Nancy's Apology

The Logic of Rendition

2007-10-30T07:45:00.000-04:00

There's a new movie out called Rendition. It's about (guess what) torture and seems to be loosely based on the experiences of Maher Arar, although with American characters.

The pro-torture argument is laid out by the US official played by Meryll Streep. When prodded about the illegal use of torture on hidden detainees, she responds:

"Because of this, there are 7000 people alive in London who would otherwise be dead."

In a nutshell, there's the logic of rendition.

And it begs for deconstruction.

1. "Because of this": Translation: "Rendition is the end justifies the means." In effect, if torture can save lives, then torture is good. But let's quantify this saving of lives. What if torture can save only a dozen lives? Or only one life? Is it okay then?

Does it have to be thousands?

And how will an agent know if the plot will involve thousands until after the torture has taken place?

Does this also take into account that violent people like to brag during confessions?

And is the limit just the saving of lives? Could it be extended to other benefits? What if a terror plot involved the sabotage of the US's electronic banking system-- say, a computer virus that destroys valuable information on a massive scale? Would torture be justified if it prevented economic turmoil and the loss of people's life savings?

Should suspicious American geeks be renditioned?

Could we not also propose that George Bush should be killed because he is blocking the world's efforts to stop global warming? Global warming will kill not just thousands, but millions or billions of people, as well as non-human populations, and it will wreak havoc on our economies. Would that be okay according to the end justifies the means?

The problem with the end justifies the means is that it justifies anything -- any end, any means. The end has not been defined or limited; and if officials are working secretly, then there is no way of holding them to any definitions and limits anyway. They could be doing anything for any reason. The public would never know.

2. "7000 people": Really? Keep in mind that rendition is secret offshore torture. This means there are no official records, and everything is "deniable." The public has a jaundiced eye about intelligence-related secret information ever since non-existent weapons of mass destruction were used to justify the invasion of a sovereign state.

If officials want to keep their "facts" secret and deniable, then they can't also expect to be able to use these "facts" as public arguments. Sorry, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

3. "Alive in London who would otherwise be dead": I want to examine this idea more closely. Does foiling a terror plot save lives? On the surface, one would think so. But this idea fails to consider that most terror plots fail. It also doesn't consider whether more terror agents would simply move in to redo the job if someone got arrested. Al Qaeda keeps trying the same objective until they succeed. So stopping a terror plot simply stops that terror plot. One can't say with any certainty what other effects -- long- or short-term -- might have resulted.

There are also two unstated premises in Streep's character's statement:

1. Saving lives is what government is all about. Apparently, saving lives trumps the constitution, the laws of the country, the values and principles that have developed through history, and the integrity and scrutability of government leaders. It is also more important than the nation's international reputation, its relations with other countries, and its self-respect. It's more important than justice: tortured confessions are not admissable in court, so legal trials have to be replaced with secret trials, extrajudicial hearings, or just no trial at all.

These are the costs of the lives that torture is allegedly saving. The character that Streep plays simply accepts these costs as something external to the job she has to do. Fortunately for the plot of the movie, another US agent comes to have misgivings.

2. Torture is the most expedient way to get intelligence information--and it's a pity we can't use it more often. Alas, tortured people lie. They'll say anything. The tortured wiccans of the Middle Ages tossed out as many names as they could scream while they begged to be put to death. This creates dubious evidence that is then used to arrest, deport, and rendition more people. Since there is no open scrutiny of this evidence, it can take on a power of its own, like an online meme or an urban legend. When those people in turn are tortured, the net grows wider. More wires are tapped, more calls are traced, more people are arrested. The government leaders crow about how expedient their methods are. Their fingers itch for even more powerful methods.

Yet how much of it is untrue? There is no habeas corpus, no defence lawyers, no trials. The public doesn't know if it is expedient. They don't even know how many people have been arrested or who they are.

****
Fear makes people behave in terrible ways. If bin Ladin's objective in the 9/11 attacks was not so much to kill as to create a climate of fear that would cause Westerners to turn against themselves and commit democratic suicide, then he was enormously successful.

The Spiritual Diet

2007-10-25T10:11:00.000-04:00

My son is in occupational therapy for something called "sensory integration disorder" -- his brain and senses don't communicate properly. The general therapy for SID is something called a "sensory diet" which involves making sure the brain gets a full and varied set of sensory information all the time every day. This helps keep the brain alert to sensory information and helps it learn to cope with stimula.

This is tough for a kid who's supposed to sit still at a desk for hours every day!

The sensory diet is not something a non-SID person would ever think about. Who considers whether they have pushed, lifted, listened, balanced, rubbed, squeezed, chewed, and bounced enough in a day? Most people will just listen to Mozart, not listen to a "diet" of music. The sensory diet is really a mind-opening concept.

I think too about the "spiritual diet." Going to church/meeting is one item in the diet. Reading books is another. Talking, listening, centring. Then there's political action, social action, environmental action. I'm probably missing some things from the spiritual "food groups" here, but you get the idea. Emphasizing one area of the spiritual diet too much makes us spiritually malnourished.

Maybe some of us drop out of one part of the spiritual diet because we feel we are getting too much of one thing, not enough of another. Like my son who can't "hear" his senses, we can't "hear" our spirit/Spirit. The revolving-door aspect of many of our meetings may reflect this spiritual diet thing.

****
This week, another book came in on the reserve list at the library, this time a well-known US author, Barbara Kingsolver. Her newest book is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and -- if this ain't proof that there's a global movement going on here -- it's about a year of local eating.

Reading the two books (The 100-Mile Diet [aka Plenty] vs this one) back to back, there is a temptation to compare. The Smith/MacKinnon book is less thick, more translucent, more open about human frailties and failures. Kingsolver's book is dense, brisk, and heavier. Perhaps more practical in many ways, too, with more how-to elements in it. Smith and MacKinnon were flying by the seat of their pants, relying on near-genius cooking skills to survive, still in many ways wondering who they were going to be when they grew up. Kingsolver is already a bestselling author, who sits proudly on the list of the 100 most dangerous people in America.

Both sets of authors touch on the cultural antipathy toward spiritual values in diet. But Kingsolver drives the point home.

She points out that as guests, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist people can politely turn down the platter of ham on the grounds of their spirituality, with no hard feelings from the host. And in many ways, a vegetarian can do the same thing for lifestyle reasons, although possibly with a more tight-lipped smile from the host.

But what about the person who, for spiritual reasons, cannot eat food that was grown by people paid less than $2/day in a far-away country, then shipped at the expense of our environment to our table, with rich corporations taking all the profits? Or those who, for spiritual reasons, feel they must eat the food that their region produces? Refuse to pour greenhouse gases into their refrigerators and mouths? Respect the dignity and value of an animal's life before it dies to become our ham platter? Treat the human body as a temple and forsake GMO and mass-produced pseudo-food?

"No, thanks, I'm on a spiritual diet"???

Hm, I envision said platter of ham up-ended in someone's lap in response.

Somehow, these values that I/we consider spiritual lie outside of the accepted boundaries of spirituality and therefore don't get the same respect as rules printed in ancient documents. And there are those other rules, equally ancient -- rules of hospitality and good graces -- that trump anything newfangled.

My parents are coming to visit in a couple of weeks for a weekend. I am trying to bring myself to buy the required food-things. Breakfast includes orange juice and oranges. Bread is white and comes with a brand name on the bag. Salads are green at all times of the year.

Do I dare offer them red cabbage and carrot salad, with squash soup, a handful of the mini kiwis I grew in my backyard, and the wonderful meats that I get from my farmer? Maybe some dolmades made with chard leaves, or bruschetta of my own tomatoes and garlic, roasted onto crusty local bread? All of it grown, sought, gathered, preserved, and/or cooked by my own hands, gifts of the earth as the days grow shorter and colder?

Would that seem like a gift to them? Or a snub?

Probably a snub.

I wonder if Woolman's hosts were snubbed when he would slip into the back kitchen to pay the slaved people who had served him. I wonder if he even ever worried about that.

I wonder if he ever snubbed his parents.

Eating What We Are

2007-10-05T15:58:00.000-04:00

I finally got around to reading "The 100-Mile Diet" by Alisa Smith and James B Mackinnon (entitled "Plenty" in the US -- I don't know why they came up with a different title for you guys. Isn't that kind of weird??). Actually, my name in the queue at the library hold listings finally came up. It was a good read -- funny, warm, quirky, non-self-righteous.

It's also like a gauntlet being tossed down. Eat locally. Pull thy head out of the sand. Take up this quest.

We've sort of being eating a sort of local diet for a long while now. Mostly the meats and veges. But it's that final push we've never done, the business of saying No More. This book has inspired me. I mean, if they can do it...

Food is a metaphor of a culture. North American food is cheap, low-interest, low-taste, and low-nutrition. This is what we as a people have become. We'd rather import garlic all the way from China and put our local farmers out of work than to pay two bucks more per bushel. It's been bouncing around on a boat for two weeks, but we don't care.

Doing the 100 mile diet brings up some really interesting problems. Where will I get sugar, rice, and flour in eastern Ontario?

The truth is I don't know. The likely answer is that I won't. And that's something we have to work out one item at a time. I have to let go of the ideas about food that are tying me to an insane global agro-food business.

For now, sugar is coming from maple syrup (50 km), honey (40 km), and corn syrup from the grocery store that I have rationalized since Ontario grows lots of corn that this is sort of maybe local syrup. The muffins this week weren't so bad, especially with the local pumpkin mush (30 km) to help sweeten them. I am now trying to persuade one farmer at the farmer's market to grow sugar beets next spring and then find an elderly German immigrant to teach her how to turn them into syrup. Maybe you can process sweet corn into syrup in the same way. Has anyone ever tried it?

Maybe I'll try it this weekend.

Is eating local a spiritual principle? I don't think quakers ever made a distinction between everyday living and spiritual living. This little quest is like a prayer for the earth, to make it better.

And as we head into Thanksgiving weekend, it's good to think of food prayerfully.

We can, truly, eat ourselves into being again.

From the second-last chapter, when Alisa and James are at a local food restaurant with a table full of local food critics. A bottle of wine had been presented to them (200 miles), and everyone at the table had hesitated to accept it:

I had expected the 100-mile experiment to be a platform to think about many things, among them a long list of bummers from climate change to the failure of whole generations to learn how to recognize edibel mushrooms. What I could see around thetable now was a less tangible consideration: a sense of adventure. We are at a point in world history where bad news about the state of the Earth is just as jaded and timeworn as the idea that there is nowhere left to go, nothing new to explore. Put those two statements side by side, however, and something hidden is revealed. Of course there are new things to do, and no shortage of them. We need to find new ways to live in the future. We can start any time; we can live them here and now .

Rachel Carson

2007-09-22T08:09:00.001-04:00

I watched a special on PBS last night about Rachel Carson. She was the author of Silent Spring in 1963, the first scientific book to express alarm at how our species was tipping the balance of nature. Her concern was pesticides and chemicals in the environment.

