack Obama is an example of what a TCK can be at his best. Thomas Merton is another.)

Here in the USA I have been accepted with complete warmth in the homeless community and among the mentally ill whom I serve as a spiritual director, chaplain, and advocate. Just showing up to do the work seems to be all they and other spiritually based activists need to know about me to accept me into their movement towards a better society.

My “waking up to snow” experience has been that, among liberal Quakers, showing up to work for a more inclusive and diverse society and/or Religious Society of Friends is not enough. I had a taste of it when I first came to the USA at the Earlham School of Religion. I would talk about “Black” people and “White” people, because that was the terminology I grew up with in the anti-apartheid movement. After a few months, I accidentally discovered that some people had determined that my use of language was evidence to them that I was racist. In their minds, I should have been using “People of Color”. Having grown up within the anti-apartheid movement, you can imagine my bewilderment! If they had talked with me and given me more information on how things are done in this country, I would have welcomed it. Instead, they talked about me and made their decisions about me without engaging with me. There have been other situations since then among liberal Quakers, when I felt rejected as ”not good enough” to join in the movement towards a free and just society. In each of those situations, I would have welcomed a friendly conversation and some suggestions. But instead, it seemed to me that they made their decision about me and who I am based on a few words I said, without trying to get to know me. I have had the experience of being found unworthy because I ask the kinds of open-ended, conversation-stimulating questions TCKs like to ask (to be worthy, I hear that I am supposed to ask questions that establish the justice agenda). When I am found unworthy by American liberal Friends – of all people – it is hard. Yesterday it finally amounted to a ”waking up to snow” experience for me. It makes me want to go home. Except I have no home.

I want to make it clear that, as a survivor of an abusive relationship and as a chaplain, I know the power of naming one’s experience and telling one’s story to heal. That was my mode of healing and is my mode of healing ministry. I am also very much aware of the power to do great harm by labeling people as inferior and discounting their experience. I understand the importance of building trust beween people, especially for those of us who have been harmed by being labeled or defined as inferior. It’s appropriate to look carefully at someone’s use of language if they want to run a support group for survivors of a particular injustice or to work as a chaplain. So I’m not suggesting that we discount language. Nor am I saying we should be accepting of Apartheid, Neo-Nazi, or White Supremacist words.

But consider this: the anti-apartheid movement in Norway welcomed everyone who showed up, without question, knowing full well that some of them might be South African government spies who would endanger the lives of some of the South African refugees in the group. At least once, a regular participant in our meetings did later turn out to have been a spy. Those South African refugees didn’t give out their phone number and address, but they did welcome anyone who showed up to paint banners, write for the newsletter, go to rallies, and petition the Norwegian parliament to boycott South Africa. No questions asked.

I worry, too, that as wonderful as the internet community can be, all we have by which to know each other is words. And not everyone who uses it is North American. I had forgotten that myself, as joyful as I was in my first few months of discovering the joy of the QuakerQuaker community and putting my joyful energy into trying to fit in, as community-hungry TCKs usually do. George Bernard Shaw once said that England and America are two countries separated by a common language. I’d like to see us use language to build bridges, not as a tool to judge Friends’ worthiness.

Query for prayerful consideration: How important is it for liberal Friends to assess people who show up to work for the kind of society Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed about? Is colloquial American use of the English language the best reflection of a person’s character? How does this relate to the Quaker concept that each one of us is to be accountable to Christ at work within us, not to human customs and conventions?

Working for Peace, Ending Slavery

One of the reasons I am proud of being a Quaker – indeed, an important reason why I became a Quaker – is our history of asserting the equality of all persons, our work to attain peace, prison reform, compassionate care of people with mental illness and disabilities, ending slavery, and gaining voting rights for all adults.

I have a poor memory for Quaker history - my interest as a Quaker has always been care of the soul and how our faith community helps or hinders care for the soul – so I talk about our history with some trepidation, and I welcome corrections and clarifications when I delve into the past for insights into how we live out our faith, as I intend to do now.

Although the dignity of each person as the bearer of the Divine Spark was always the foundation for Quaker engagement, I learned from John Punshon that the spiritual core (as opposed to the practical desire to avoid being confused with the treasonous 5th Monarchymen) of the Peace testimony was as follows: concern for the soul of the person who committed violence. Fox and Margaret Fell (who wrote an earlier version of the testimony) believed it is wrong to use violence, and that a person who does so will harm his or her relationship with God. They thought of our actions in this world as having an impact on the battle between Light and Darkness in the spiritual realm, and the use of violence would strengthen the forces that oppose the Light. In this Lamb’s War way of thinking, the potential death or injury of the victim of violence were not the main concern. In the 1650s, of course, illness, maiming, and premature death were not uncommon occurrences, and many Quakers voluntarily undertook faith-based actions that resulted in severe physical suffering. Fox’s chosen method was to try to talk people out of using violence, out of concern for their soul, and I’m not aware that he spent much time ministering to victims of violence or demanding restitution for them.

When John Woolman set off to end slavery, his chosen method was to visit with slave owners and try to persuade them that their immortal souls were endangered by denying slaves their full humanity and dignity. He didn’t accept food, drink, or a bed in the homes of slave-owning Quakers, because he was worried for his soul if he were to derive any physical comfort from the ”fruits” of slave labor. To the best of my knowledge, Woolman did not spend much time being with slaves or encouraging them to rise up against their owners to end the injustices under which they were suffering.

There is also a long tradition of Quakers being present with and ministering to those in prison (Elizabeth Fry) or mental health institutions, and as a chaplain and spiritual director, I identify strongly with that strain of Quaker activism. But in the case of working for peace and ending slavery, being present and ministering to the victims of injustice don’t seem to have been the chosen mode. As someone who walks alongside people who are suffering in a variety of ways, I confess to feeling a bit uncomfortable with the seeming lack of attention given to those who suffered under the injustices Fox and Woolman were seeking to abolish.

I wonder, would a slave working in a field, watching John Woolman walk past on his way into the big house, have any reason to trust Woolman or believe that he was sincere? Perhaps he or she might have thought something along the lines of ”Woolman, if you really cared and wanted to ease my burden, you’d come and take my hoe and do some of my work”. And that seems like a perfectly natural thought to me. If it had been safe for the slave to do so, I can even picture him or her angrily denouncing Woolman’s approach.

At the same time, I see the success of Woolman’s method, and I have been deeply moved when I read the accounts of Quakers defusing potentially violent situations by expressing concern for the person about to commit violence against them. Fox and Woolman are among our heroes, the ones many of us try to model our lives after and aspire to be like.

Query for prayerful consideration:

Does God call me to be present with and minister among victims of injustice? Or to be with those who are doing wrong, gently and firmly calling them to be in right relationship with God? Am I sometimes called to do one, sometimes another? How do I support the leadings of those who are called to respond to injustice in a different fashion than I am?