I had only ever known about Rachel Carson as a name, an almost legendary figure in the environmental movement. Now I have seen her face and heard her story. It was very moving.

Carson was vilified, mocked, and shunned even by the science community for her research. She was warned not to publish it. How alone she must have felt. Yet she kept appearing in public, making presentations to anyone who would listen, until she finally got the ear of the federal government.

She didn't live to see much of the results of her efforts because she was already dying of cancer. She died in 1964. Yet she gave up to her last breath to help save a planet.

Sometimes when we feel hoarse and exhausted from fighting for the truth we need to have faith that truth has its own life and power. If we keep speaking it, eventually it will take root, even if we don't live to see it.

Buttons

2007-09-20T09:44:00.000-04:00

I took a break from Quaker blogging for the spring and summer while my eye healed. It's good to get back into it. I'm pleased to see a lot of new bloggers, and I'm looking forward to getting to know them all.

Coming back to a group like this one, I get to see what we are doing with fresh eyes (ha ha - get it?). I flipped back through some of the older posts that I missed over the summer, just to see what people have been talking about.

And -- don't take this wrong, now -- I have been struck by an almost dominant "down with Quakers" message, like a catalogue of our shortcomings. We seem to come back to this theme frequently, from all different angles.

Sure, sometimes words and ideas come across as negative when they're supposed to be musing or inquiring. That's the nature of the written word: you don't have control of how people read it or what they latch onto. Maybe for commenters, the negative is just more attractive, in the way that the bad guys in movies are so much more interesting than the good guys. So the thread veers toward the negative like a magnet to the north pole.

But my question is: Are these buttons?

When Margaret Fell was writing epistles to the fledgling Quaker meetings back in the 1600s, she lamented their preoccupation with buttons. Who cares whether Quakers wear buttons, she moaned. Who cares whether they wear a hat or keep a day?

I recall one of Lucretia Motts' sermons, where she too laments the buttons of her day: "It has been well said our fathers made graven images, but we make verbal ones."

When we try to discern what is wrong with Quakerism today, are we staring at our buttons?

Like, is this what we're supposed to be doing?

I wonder if I go to any other denomination's blogsphere, will I find largely the same conversations? -- how X needs to be more A (or less B), how it needs to get back to its roots (or get away from old roots), how its gatherings need to be more Spirit-focused (or more active in walking the talk), etc.

I wonder if all this is true. Do we really need these things? Are we being called or led in this way?

Maybe what's important now is not for Quakers to be uberQuakers -- or even Quakers at all. Maybe many are each being called to be Spirit-led in a more nameless, formless way, just following those inner nudges, listening for guidance, building the kingdom of heaven on earth. Maybe the Light is pulling us in different ways, but that it's okay.

Maybe the inner grumblings we feel are just our own. Maybe they're not to be extended to the Quaker group.

I'm just saying maybe because, well, maybe.

*****
The first meeting I belonged to had a yearly tradition of a silent supper at the meetinghouse. The idea was to come together and eat in a Spirit-filled silence, in a manner reminiscent of a communion. I finally managed to attend one of these dinners.

There was one elderly woman, very tiny, a bit childlike in many ways, who had come to the dinner as well. The meeting members were filling their plates and sitting down in silence, but this elder was quietly chatting with people around her. Just pleasant chit-chat. Either someone hadn't told her it was a silent supper, she just didn't get it, or she'd forgotten.

As the meal started and she still hadn't settled into silence, my inner irritation grew. Why didn't someone quietly tell her that she was supposed to be silent? It would only take one or two words. I found it hard to centre down as the puddle of irritation grew in me. I looked up and stared at the people around her, wondering why they weren't doing anything.

And then I saw what they were doing. The Friend beside this elder was holding her hand quietly as they ate. The Friend across the table was listening, nodding, giving his full attention to her. Others were gazing at her, rapt, some smiling indulgently.

It was one of those spiritual whoosh moments. The point wasn't that we were supposed to be silent, but that I was supposed to be silent. And here I was, the whole time, being outwardly silent but inwardly totally nonsilent.

The others had it right. They each kept their own silence. That silence left them open to listen to this elder. They found their ministry through her.

Only I did not.

Silence was my button.

To End a War

2007-09-16T08:18:00.001-04:00

Listening to American politicians debate how to (or whether to) end their role in the Iraq war has left me wondering if any of the discussion makes sense.

How do you end a war? When is it over?

This is a crucial question.

One of the tragic flaws of the whole War on Terror (and the Iraq War, which has been lumped in with it) is that there is no clear way of knowing when it's done. Terror is an abstraction. There is no fixed target or enemy. There is no measurable means of claiming victory and bowing out, as there would be in a war over, say, territory. Hence, the war can never end.

Maybe we can say that very classical wars--and only classical wars-- have measurable endings. Everything ends with the treaty.

Yet World War I didn't end with the treaty because of the revenge it imposed on Germany. Instead, that "end" fed animosity and led to the rise of Hitler and World War II. So it really wasn't much of an "end" at all. And what about Bismark's war before World War I-- did the "end" of that war not feed directly into World War I?

How far back can we go?

Treaties in and of themselves don't end wars.

More war doesn't end wars either. Many people believe that World War II ended because of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. But this atrocity only created detente.

No, the Marshall Plan ended World War II. The Marshall Plan was the stake driven into the heart of a long line of wars that wouldn't end. Afterward, there was peace.

Because the real war was not in the guns and bombs: it was in the hearts and minds of the people. When the shootings and bombings stop, you have detente. To end a war, you have to end the hatred and quell the thirst for revenge.

On both sides.

That's what the Marshall Plan did. It built the foundation for peace. It reduced the likelihood of continued misery. It created hope. It forged a bond of forgiveness and respect.

Ending a war means listening, talking, admitting mistakes and atrocities, making amends, rebuilding, giving, forgiving.

This can only happen at the negotiation table.

And that is the tragedy. That is why this war will never end.

America doesn't negotiate with terrorists.

Walking Prayers

2007-09-12T11:50:00.000-04:00

Three nights ago, I watched a geology show on TV with my kids. It was about the geological history of Ontario.

Did you know that 4.5 billion years ago, the highest mountains in the world (higher than the Himalayas) covered a stretch from east of Toronto up to Georgian Bay? And that an immense salt-water sea covered south-eastern Ontario south into the US and west past Detroit? And that a mere 6000 years ago, as the glaciers were retreating, a break in the receding glacier caused a massive flood that filled the Great Lakes and created islands out of dry land? (And that the Ashinabe Indians who live in that area have legends about the flood that created the islands, showing that their oral history goes back to the Ice Age!)

Well, I was impressed. All those weird striped rock-islands in Georgian Bay are actually the base of the old mountain range, twisted by the collision of two continents and heated under the pressure of miles of rock.

And the limestone under the shoreline where I live, littered with sea fossils like an ocean garbage dump, is an old sea bottom. The deep underground salt mines in Goderich (ON) and Detroit (MI) still show ripples of sea waves in the salt deposits.

I was suddenly aware of the immensity of time. Those mountains and seas were several "earths" ago, long before dinosaurs, long before life forms.

And yet, here am I. Here are we.

I thought of this two days ago as I was driving to the next town to pick up some fruit. The trees along the 401 are now lightly tinged with orange and red, just a hint of the splendour of fall on its way. I took note of the low, flat-topped hills and gentle valleys, perhaps eroded by glaciers, or perhaps flooded by sea water or glacial floods. I saw rises and falls, and soil that came from somewhere else, and limestone rock-cuts pressed up out of the ground by drifting continents.

What I saw was time, rather than physical space--chapters of the earth's story jutting up, buried here, fading there, covering itself with a new story that simply extends the old one in one long line of 5 billions years.

********

Praying is in some ways about seeing. In ordinary life, we close ourselves off to too much input so that we can focus on a single task. To pray is to brush that aside and open, look, listen, see, smell, hear, taste.

Of all the bibles, talmuds, korans, and books of mormon that the Creator has allegedly written, there is only one that we can be certain he/she/it wrote-- and that is creation itself. The earth and universe are the first bible. It's the one we really must read if we don't read any others. It's the one we can all agree on. And there is so much written there, such a long story, with such detail, down to molecules and atoms and string theories.

The Old Testament bible covers only 5000 years; the Creator's bible covers 5 billion. How lucky scientists are to be reading such a book. How thankful I am that they share their findings with us so that we too may read the chapter they have found.

*********

I go on early morning walks every day for a half hour before breakfast. It's cooler now, so I have to wear a sweater. As I walk, instead of thinking, I try to open up to this kind of prayer.

Some days, I walk to feel gravity. I focus on feeling the force of the planet, which is large, overpowering me, who am small, pulling me in. I feel the force I need to exert to pull my foot away from the planet. I experience its goodness and rightness. I let its pull embrace me, keeping me safe.

Some days, I walk to see and read. I look at details, feel sensations, inhale slowly to taste the air. What does it all say? Not just the natural surroundings, but the human-made surroundings too, which are made of created matter, molecules, textures, stones. What is being said to me, now, here? If I treat everything as the messenger, will I get the message?

Some days, I walk to be part of Creation. I see everything as the work of an artist's hand, the colours, the textures, the sculptures. I feel the Creator within and beyond it, for his/her/its 5 billion years of shaping and revising. I experience myself as part of the art, one piece split off from the rest, like a piece of clay pulled out of the main block, rolled and shaped, and set into motion. I am art, I walk through art. Through art, with art, and in art, in the unity of creation.

There must be more ways to walk prayer.

Sea Ice Melting

2007-09-09T08:49:00.001-04:00

On the news yesterday and in some newspapers was a long report about the Arctic sea ice. Satellite images showed that since 1979, about 40% of the ice has melted.

That's a lot of ice.

Sure, the ice could freeze up again--if we had a few very cold winters and cool summers. But Arctic ice isn't like ice in your freezer. It acts as a giant white mirror reflecting the sun's rays back out into space. When the white ice is gone, those rays heat up the surrounding water, making the remaining ice melt even faster. This starts a cycle of warming and melting that speeds up. It's like trying to make ice in your freezer when the ice tray is sitting on top of a warming pan--and the temperature of the warming pan is slowly rising.

As the ice is released into water and the ice mirror effect fades, the world's climate will go through drastic changes, starting with the drowning of the coastlines.

What sickens me is the response of the four Arctic nations who have no doubt been observing this change for years. Canada, Denmark, Russia, and the US are all staking claims to the Arctic seabed.

Because it contains 25% of the world's remaining oil supply.

They see environmental disaster as an economic opportunity. They sound no alarm bells, wage no international campaigns to save the earth. Instead,, they stake their claims. There is money to be made in this disaster.

Never mind the irony that it's the burning of fossil fuels that has caused a lot of the global warming. They would cheerfully add more fuel to that fire if it made them a few bucks.

That is perhaps the saddest part of this story: the greed and self-centredness it exposes. Rather than try to save our planet, our leaders are lining up to be the first to push it over the edge.

Standards of Truth

2007-09-08T15:50:00.000-04:00

On my early morning walks, much mistier and cooler now than in the summer, I'm still thinking about fundamentalism. It is a question that doesn't seem to go away, even after I have paced it through morning after morning.

For the past two days, I have been thinking about the standards of truth, and I have come to this conclusion.

People who live in today's scientific, rational world have a natural standard of truth based on experience, sense information, testing, researching, comparison and contrast, deduction, and induction. We've been raised this way, our education has formed us this way, and that's how we come to conclusions. We must understand an idea and test it against standards before we accept it. And when there are contradictions, we probe further--there must be an error, an omission, deliberate or incomplete misinformation: for two truths cannot contradict each other and yet still be true.

Now, someone who is a fundamentalist--and it doesn't matter what kind of fundamentalist--has to switch to using a different standard of truth for religious matters. This religious standard of truth is based on whether something appears in a book or a doctrine, or whether it has been stated in a pulpit. If experience, sense information, testing, researching, comparison and contrast, deduction, and induction suggest something different, fundamentalists are supposed to block those ideas from their mind out of devotion to this religious truth standard. They call this faith. If there are contraditions, they must either ignore them or delicately step around them.

Yet these two standards of truth are mutually exclusive. They are polar opposites. Moreover, you can't switch standards of truth on and off like lightbulbs; and you can't do both at the same time. Deep down, you have only one standard of truth.

I think it's the superhuman effort to maintain two mutually exclusive standards of truth in the same brain that pushes fundamentalists to extreme action. They have to prove to themselves that they think according to the religious standard, when deep down, they think according to the natural standard. They have to distract themselves from the discordance in their own minds and from the natural-type truths that must be nudging them.

Perhaps this is why converts are often the most extreme of fundamentalists. They have to work harder to shove their natural standard of truth aside to make room for the religious standard of truth.

Quakers have that old sentence from Fox about knowing things experimentally. Fox's idea was (or appears to have been) that religious truth must be true by natural standards. Reading even revered books demands scholarship and academic discipline, the same as everything else. He seemed to have scorn for people who quoted scriptures to justify their beliefs (You say the apostle says this, and Paul says that, but what do you say?). I believe he was advocating against having a different (and lower) standard of truth for religion. For Fox, religious experience as a natural experience had to be the foundation of religious beliefs and doctrines.

A fundamentalist friend once told me that experience was the basis of fundamentalism. I replied that a religious experience doesn't come with a name tag. It comes simply as a sense of Something Out There or Something Within, or a Nudge or a Beckoning. It's vague and formless, even though it is compelling. You can't have an experience of a doctrine of a trinity, or a duty to wear a burqa.

If one believes that their is only one Being out there, then religious experience must be the same for all religions. (Unless one rationalizes that God speaks to my religion, and the Devil speaks to everyone else's!) So it's the differences that have to be maintained by the religious standard of truth.

Perhaps this is why the world's religions are polarizing into two camps: the moderates, who focus on the commonality of religious experience, and the fundamentalists, who focus on the differences of doctrine.

M. Scott Peck, the author of The Road Less Travelled, wrote another less well-known book called The Lie, about the nature of evil. Peck suggests that all evil proceeds from lying. It's an interesting thesis. Lying can take many forms--running away from truth, abusing truth, masking truth, deliberately distoring truth, omitting truth, and especially lying to oneself and self-delusion. Lies from government, powerful classes, middle-class complacency, myths, and outmoded ways are the spawning grounds of crime, poverty, injustice, violence, and of course, more lies.

One has to lie to oneself in order to hold two opposite standards of truth.

Poverty, Charity, and the Web of Life

2007-09-04T19:35:00.000-04:00

A friend and I sat out on the back deck in the cool evening breeze two nights ago while our sons played together. She is a very spiritual Catholic, very involved in political and social action. She and her husband had decided this summer that since the birth of their son 11 years ago, they had been doing less for the poor. There had been so much to do for themselves--especially since their son has Asperger Syndrome. She wanted to know if I had suggestions.

Yeah, so I didn't. I managed to mumble a bit and then kind of sputtered out.

Sure, I have my charities that I support. Most are international in focus--microbanks, social change groups, human rights, the environment, Quaker and Mennonite groups. I also support several political advocacy groups, like the Council of Canadians, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, and Greenpeace: none of these are eligible for charitable tax deduction status anymore, so they don't get tallied up with the charities. I give often to the Green Party, which is eligible for handsome political party tax credits.

But except for some lump-sum donations at Christmas to a few local charities, none of the groups I support is really a poverty action group. Their visions lie elsewhere.

Lately I've been giving to some new groups. Like Avaaz.org. It seems like a funky, international, internet global action group--let's see what they can do. Like Fair Vote Canada, which is canvassing for the Oct. 10 Ontario referendum on proportional representation. And like the Canadian Council of Churches year-long campaign to stop the privatization of water. Sort of things as they come up.

My friend and I ended up talking about the place of poverty in a world of struggle and change. I find I don't think about poverty in terms of poverty, the way I did, say, 20 years ago. I see it now as one element in a broad web. I don't know if tackling poverty will actually tackle poverty. I think it's everything else that's making us poor. Poverty is the effect, not the cause: the symptom, not the disease.

That's not a rationalization: it's more a realization. The solutions to poverty don't lie in poverty: they lie in life itself. And when we are doing what we can to improve life everywhere through countless different ways, we are working toward ending poverty. It's all part of the same thing.

I'ts like the environment. Over the past two years, my husband and I have renovated our house for energy efficiency, gotten rid of the gas-guzzling car, changed all the lightbulbs for fluorescents, and switched our electricity supplier to 100% green electricity (wind and low-impact hydro). Due to better use of our extractor fan and our new ceiling fans, we have had to use our air conditioning only 8 days this summer.

But while all that does have an effect on our ecological footprint, it's only one part of the picture. The environmental picture isn't just how much energy we consume, but also what we buy, what we eat, where it comes from, how it gets here, whether our country is detonating bombs, allowing artificial fertilization crops and deforestation, giving tax breaks to importers, and hauling in immigrants to prevent the population from dropping. In effect, work on social and political action ends up being environmental action.

Recently a British Columbia couple spent a year on the 100-mile diet and wrote a book about their experience. It's currently a best-seller in Canada. For one year, they ate only foods that had been grown within a 2-hour drive of Vancouver. So cinnamon and brown sugar were out. So were tea and coffee. They had to make do with BC produce and meats.

They have said in interviews that what surprised them the most was the variety of foods they ate. When one is restricted to what is available locally, one ends up eating new things, all very healthy and fresh. This is how our pioneer ancestors lived. One also eats only what is in season, which means always eating foods at their best. Currently, the family is still eating about 85% local.

They said they missed lemons.

We too have been trying to live a more sustainable lifestyle by changing the food we eat. For the past three years, we have been eating meats from family farms. We place orders at the market once every two months. We buy local eggs. We purchase our produce from a produce store that brings in locally grown produce and promotes it. These are our food producers.

This summer, we took a bike holiday in Prince Edward County (a half-hour drive) and discovered 19 wineries that we had never heard of. Their wines are not sold in stores. We brought home a afew bottles. Soon we need to go back again to restock. These are our wineries.

There are three cheese factories in the three neighbouring counties. For specialty cheeses, Quebec (slightly outside the 100-mile range, but not too bad) has plenty. We are making an effort to buy all regional cheeses. These are our cheeses.

A part of me struggles with this. I grew up Italian. Good food is cooked with olive oil and sprinkled with real parmiggiano-reggiano cheese or pine nuts. Adriatic cooking contains a lot of fish--something that despite living on the shores of one of the biggest fresh-water lakes in the world, is not available locally due to water pollution. I don't buy food from China, California, or Chile; but I do buy pasta made in Italy (no, the Canadian brands just don't cut it) and ocean-caught fish. So despite buying local, I'm still trying to make it fit with the tastes that I grew up with. Somehow, this part of me has to die in order to live truly close to this area's food.

Regional cuisine develops when we give up on imports and imported thinking and focus on what is at hand.

Yet when I am buying from the farmers and venders I've come to know, and travelling a little here and there to pick up wines and specialty items, I am overcome by a subtle sense of My People. These are My People--not my Italian ancestors, whose culinary idiosyncracies I've inherited. My People and I are part of a web of life. We take from the same land and give back to it.

There is this same sense when one is working on polical change, social change, environmental change, global economic change, or military change. The internet makes it even more intense, because we get to see and hear the voices of My People, far away, doing the same actions as us. The result is almost a tenderness for each other, a global camaraderie. We know that if we pull any one issue in the right direction, it will tug all the connected issues along with it.

I didn't ever give my friend any suggestions. But I think we both left with a sense that what we feel nudged to be doing right now is the right thing to be doing.

War as Obsolete

2007-08-30T16:32:00.001-04:00

I found this editorial in the Ottawa Citizen a few weeks back.

It's been making the rounds of Quakerdom as it passes into email circles. But in case you haven't read it, it's a good read:

War's had its chance

Mitchell Anderson, Citizen Special
Published: Monday, July 23, 2007

War doesn't work anymore. From Iraq to Afghanistan to the Palestinian conflict, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the oldest method in human history for resolving disputes has become obsolete.

It's not that war is wrong (it usually is). It's not that war is ghastly (it always is). The simple fact is that war as a strategy to achieve a desired outcome no longer works.

Look no further than the ongoing debacle in Iraq. The U.S., with the biggest military machine in human history, is mired in a losing struggle with a determined insurgency equipped mainly with small arms and improvised roadside bombs.

After spending more than $450 billion and counting, the U.S. military still cannot pacify a country with no organized military opposition, even when the prize is the second biggest oil reserves in the world.

The grisly human toll mounts even as the prospect of a military victory fades daily. The U.S. has so far lost more than 3,500 soldiers. More than 26,000 have been wounded. Last year the Lancet estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had lost their lives to violence since the invasion in 2003.

Even while saddled with arguably the most docile and jingoistic media in the developed world, the American public is demanding an end to this fiasco. Two thirds of the U.S. public currently opposes the war. Over half believe that it is creating more terrorists than reducing the threat from terrorism.

This last point is key. The strategy of trying to pacify a population by killing those that don't agree with you may have worked for millennia but has now become plainly counterproductive. It is like trying to fight a fire with kerosene.

With every door kicked in, every person humiliated, every loved one killed, there are more bereaved and enraged people willing to join an insurgency. This ad-hoc volunteer force of combatants is becoming an unbeatable foe for the world's leading military powers.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a poignant example of this emerging reality. Pound for pound, Israel has one of the most effective militaries in the world. They also have employed a grimly well-honed policy of disproportionate retribution.

There is no doubt that the various groups opposed to Israel know very well that the Jewish state can and will exact a terrible cost for every action against them. This strategy, with its gruesome human toll on both sides, has been going on for generations, yet has utterly failed to make the Israeli state safe or to protect its citizens.

So what has changed? Why has is it become so much easier to mount a crippling insurgency? One factor is the global profusion of small arms. There are now about 600 million in circulation in the world, which cause 500,000 deaths each year.

The cost of a new AK-47 in Iraq is about $200. In Afghanistan, a used one is a bargain at about $10. Bullets are 30 cents each. A rocket launcher in Baghdad can be had for about $100.

According to U.S. terrorism expert Stephen Flynn, "weapons like the AK-47 are so plentiful that they can be had for the price of a chicken in Uganda, the price of a goat in Kenya, and the price of a bag of maize in Mozambique or Angola."

The other new factor is the deadly and recent phenomenon of suicide bombing. Developed as a tactic in the Lebanese civil war only in the 1980s, it has become a frighteningly effective tool that military powers are virtually powerless to prevent.

Between 1980 and 2003, suicide attacks accounted for only 3 per cent of terrorist attacks worldwide but 48 per cent of deaths due to terrorism. A conventional army trained to fight other soldiers is of little practical use against such extreme tactics.

Contrary to popular opinion, most suicide bombers are motivated not by religious fanaticism. According to Robert Pape's seminal book on the subject Dying to Win, 95 per cent of suicide attacks have had one strategic goal: to remove an occupier.

Not surprisingly, places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, where suicide tactics are commonplace, are also examples where it has become virtually impossible to achieve a "military solution."

It spite of the waning utility of war, like many sunset industries, it will be subsidized long after it makes sense to do so. Military spending around the world has increased 34 per cent since 1996 and currently eats up $1.2 trillion each year -- 46 per cent of which is accounted for by the U.S. alone.

Instead of throwing more good money after bad, we should admit that military interventions are no longer effective and reallocate those resources toward preventing conditions leading to conflict. Rather than lamenting the end of war, we should embrace the possibilities it creates.

The U.S. government spends 32 times more on the military than foreign aid. Globally, aid is less than seven per cent of military spending. Based on those numbers, the potential to make the world a more civil, just and peaceful place is enormous.

The so-called "war on terror" will not be won on a battlefield; it will be resolved through economic development, fair trade practices, strategic assistance and respectful negotiation.

Like slavery, subjugation of women and eugenics, the age of war has come and gone. It will not be missed.

Harry Potter and the Eerie Silence

2007-08-27T13:48:00.000-04:00

Every evening, my kids curl up with me in our bed, and I read them another two chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Reading Harry Potter has been an off-and-on ritual for the past few years, since they were old enough to handle the first Potter book. It's been an adventure that we've lived together, and I'll be sad to set the last book down.

So my question is: What has happened to the great outcry against the Potter books? An eerie silence has greeted Book 7. There's barely a whimper anywhere.

The bigger question, of course, is why was there an outcry in the first place? After all, it's kind of like a fairy tale. What was the big deal? Why this book, and not a hundred others?

My personal theory is that the Potter books hit on a conservative-Christian nerve. In some parts of the States, conservatives didn't just want their own kids not to read it: they wanted nobody to read it. There were book bannings and book burnings.

Of a kids' book.

Somehow this book got too close to something.

I meant to find out what it was.

The protesters claimed that the books promoted paganism. But if you know anything about paganism, you'd recognize that this is rubbish. Paganism is an anything-goes worldview: it has no concept of a moral evil and a moral good. In the Potter books, good and evil are central to the storyline.

Neither is the book about occultism or satanism, as claimed. No occult events occur anywhere in any of the books, and satan isn't mentioned. Evil takes the form of a person who has shredded his soul in order to escape death. He is not an object of worship, but an object of fear and loathing.

Nor is the criticism that the books will lead children to believe in magic or want to be witches valid either. If kids are old enough to tackle a 500-page book, then they're old enough not to believe in magic.

This was all grasping at straws.

I don't think it was the pagan or magic aspects of the Potter books that drove the conservatives nutty: I think it was the Christian elements.

Rowling, who is not a professed Christian, took 2000 years of christendom--in the form of symbols, legends, archetypes, allegories, and values--and put it into a new story. The books are a feast for the literature-starved: a delicious mix of latin and greek, classical references, quests, myths, ancient symbols, literary references, and above all, Christ's teaching and example. It's as if she took everything in christendom's collective unconscious and wove it into a world we can see and feel. The stories are so true to our unconscious that the places and people seem achingly familiar. We don't just *like* Hogwarts: we *recognize* it.

In effect, Rowling broke the Christian copyright on these symbols. She told the story with new names and let it have new meaning. In many ways, she let the symbols tell their own story.

Take the first two books.

Hogwarts School is clearly a symbol of the church. It is where the chosen youngsters learn the power of magic.

It had four founders, who created the four houses of Hogwarts, paralleling the four authors of the gospels. The inhabitants of the three synoptic houses are ordinary, perhaps earthy and courageous; the fourth is the house whose inhabitants believe they are divine, that access to magic makes witches and wizards above all other humans. From this house comes the evil in these books.

To get to Hogwarts, first-years have to go through a ritual by water, a type of baptism that only needs to occur once to let them in.

There is at Hogwarts a friendly giant, who protects all creatures great and small. There is Dumbledore, the white-bearded God figure, the headmaster of the school, wise and kind, whose sermon is love. His patronus symbol is the phoenix, the mythical creature that dies and then is reborn from the ashes, a resurrection symbol even though it predates the gospels.

Harry is the boy who has been prophesied to conquer evil. His patronus symbol is the stag, which in the medieval bestiaries symbolized the Christ. In case the reader didn't know that, Rowling points out that the stag looks like a unicorn--another symbol of Christ. In Quidditch, he is an instinctual Seeker. Harry and his two friends Ron and Hermione form the trinity that works to keep evil out of Hogwarts. Incomplete on their own, they need each other's strengths and weaknesses to defeat evil.

The weapon of the books is love, also called forgiveness and grief. The team of good guys is known as the Order of the Phoenix, making more use of the resurrection symbol. Evil in the stories is the fear of death. The evil lord is named Voldemort ("vol de mort" = flight from death), and his followers are known as Death Eaters.

In Book 1, the evils are in the attics of the "church" - and the evil one sits in the hat on a teacher's head. Harry has to clean out the temple and banish the evil one. In Book 2, Harry must descend into hell to kill the serpent. In so doing, he is fatally wounded by the monster's poison and faces death; but his wounds are healed by Phoenix tears--symbolic of the sorrow of the Passion story--and he survives and returns from hell.

In the final book, Harry faces his own Golgotha.

I could go on. Many people do. The books are steeped in christendom's symbols, and it's kind of fun to pull them all out. Even the mist-shrouded, train station to the afterlife, where Harry ends up after his Golgotha, is called King's Cross.

Christ's teachings dominate the morals and ethics of the books. One theme is the tender care one owes to the least of one's brothers and sisters, from the powerful wizards down to the enslaved house elves--and it even extends to the bad guys. The antiracism theme develops through all seven books, until the final book, where it becomes the dominant theme--echoes of Nazi Germany pervade the book. And Dumbledore's solution to every problem is love.

Unlike Star Wars and Tolkien, where both heroes and villains kill, in the Potter books only villains use killing curses. The good guys are nonviolent: they use disarming spells, stunning spells, immobilizing spells--and sometimes end up being killed in the process. Yet they resist any temptation to do things that Dumbledore would disapprove of. Acts of love, courage, and self-sacrifice, as well as reflecting evil back onto itself, help them by slow degrees to win the day.

Yet--and this is a big yet--despite being saturated with christendom, the books do not weave in a creed. There is no gospel-based event-by-event allegory, like CS Lewis. Except for "Christmas," "Easter," and "godfather," Christian words are not used, not even where the gospels are being quoted or paraphrased.

And that's what I believe sent the conservatives into howls. They saw what was theirs, stolen.

So then why did the hue and cry suddenly end?

It seems on the surface as if conservative Christians have suddenly decided to accept the Potter books, maybe because the Christian symbolism is so strong, that they believe the books just *have* to be Christian, that Rowling has secretly been a CS Lewis without telling anyone.

I beg to differ.

Book 6 ends with the killing of Dumbledore. Focus, people. There is no God at Hogwarts after that. Harry is left on his own with a few shreds of information to save the world from evil, a task he does not know how to do. He is not a saviour: he is just a kid who doesn't have a clue.

Book 7 is "death of god" theology, told not by philosophers but by our own collective unconscious. God is dead, Harry keeps saying, the Messiah has to be us. And so the trio finds and roots out the scraps of evil's soul until the awful moment when Harry realizes that completion of his task requires him to give up his life. And so he does, without hesitation.

But Harry is not the only Messiah. When his apparently dead body is carried back to Hogwarts, the students find that the power of evil over them is no longer strong. They become their own Messiahs, starting with stuttering, awkward Neville Longbottom, and followed by the others. They resist, refuse to obey, and draw new power over evil, until at least evil is defeated.

In effect, Harry is a Christ figure without the redemption idea. The message is not that Christ died to save us, but that Christ died to show us how to die. We are Christs when we accept the possibility of suffering and death in order to protect love.

There's the nerve that Rowling stepped on.

*****

Interestingly, the epigraph to the final book is from William Penn, on death and dying. Is this the only influence of Quakerism? Maybe just one other thing--the way the Light in children is treated with the same respect as the Light in adults in these books.

Fundamentalism Revisited

2007-08-25T13:31:00.000-04:00

After a long summer break, I'm ready (I hope) to devote some time to blogging again. It is a spiritual discipline, isn't it? Since I'm not attending Meeting at the moment, it's about my only spiritual discipline, so I should get back at it...

Husband and I have been discussing fundamentalism a lot lately. Topics like this sit with me for a long time, walking along with me as I go on my daily walks. We find fundamentalism fascinating because it is so far outside of our worldview.

Husband just finds it nutty.

What is it about fundamentalists that makes them act in a way that is, while not exactly "insane," certainly "counter-sane"?

Worldview.

The collective, unspoken, but accepted perception of reality of an entire culture.

Fundamentalism juxtaposes itself against the worldview. Opposing a worldview in which you are immersed is remarkably difficult. Fundamentalism is high maintenance.

Hundreds of years ago, literalist religion was not high maintenance. Religion was just all there was to believe. There was no science. There were no facts. Reality wasn't knowable. The Old English root of the word "truth" is "trow"--which just meant "belief" or "trust." "Truth" did not convey any idea of "fact" at all. The "truth" was just something you believed.

Written religion provided a theory of reality that people could believe in, and that was enough to make them believable. Requirements weren't very strict -- that hadn't been invented yet. In a worldview devoid of science or facts, God made the wind blow, God made the tides come in and go out every day, God made the sun rise and turned the seasons, God made people sick. There was no other explanation.

It made religion pretty easy. Just believe what you already believe.

Fundamentalism today is hard work. To literally believe everything in the bible and the early doctrines, you have to deny the reality you already believe in. You can't choose not to believe in your worldview: it's part of your everyday experience of life. It's just there, like air or water.

This puts fundamentalists in a terrible dilemma. Even if you don't really believe in witches, the fact that the Old Testament makes a statement or two about witches means you have to believe in them (and condemn them). So you force yourself to believe in witches.

But you don't really believe in them. Witches (in the satanic sense) are not part of the worldview. People today don't believe in magic, flying broomsticks, evil curses, or potions--unless they're insane. Plus, the Old Testament doesn't exactly tell you what a witch is. So you have to revert to folklore and descriptions by medieval inquisitors. After all, if the bible mentions a witch, then it has to be a thing--and a definable thing at that. So hate literature from the Dark Ages becomes part of your required belief system.

And so the net of required beliefs gets larger and larger. It doesn't just conflict with your worldview on one or two levels (e.g. taking one book literally while scorning all others, ignoring historical research into the roots of biblical writings). It requires you to concoct an entire unbelievable worldview.

This kicks off what Thomas Carlyle called "our spasmodic efforts to believe that we believe." It's hard, hard work. You can't look anywhere. You can't read anything. It's dark and scary because all that has to happen is for one small Yop to cut through the spells you've woven around yourself, and the whole thing could cave in.

Fear that there's nothing there.

Fear that the whole promise of life after death is hollow.

Fear that if just one word of one book is shown to be untrue, then nothing is true but the sad, hard world we live in.

That's why fundamentalists work so hard. Our sermon to them should be "Don't be afraid. Put the trust back into truth. Let your worldview guide you."

Eyes

2007-06-05T16:54:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I checked into the Quaker blogs. I have been in and out of Emerg, had eye surgery two weeks ago, and after a cat scan and another test next week, I'll have another eye surgery. Nothing life-threatening, just damnably inconvenient and time-consuming (you *have* to see the wait times in a Canadian eye clinic to believe them!). I looked like Bride of Frankenstein for a few days, and I'm sure a few more of those days are coming (sigh).

I have had no great moments of illumination during the past month either. I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or a good thing.

However, I came across an article about intellectuals that I thought Quakers might be interested in. It's short and very alerting -- eye-opening, perhaps. (But of course it's not talking about me!)

I hope you are all well, and I'll try to be a thoughtful blogger/reader in the near future (with both eyes).

Convergent Humility

2007-04-27T09:41:00.000-04:00

My husband and I sat down last weekened with the iPod download screen and the words of about 100 rock songs that I'd picked out for the church thingie. We went through them one after another, nixing this one, taking that one. There were a few good laughs. We ended up with about 20 songs for the first year.

Since then, said husband decided that it was going to be too difficult to wait to get a band together. He's looking for computer equipment to allow him to set down tracks and record over them so that he can be a one-man band in the short term.

I thought that sounded kind of funky.

But later, as I was admiring our new download CD, it suddenly hit me.

He was in charge of this whole project, not me.

He who never goes to meeting or church. He who thinks religion is stupid. He's the one that the Light is moving to build a new church.

Yeah. Like, not me.

I was awash in sudden humility.

Okay, sure, I'm intimately involved in it. I wanted this church thingie to be targeted at precisely the kind of person my husband is -- nonreligious. This meant that I had to listen very closely to what he was saying (and not saying) while I was developing the ideas.

But it all makes me wonder, in general, who is thinking whose thoughts. When I think a set of thoughts, am I actually just hearing and reflecting the thoughts of someone else? Or is the Spirit doing a co-nudge? Or is that was a spiritual co-nudge is?

Was it my listening to my husband that moved my thoughts into his head? Or was it how his thoughts moved into my head? Or are our two heads just corks floating in one larger Head?

Does our Quaker training in receptivity to the Spirit give us a leg-up in this area? Or are the world's people becoming like one big Mind due to media and the Internet? Is what we do in our blogs self-expression or co-expression?

This week I read the kudos to Martin and all the thanks messages about the Quaker blogosphere. How much influence have each of us had on each other's ideas and spiritual directions? How much is our own, and how much is part of this big Oneness?

I went out for a walk yesterday to think about this idea, and I saw it everywhere. The trees are not individual trees, but rather out-pushings of the Earth, where they will return when they die. The soil is not earth, but old trees. The wind here is the air from far away, with air molecules that the ancients breathed. When I touch anything on the Earth, I am connected with the whole of it. People are not born: birth is just the process of breaking off a chunk of life to become more life. When I speak to you, I am not speaking to you, but with you and in you. It's like the Catholic prayer before communion: Through Him, with Him, and in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honours is yours forever and ever.

This slightly Zen "Aha" moment is the realization that so much of what we call our own--our thoughts, minds, ideas, identities--is collective, not individual. When we get the courage to surrender our individualism, we let ourselves live more fully because our lives become rooted in reality.

****
We're going to start meeting next week. Just him and me for now. This is something we have never done before. I guess after 12 years of marriage, it's about time we started. I think way will open from there.

QuakerQuaker & Me

2007-04-19T08:30:00.000-04:00

I came upon the QuakerQuaker scene two years ago. I still feel like a relative newcomer, but folks have made me feel very welcome. Martin Kelley was especially helpful in getting me, an unknown, established in the community.

Communication is an adventure. People have never been able to communicate like this before. I love being able to talk to you, having never seen your faces, knowing most of you live in different countries that me. My husband calls it the "self-expression revolution." But I think of it as a realm of collective thought. Sure, people can misconstrue a post or a musing comment because words as communication are incomplete; even so, we get to think collectively. The QuakerQuaker community is a bit like a clearness committee. Through our blogs and comments to each other, we draw ourselves to greater clarity.

To use the old Quaker greeting, "how doth truth prosper in our parts"? I think it doth prosper very well.

I see things as having relevance for the time period in which they occur. It strikes me that we have this never-before capacity to communicate with each other because we have a never-before need to communicate at this level. There is so much that needs to be done. We need to be able to think collectively and communicate instantly. An idea starts as a nudge in someone's head, turns into a meme as it connects with other nudges in other heads, then becomes a worldwide movement that can't be stopped. There's hope in the way that the international interconnected community has taken on roles in wresting power away from those who don't care.

QuakerQuaker is a part of that movement.

Since starting my blog, I've been really pleased and touched by the people who have visited it. NonQuakers have dropped in from time to time -- that's always intrigued me. How did they find my blog? Why did they come? Who are they? I follow their link back to their site to see who they are, these individual people who have no connection to me but who by some miracle shared in my thoughts this one day.

What's changed for me since starting this blog? Greater clarity. This blog community has pulled at me in a way that regular meeting hasn't in a long time. It's prompted me to read books that people have recommended, follow links to articles that crystalize new ideas. Even the task of putting a vague nudge into words makes it take a form and shape, sometimes something new.

As if something speaks to us through nudges.

I'm glad to be here.

Letter to the Editor

2007-04-14T18:33:00.000-04:00

The following letter to the editor appeared in our local paper two days ago, written by a local Friend. It expresses a fundamental idea with pithy eloquence:

With the grievous loss of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan at the same time as rededicating the Vimy Ridge Memorial, much has been made of the "direct line" between those two conflicts ("PM honours Vimy legacy," April 9, 2007). The connection is not one so much one of glorious nationalism as it is a cult of death.

If Vimy was our defining moment it defined us as a people steeped in the blood of both friend and foe. Like other warlike people we love to teach our young to kill and be killed. We dress death with splendid monuments, flags, parades, doleful laments on pipes and bugles, volleys over open graves and floods of tears. We promise never to forget. And we initiate each new generation into the cult which ensures further occasion for remembrance. We dress the causes and results of death with noble but false words.

The great irony is that these events come together at Easter when Christians might be expected to champion most strongly a cult of peace and life. Our beloved country has followed the wrong line from Vimy to Afghanistan. We should seek out and follow the difficult paths of non-violent service both at home and abroad. We need a moral equivalent of war.

The next day, the CBC had a heartbreaking story about the deteriorating mental health of the children of soldiers in Afghanistan.

Why We Go

2007-04-11T16:06:00.000-04:00

Why go to meeting/church?

Why not not go?

My husband and I are currently looking around for band-mates to start up the band for the church thingie (see Prism link in the sidebar), Our little posters are pinned up willy-nilly all over town and stuffed in the pockets of almost everyone we know. Since Husband is very representative of our "target market" so to speak, I am letting him lead on this project. But it takes a great deal of patience on my part.

I suggested that maybe we could start without the band.

He gave me an odd look. "What would be the point in that? Why go?"

Why go indeed. He explained:

"The band is what makes it real. The point is relevance. We're not trying to impress anyone, just trying to say religion is where we are and where we live. So we need to start the way we mean to carry on."

Translation: If there's no band, then I won't go.

The medium is the message.

Okay. This is important. Husband is representative of the general population, and if Husband isn't interested in going to a church thingie of his own creation unless it has a band, then others won't come either. Maybe people aren't really searching for religion: they're searching for relevance--action, connection. Whatever -- it doesn't matter. What matters is that we create this church thingie for them, not for some theoretical reason. We do it on their terms, in their language.

The last thing the world needs is another lame church.

Husband and I ended up talking about why people go to church.

For catholics, the answer came easy (since we were both raised catholic). They go for that piece of bread. It's called "the bread of life" in RC circles. Many people skip out as they walk back to their seats from communion, just making a bee-line for that back door, because it's essentially over. It's not about the homily or the muttered liturgy or the hymns -- it's about that bread.

For fundamentalists, the answer came easy too. They need the scaffolding. Being a fundamentalist is hard work. You have to keep your brain contorted and block out contrary thoughts. So you need weekly reinforcement of doctrine, quotes, and the "holy hootenanny" to keep yourself immersed in your belief system. It's what Thomas Carlysle called "our spasmodic efforts to believe that we believe."

For quakers in the silent tradition, the answer is communion. Right? That's the point of the silence. It's not supposed to be individual silence, but rather, collective silence, in the form of an inward journey of sorts.

And what of the quakers who no longer experience this communion, but just find they sit in the silence, directionless, forcing themselves to centre, crossing and re-crossing their legs, week after week?

They take a break from meeting.

I mention this because as past clerk of nominating committee, I had the task of contacting everyone in the meeting to talk to them about their roles in the upcoming year. What I found was that all of the under-45s in the meeting were "taking a break" from meeting this year.

Interesting.

This age-group only. All of them. Hm.

My sense is that the under-45s have to work hard at getting the culture of meeting to work for them, which creates a barrier to communion. They also inwardly resent that culture (which developed in another time) and the fact that it's not part of their worldview (which is current and probably postmodern), which adds a further barrier. But that's just a guess.

In addition, people change. It's called the spiritual journey. Few religions (and meetings) leave room for a full spiritual journey, with all its detours and dulled periods. Most have only one focal point. If your journey takes you in a different direction, your batteries start to drain, and you drift away.

There's nothing to make you stay.

Husband and I did talk a bit about mainstream protestant churches too, why people go to them. The answers were elusive to us. We really can't figure out why people go.

It could be any of the above reasons, in a kind of watered-down way (but then, why not just go to one of those other churches/meetings and get the non-watered-down version?).

It could be to hear a sermon (but then, why not just read a good spiritual book at home?).

It could be to meet and talk to people (but then, why settle for sitting in pews all facing the front, not talking to each other--except for a brief coffee afterwards? why not just come for the coffee and skip the service?).

It could be for the music, but only if you are into high-brow classical music, pipe organ, and/or plodding 19th-century hymns (percentage of population: probably less than 1 percent).

It could be to recite those bold-lettered responses written into the program so that they can all say them together in that church rhythm.

Most mainstreamers I know who go to church say they go for their children, so that their children will have a religious education. Their children, of course, would much rather not go. They go only because their parents make them go.

Fascinating.

I know why I'm no longer going to meeting. It was draining my batteries. Said batteries were dead. If I hadn't started this blog and met all of you, I would have become one messed-up quaker. Instead, I'm trying to start up something that has relevance.

Husband says it's going to start with the band.

There's the light. I'm following it.

It's already charging my batteries.

History of Friends

2007-04-02T22:51:00.000-04:00

I visited Cherice's blog, and then Martin's blog, and they both got me thinking about the history of Friends, the whispery winds of long ago that keep wrapping themselves around us. Those whispery, controversial, dividing, confusing, niggling winds...

How much do we owe to our religious forebears?

Some cultures engage in ancestor worship. Some nations do too. What was there that started everything is sacred in people's minds. The first president, the first constitution...

Religions do a form of ancestor worship too.

The first book of Christianity eventually became known as the Bible, the ultimate reference book of Christianity.

The first person of Quakerism was George Fox, whose written words, for many Friends, are the ultimate reference point for Quakerism.

The first doctrines of Christianity were those of the what-was-to-become-the-Catholic Church, which eventually became the ultimate doctrines of Christianity. Their first interpretations of the Jesus story have become the ultimate interpretations.

I could go on. Basically, whatever happened first becomes the determiner of what should be allowed to follow. And people ever after use that First as the measure.

How much loyalty do we owe to these firsts? How much loyalty do today's Quakers owe to George Fox? To what extent must they allign themselves with his theologies and worldviews? Some Friends would say: completely. But is old better than new?

Are we called to stick by the original?

I call this whole concept Firstism. Firstism is a cultural thing, a worldview. To me, Firstism is a notion. It has three definite features:

1. Firstism is based on illusion or self-delusion. Nations embroider their histories to make their first leader seem like a god out of a Greek legend. They build folklore around the creation of key cultural icons (like flags and constitutions). They ignore or airbrush all the imperfections. Religions do this about their founders, their first books, their first doctrines. Only the Firsts are God-inspired; everything else that comes later is subordinate.

2. Firstism reflects collective ego. By having grandly embroidered First stories, correct in every detail from the very first minute, we express our superiority to others. If we don't uphold our Firsts, then we admit ours is a human story, full of faults and foibles, rather than a legendary narrative.

3. Firstism expresses itself with centuries of dogged loyalty. The longer the loyalty, the more valued the First becomes. A 300-year-old constitution is better than a 20-year-old constitution. An ancient church doctrine is better than a theology book published last year. The King James Bible is better than the New International Version.

I am not a Firstist.

My brain says: whatever was first was the wonky prototype. With centuries of care, things improve a great deal.

We owe reflection to those old Firsts. Such as perhaps attempting to read George Fox's journal, but don't sweat it if you can't stand it.

Or attempting to understand how the early church ever understood those theologies of trinities and personal salvation through crucifixions and how they managed to connect it all to Jesus's life and teachings. But again, don't sweat it if you can't do it.

Many of Jesus's parables were about seeds. Quakers talk about truth as a seed, not a pearl.

Firsts are seeds. They're small and hard, not pretty like pearls. George Fox's teachings were seeds. The early church's teachings were seeds. Many of Jesus's teachings were seeds. The bible was a seed.

But they're not seeds anymore. They've grown into living, growing plants. Yay. That's what they were supposed to do. A seed that doesn't grow is a dead seed.

But when the seed grows, it's no longer a seed anymore. It's a plant. Different thing entirely.

I just don't see how the seed could be considered superior to the plant that it grew into.

But then again, an oak seed should grow into an oak tree. If the tree suddenly starts sprouting maple leaves, then there's been a mutation. Maybe that's not good. But can we really undo a mutation?

Goodness

2007-03-13T16:15:00.000-04:00

I like irony.

When I did my teacher's degree years ago, I ended up taking the mandatory religious ed course for teaching in the public Catholic school system. I didn't really want to; but as a baptised Catholic, I could double my chances of getting a job by applying to both the public and public Catholic boards. In the job-scarce late-80s, that was a smart thing to do. So, hey, I signed up.

On the first day of the course, the nun who ran the program told us that regardless what we each personally believed, our duty as a teacher in a Catholic school was to teach church teachings. This meant keeping our mouths shut about our own beliefs. Yeah, right.

My friend Leah, who has never kept her mouth shut in her entire blessed life, raised her hand. "You mean you want us to lie to the kids?" she asked.

"It's not lying. It's just teaching the program."

"But what if the kids ask us questions?"

"Then you give the answers that are in the book."

"But kids know when we're lying! What good is it going to do if they know we don't buy it but we're telling them to buy it?"

"That's not the point. The point is that you are paid a salary, and that salary is to teach church teachings."

"What about integrity? Honesty? Real discussion?" The nun just turned away and made a move to start on another topic. Case dismissed. "Hey, I'm just asking," Leah finished, then sat back down, arms folded.

I dropped the course that afternoon.

However, and here's the irony, I ended up teaching in a tiny Catholic high school anyway. In a small going-nowhere town that to this day I lovingly call "Deadstock." They were desperate for a French teacher, and I was desperate for a job. A match made in, er, heaven.

Another new hire that year was a francophone from Quebec named Gilles. He was an older guy, or maybe just older-looking from hard-living. He was thin and scruffy, spoke hardly any English, smoked like a chimney, peppered his speech with expletives from both of Canada's official languages, lived with his girlfriend (which was top secret: the school board was not allowed to know), was divorced AND a recently reformed heroin addict, and has never gone to church in his life.

He was hired to teach the religion program.

Yeah, irony. Funny too. Hilarious if you'd ever met the guy.

I had little chats with Gilles about teaching the program. He would just give a gallic shrug and say in his gentle, soft-spoken voice, "Me, I don't care, I just want de &*%# money, dey give it to me. The kids, dey don't believe any of dis &#$@%. I just tell dem to write it down. I don't care. Dey don't care. We agree on dat." Shrug. "It's not so bad."

"But how can you stand that? Don't you want to talk to them honestly?"

"No, me, I don't $&@% care. Dey pay me to teach it, so I teach it."

He would have done the nun proud.

At about that time, I started driving on Sundays to the nearest Quaker meeting, which was more than an hour's drive away. I told no one at work because it would have cost me my job.

A student teacher showed up at the school to do his practicum rounds. He was working with one of the senior teachers. This guy was a little older than the usual student teacher, was married, and lived in a small town not far away. He and I got along really well. We talked a lot about the ironies of teaching in a Catholic school. He found it kind of surreal too. We often touched on spiritual topics, but very carefully.

His teaching round was over after four weeks. It was only after that, quite by accident, that I found out he was a Quaker as well. There was one other Quaker meeting in the region, about an hour from where he lived. He attended that one. I never knew, and neither did he. We would have been the only two Quakers in that entire town, and there we were, working side by side.

And never admitting one to the other who we were. Because that would have spelled the end of our jobs.

I quit that job. I guess you saw that coming. But I left with a clear knowledge of what it was I was leaving: pretence.

The Catholic church is not alone in this. I see this pretence as a foundation of modern religion.

The first act required by church and religion is to pretend. The mere fact of belief systems, creeds, and doctrines makes it so. Pretending gives a nice atmosphere of conformity. It allows the institution to function.

Kind of like during a job interview when they ask, "Are you willing to work on weekends?" and you say, "Yes, of course," when inside you're saying, "&%$#@." But it's what you have to say to get the job.

I think that at one time, religion wasn't about pretense. There wasn't much knowledge, so churches and religions had a kind of monopoly on what knowledge there was. These were one-book cultures and one-institution cultures. Everybody believed in church doctrine because that's all there was to believe. One book had all the truth because there was only one book.

Contrast to today. The information age. The education age. The diversity age. The multifold institution age.

It's a clash of civilizations across time.

I raise my hand. "How can Goodness come out of religion if its foundation is pretense?"

"Is Goodness still in religion? Or is honesty a prerequisite for Goodness?"

Hey, I'm just asking.

*****

The last I heard, Gilles was still teaching in the Catholic school system. Go figure.

So, fortunately, was Leah.

And she's never kept her mouth shut in her entire blessed life.

Faith

2007-02-27T18:43:00.000-05:00

Now that the ad is in the paper and the website is up, I've been waiting for someone -- anyone -- to call. The newspaper didn't get delivered to our house this weekend. I noticed the snowy, saran-wrapped bundle of newspapers still in someone's driveway when I was out walking early Saturday morning. A friend called on Sunday to say that the newspaper had mistakenly placed the ad under Pentecostal.

That explained a lot.

But in the meantime, it had given me another 24 hours to feel muddled about how I was going to find people to build this new meeting.

My husband just shrugs. Have a little faith.

Says he who hasn't stepped in a church or meeting since we got married.

Faith is one of those funny words. Post 9/11 had lots of news stories about people who had lost their faith. The shock of loss and horror had made it impossible for them to believe in God anymore.

But was the faith they'd had a house of cards? Deep down, they believed what everyone believes, just ordinary things. Natural laws, time, sequences of events, probability. The events of 9/11 just pulled out the bottom card, and it all came tumbling down.

Thomas Carlyle talked about "our spasmodic efforts to believe that we believe."

Churches (and many meetings) work hard to promote a church-constructed worldview that is at odds with our nature-based worldview. People can't believe what they ultimately don't believe. So then there is a need for more sermons, more Alpha courses, more Christian rock songs, more hype to keep propping it up.

People lose faith when a child dies. I've seen it, burned in my memory forever. I watched them pray that this child would be spared, would live. But the immutable laws of existence could not be wrenched from their place in the universe. Their faith died when they discovered that all those sermons about God answering prayers didn't hold true. At least, they didn't hold true for them in their time of need. Ultimately, nothing else matters.

Religions set people up for this kind of shock and despair. We have to take down the scaffolding, the winches, the duct-tape and have a more honest religion. We have to start admitting we don't have all the answers. Much as we'd like to have super powers, we can't change nature or the laws of the universe with our own whispered wishes. We are in this life, not in control of it.

Do I have faith?

Sigh.

Faith is that somehow, somehow, behind and beyond it all, everything's going to be all right. That's as far as I get.

I certainly don't feel faith; I just feel tasks and nudges. I feel truth too -- don't always like that one, but I can feel it. I just have a sense of something beyond, but quite honestly, it's seldom much more than a sense. That I am starting up a church/meeting without faith in the traditional sense attests to the strength of nudge and truth I feel.

But this, what I am doing now, it isn't faith. It's just wrestling.

Launch

2007-02-22T11:25:00.000-05:00

I had my clearness committee meeting last week (to discuss the programmed meeting I'm starting up -- see past posts).

Relief -- it is done.

Their questions were very good. I could tell they "got it" though they were struggling with the idea of actually doing it. One asked about my membership status. Another asked how well I could handle disappointment. I could tell that at least two of them knew that I was saying good-bye, and that was hard.

Despite my queasiness in the weeks leading up to this meeting, I wasn't uncomfortable once I was there. The four months of considering this leading and listening for the shape and direction of it seemed to sit beside me and guide me.

We were all clear in the end that it was a leading and that I should move forward on it. They suggested that once the group begins, we could consider requesting worship group status in the short term so that we can use the meetings' charitable status number for donations and expenses. Unlike most clearness committees, they will be giving a report to MM about this project so that everyone understands what's going on.

Yesterday I put the first ad in the newspaper. The website is up, and a few of my advisors have visited it. Once we have four people, we will start.

This is launch.

It's kind of scary.

Taking One for the Team

2007-02-06T11:01:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, a workplace friend of mine was engaged to get married. Her parents' best friend was United Church clergy, so she and her fiance had decided that they would ask her to do the ceremony, but they'd hold it at the the fiance's Lutheran Church, to be fair. So everybody was happy.

Until the next day. Said fiance returned and told my friend, Sorry. No can do. He'd checked with his Lutheran church and got a big thumbs down for the whole idea. "We don't believe in women clergy," was his explanation.

Um, "we" don't believe in women clergy? A mere twenty-four hours earlier, "we" believed in it just fine! Obviously, he didn't believe women couldn't be clergy, or it would have figured more prominently in his mind when he and my friend were deciding on their wedding the day before.

Setting aside issues of abuse of language, especially the lobotomies done on words like believe, let's focus on the motivation.

I think, in short, it's safe to say that my friend's fiance didn't believe in anything in this situation. He was just taking one for the team. Taking one for the team is a kind of religious "us-guys" loyalty that makes people put the group's thoughts ahead of their own, no matter how much dissonance this causes.

This is the only way I can explain to myself the strange loyalties of people to their religions' most extreme and least defendable parts. I think of it when I hear Muslim feminists explaining why their wear a veil (or a burka!). Or when Catholics describe the roundabout, metaphorical, diagonal-sideways way that gee whiz papal infalliability makes sense. Or when fundamentalist Mormon women appear on TV extolling the virtues and benefits of their cattle-call "marriages" to one old man and how really it's wonderful for them.

I'm sure you can think of examples of Quakers straining to defend outdated or extreme ideas without my assistance.

They're all trying really, really hard.

Human beings are masters of rationalization when it comes to home teams. We find justifications for unpleasantness or just plain wrongness if it means we have to scrape the bottom of the barrel of our brains. Sometimes we do it unconsciously, out of an unspoken desire to pretend that it all still works for us.

Are we afraid it will all unravel if we admit that this or that about our religion is wrong?

Are we afraid of group censure? Being sicc'ed with a committee of care?

Sure, some people have to do it in order to survive. Women especially often don't have choices about their religion, so they have to make do. Nobody wants to believe that the extreme efforts they have made in a religion for 20 or 30 years have been pointless.

Some people, when they can't put up with their own rationalizations anymore, say so and then just leave. The people around them call it "losing the faith" and rally more strongly to the defence of their doctrines and customs.

In baseball logic, taking one for the team means the team is stronger because individuals are willing to set their own needs aside. In political logic, taking one for the team means the party can more easily defeat the opposition, even if these are not issues that individual party members approve of. For both, it's about consolidating power.

In religion, what's the logic of taking one for the team?

Beer at Church

2007-01-31T08:15:00.000-05:00

I learned about an Anglican/Episcopalian church somewhere in the States that serves beer after church instead of tea and coffee. Not just serves it: they brew their own. So it's, say, St. Paul's Lager, or something like that. No, I don't have the link.

And here's the big surprise: this church has a really high number of young males in its congregation. We could be very cynical and say it's amazing what free beer will do. Or we could be very liberal-minded and say it's amazing what happens when we acknowledge and accept the culture of mainstream people.

Most young males I know don't stand around nursing a tea and making chit-chat. However, they'll do the same holding a beer.

I wonder, as I have in past blogs, how much church/meeting emphasizes women's culture and excludes men's culture. Does the tea-and-coffee mentality alienate young males? Do they feel that they have to pretend to be someone they aren't when they are at a church/meeting?

The whole idea of excluding alcohol from church is a 19th century idea, a result of the temperance movement, which was also the women's movement. Before that, alcohol and church kind of went together (consider the bread and wine thing). Most abbeys and manses had great wine cellars. And many religions use heavy-duty mind-altering substances as part of religious ritual.

I'm not dissing the temperance movement. There was a need. For example, in Canada between 1840 and 1870, everyone was an alcoholic. Life was hard and dull, and whisky was a half-cent a gallon. So temperance was a good thing, and my Canuck Quaker forebears (especially the women) were actively (if a bit sanctimoniously) involved.

But it bears some thinking that modern-day people living in a culture that includes alcohol and accepts it in small, socially acceptable amounts will have some difficulty crossing over into a church culture. Our whole world has a dividing line between the "secular" and the "sacred," and many people consider it a sacrilege if that line gets crossed. But the line is completely artificial: there is no sacred and no secular. There is just one holy world.

I wonder a bit about notions and silly poor gospels.

Breathe is a little home-based, restaurant-based church out in Burnaby BC that holds martini evenings and pub nights. Zac's Place is a church in Wales that is a real pub.

I find these churches kind of refreshing (so to speak).

Clearness Committee

2007-01-26T14:51:00.000-05:00

My clearness committee re starting up a programmed meeting has been scheduled for Feb. 8.

And I'm not quite sure why I feel as if I'm going to an execution.

It's kind of in the way of my thinking right now. And in the way of blogging. I have to not think about it, not plan ahead what I'm going to say, because that's not what you're supposed to do.

Yet at the same time, I can't help cringing at the thought of it.

The committee has set four meetings. The first they will meet alone, without me. But that still leaves six hours available for grilling! Six!

I've been taking a break from meeting. I've given the excuse that it was because my son is having a hard time (he is, but I *could* just leave him at home). The truth is more complex: that since I've acknowledged my restlessness and come up with the idea of experimenting with a programmed meeting, I can't quite make myself go back. No tengo ganas, as they say in Espanol.

So of course, I wasn't at the December MM when my request for a clearness committee came up. I don't know exactly what the reaction was. But I do know there was mention being very careful about process because it could set a precedent within our yearly meeting.

Caution.

Slowness.

Process.

Quaker values? Or Modern values?

Does the Spirit work because of process and caution and slowness? Or in spite of it?

What is the role of the clearness committee in this situation: to make me clear about what I'm doing, or to make the meeting clear about what I'm doing? What if I'm already clear?

I should just stop thinking about it.

Flying as a Flag

2007-01-11T18:44:00.000-05:00

I didn't see any of the images. I guess in the UK, the tabloids put the pictures on the front page -- neck broken, eyes open, head dangling. Gee, there's something to enjoy your morning coffee over. (Who are these people who buy this trash anyway??)

But despite the media foaming at the mouth at the chance to show off something really grizzly, something fundamental changed in the world with the Hussein hanging. Have pro-capital-punishment governments realized that, I wonder? The newspapers sure did.

Civilized people have now witnessed an execution. They now know what an execution is. Governments can't whitewash it anymore. End point.

Here is what else people have learned from the Hussein hanging (if they didn't know it already):

1. Executions in real life are sick. The whole spectacle of deliberately causing death in the name of the law is enough to send anyone rushing to the loo. There's nothing dignified or stately or honourable about it: it's just sick.

2. Executions are not about justice. The jeering and taunting of Saddam Hussein in the seconds before his head was ripped off revealed the truth: executions are about revenge. We judge, we take revenge. "Judge not," Jesus said. "Vengeance is mine," the old testament says. We do it anyway and call it justice. One problem with revenge: it bounces.

3. Executions don't solve problems. They don't kill crime or violence. The crime and violence are still out there in the unhappy world after the body hangs. In Iraq, violence and injustice rage on. Revenge piles upon revenge. Hussein's death is just one more for the pile. It solved nothing.

5. The self-expression/communication revolution -- cheap camera devices + internet connection -- means the end of the government official line. The prim and tidy Iraqi government television version of the lead-up to the execution was utterly destroyed by the shaky, hand-held phone-camera version. One was whitewashing, self-righteous; the other was stark, cruel, and dishonorable. One was lies; the other was truth.

6. People are angry. If someone hadn't recorded the real execution with a cell-phone camera, then the world would not have known the truth.

7. Cell-phone cameras should be permitted at US state executions. The population would only need to see one execution. One. One bit of truth. Then it would all be over.

Mary Dyer hanged as a flag for others to take example by, and her flag was liberty. Perhaps that's too generous to say about Saddam Hussein. But he hanged as a flag, and his flag was truth.

Little Mosque on the Prairie

2007-01-09T21:35:00.000-05:00

I watched the first episode of Little Mosque on the Prairie on CBC tonight. I'd seen some of the trailers for it, and then all the hype in Toronto (giving away free shawarma and meet the actors), and it seemed kind of overstated or overdone somehow. Maybe they just chose weak snippets to show, I don't know.

But the show was pretty good. I liked the characters and the story. They sort of started out with a hard line, but they pulled it off. It was funny, and I was laughing. Woody Allen is one of Zarqa Nawaz's influences (she's the director), and I could see that in the dialog and timing.

It's definitely Saskatchewan. Kind of puts me in mind of Corner Gas. Funny how I never saw anything about Saskatchewan on TV, and now there are two regular shows about it. (How many bets that Corner Gas gets some cameo appearances from people from Little Mosque? Brent Butt will work it into one of the plots somehow, and probably very soon!)

Anyway, the show works. I think it's going to be pretty good. I'm sure it won't hurt that the cast is very good-looking and that muslim is the "new gay" in Canada, so people will watch it just to prove their not bigoted.

Some US stations are considering buying it, but I think they want to wait and make sure it's safe.

Human behaviour is funny.

Sacred Secular

2007-01-03T09:09:00.000-05:00

I had a chat with a friend at New Years about the idea of starting a church thingie. It was a good conversation, but things started to get a bit weird when we talked about music. The conversation went kind of like this.

She asked what kind of music we were going to do. I said we'd have an electronic band.

"Oh, then Christian rock," she said.

"No," I said, "it would be music we know. Songs from the radio. Any good song."

She looked puzzled. "You mean songs that say God in them."

"No," I said again, "just any good song."

She frowned slightly. "So then it's not really going to be a church. It's going to be more of a secular thing."

"No," I said, and tried a visual tack so that she might see what I meant. "We might have candles burning while we sing the songs."

"You mean you'll just sing anything?"

"Not quite. They have to be a good songs."

"What do you mean by good? You mean it talks about spiritual things?"

"I just mean it has to be a good song. Good tune, good words, good feeling."

I tried to explain how songs don't become "holy" when they mention God or other religion words. They're holy because they are cries of the human spirit, and that human spirit is intertwined with the Spirit. We need to listen to those songs as much as we need to read nature in a dried leaf on the sidewalk or to take time to hold a friend while she cries. There are sermons everywhere.

But it wasn't my friend's fault that she couldn't understand. She's a product of the Modern culture, and that culture says that what is secular is not sacred, and vice versa.

Sometime around the trials of Galileo, our culture split into the secular and the sacred. Before Galileo, there was only the sacred. But the Modern culture had to invent the secular to rescue many important values (knowledge, truth, fairness, etc.) from the clutches of the doctrinal empire-church of the time. The sacred was pushed to the sidelines, and it became less and less relevant to "real life" as time went on. So the sacred built their own trenches and solidified their sacredness within their walls.

We're left with a strange split in our culture. Something is either sacred or it's secular. It can't be both. Note the odd parallel universe of Christian culture in the States: there are Christian rock bands, Christian romance novels, Christian coffee shops, Christian chocolate makers, etc. As if somehow, the other stuff was tainted. And how many secular people ever venture into these Christian domains?

I think this split may have had something to do with the poor US news coverageof the kidnapping of the four peacemakers in Iraq. (Okay, there might have been just a little political influence on the networks, but just follow the argument...) Both the sacred and the secular camps didn't know how to deal with the story. The secular people appreciated the peace message and the Gandhian nonviolence perspective, but they wanted to distance themselves from the Christian side of the peacemakers' efforts. that churchie talk turned them off. Meanwhile, the dominant churches didn't know how to deal with the peace and Gandhian side of the peacemakers' message. To them, peacemaking and nonviolence issues are secular, not sacred. Moreover, obedience is Christian, so civil disobedience and activism is secular. Neither side could claim these people as their own, so they were treated as anomalies, wingnuts, dangerous eccentrics.

Our culture has compartmentalized life into the pockets of sacred and secular so efficiently that it's difficult to walk in between. Quakers know this well because we try to live in that in-between zone. But many meetings have to deal with newcomers who perceive of Quakerism as a kind of secularism, so they come to meeting to flee the sacred. They don't like ministry or discussion to "drift" into areas that are too spiritual or use too much godtalk; otherwise, things become too much like a church. If the meeting doesn't help these newcomers understand the fusing of sacred and secular in what we do, we end up secularizing our meetings. The sacred gets eliminated, and we end up with a Sunday Morning Tea for Social Activists.

The meetings that are organized as churches likely have the opposite problem: things become churchified and sacredized to the point that the secular gets crowded out.

Churches try to make the sacred look and feel very different from the sacred. They use different words: a seat is a pew, a song is a hymn, a talk is a sermon, and everybody uses ancient words like Alleluiah and amen. And they even have a special word for something secular that sneaks into a sacred setting: sacrilege. In many ways Quakers do this language thing too. It's a way of marking a secular concept as sacred in this particular instance. But really, why are we doing this? Are these concepts not sacred all the time?

At the church thingie I want to develop, I want to have coffee, bread, and a toaster at the back near the entrance. When people arrive, they will serve coffee to and make toast for each other, and especially for newcomers. Most people would consider a toaster very secular, very unsacred, not the sort of thing to have in a church. But in this context, the toaster will be a holy thing, the basis of a ritual of service and ubuntu, a sacrament not unlike the bread-and-wine thing of Christian churches. Afterward, any time someone makes toast, they will think of the holiness of the act.

We need to learn to see the Light in that secular world, without trying to separate it from its secularity.

If we treat everyone (and everything) like the messenger, maybe we'll get the message.

Men and Worship

2006-12-30T12:59:00.000-05:00

My husband S picked up one of my library books that was lying around -- Malcom Muggeridge's The Third Testament. Not exactly light reading, but he'll read anything.

We talked late last night about the dominant themes in the book. The topic of religion comes up a lot in our house now, given my leading to start a church thingie. S talked about a few of his colleagues whom he admires a great deal. They belong to churches and have active church lives. They also have a noticeable inner peace. S focused on that. He said he'd really like to have a religious faith, but he hasn't found anything he can believe in. He'd like to have that inner serenity. But wanting to have that doesn't make one religious because it doesn't make one believe particular things. Or even to have faith where one doesn't have beliefs. It also cannot make you have religious experiences or a sense of the inner Light.

He's been to Meeting a few times but hasn't really been caught up in it. He comes to the potlucks to be friendly. But despite his years of being raised a Catholic and 10 years of being married to a Quaker, he hasn't "found religion."

Our meeting is full of women, most of them married to spouses who don't attend. There are very few men and only three married couples.

This isn't all that unusual. Most church congregations are more than 65% female. In fact, there is a website devoted to the problem of men and church (see www.churchformen.com). But is serving beer and going to baseball games solving the problem? Is the problem a cultural one: that religion has turned into a feminine world? Or is it a brain type problem: that thinker-oriented people have more difficulty than feeler-oriented people with the type of emotional and psychic responses necessary for faith (or belief)?

Why is it that what we call religion is always a belief system? Why is it always focused on the feeling side of things, rather than on the action side of things? And focused on the non-rational, rather than the rational?

Whatever happened to Iron John anyway?

Quaker Darth Vader

2006-12-14T12:41:00.000-05:00

I have a habit of killing things.

I used to kill plants. This is bad for a gardener.

Then I read a lot of books about gardening and paid more attention to what I was doing. Things still die sometimes, but at least I know that I didn't kill them.

I kill groups. My standard formula is pull in, then pull out. For example, join a gorup, get asked to take a leadership role, develop a vision, let others catch the fire of the vision, get knuckles rapped by current leadership structure, pull out to get out of leadership's way, and end up taking everybody along with me so that the group collapses.

Yep, I've done it more than I care to admit. In fact, I generally ask the group not to let me in any kind of a leadership role so that I can't do it. But it always happens anyway: they're short of people, and could I just help out a little; or they need someone who understands music, and there's nobody else; or they just want to learn a little more about this one idea I had, and would I mind coming in to talk to them. This is how it starts. When I say no, they get the idea that I'm either lazy or selfish, or just plain weird, and I get bullied into it.

They have no idea what I'm going to do to them.

I realize I'm in danger of doing it again. As I pull out of my current Quaker meeting, after having promoted and experimented with programming over the past year and encouraging the meeting to do outreach and expand, I will be doing damage. Fortunately, these are strong-minded people, and they will likely recover. But I dread the thought that anybody in the meeting might feel moved to follow me.

I think I dread that more than failure.

This is why I hesitate to get my meeting involved. I don't want a committee of support or clearness. I don't want them getting sucked into the idea. It's for their own good. If I burn, I burn. But it would be just plain awful if I weakened the meeting in so doing.

Leadings can be so awkward.

Rolling Up The Sleeves

2006-12-11T13:45:00.000-05:00

Last week, I screwed up my courage and told my husband that I have had a leading to start up a church. Not exactly a church, because I'm not going to call it that, but a thingie instead of a church. Sort of a thingie like a meeting except not really a meeting, and not as noisy and hyper as a church, but cleaner and honest and transparent-like. Pastored, but without a pastor. You know what I mean? Something kind of like that.

"It's about time," he said, without looking up from the book he was reading.

I blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"Church is TSFW [family code word for Too stupid for words]. Meeting is insipid. You could do something better than that." He looked up then. "I want to be in the band."

So I guess there's going to be a band.

He wasn't finished. "You always do what you think you're supposed to do. That's not living. The work you do during the week is not you, that's just what you do to help the family make money. All this Quaker committee work, that's not you either. You have to have passion about something that you do. You've been pulling toward something for a long time and not doing it. This church thingie thing is more like the real you. It has that ring to it. So just do it."

He still wasn't finished. "Don't try too hard getting it all together. Way will open."

This from the man who never attends meeting.

So okay then. I guess I'm doing it.

Ideas always come to me as a whole, beginning and end and middle, all at once. Usually, there is a long period of nothing, like an unrest, but then, it coalesces all at once. It's apparently a personality type-- intuitive thinking as opposed to linear thinking. This is always difficult, because nobody else can see what I see, and there is not much transition zone to it.

It's this way with the church thingie idea. I've been trying to make notes on what I see so that I can communicate it to others when the time comes. Finding words for the concepts isimportant.

I ordered two books from Chapters to build on this. First was Emerging Churches by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, because it was recommended by Aj on some website somewhere. And Brian McLaren's The Secret Message of Jesus. I got some language from them, and some ideas became more clear as I compared one thing to another.

The next step looming ahead is to tell my meeting. I get kind of a cold sick feeling at the pit of my stomach just thinking about it. I am clerk of two main committees and two other committees. I know that my donations to the meeting make up over 10% of the revenues, and I'm going to need that money to start up my own church thingie, so I can't continue it. Also, my kids currently make up 25% of the children's program.

I'm going to have to screw up my courage again.

Orthodoxy Blues

2006-12-07T09:06:00.000-05:00

There's this little problem with the whole idea of starting something. Actually, there are a thousand little problems, but then there's this one about orthodoxy: I've never known what to do with it.

Back in my university days, I used to go to Varsity Christian things with some of my friends, just to see what it was like. The people were very nice, and a few of them had very interesting minds. But a lot of the time I had to spend silently telling myself shut up shut up shut up so that I wouldn't say anything. It was hard. I wasn't Quaker at the time and having left Catholicism (which will turn orthodoxy into Buckley's Mixture for anyone), I was alone spiritually. An exile, in a way. I found my choices were either Reason or Religion, but not both. And the voice in my head was committed to Reason.

Truth to me has always been a verb, not a noun. I have no experience of it any other way. I can't decide to believe in something or not believe in something. When people talk about believing something as if it were an act of will, I don't understand what they mean.

But if you're going to start something, then you have to have something to say. People don't start something unless they have some message or some spiritual product that lights a fire under their derrieres. An experimental, undefined thing doesn't cut it. Moreover, what you start needs some kind of structure and anchor. If there's not enough, it will drift aimlessly. I think this may have been what happened in some parts of liberal quakerism: refugees from orthodox religions sought shelter there and gradually pressed it into new directions. (However, the same could be said for the Wesleyan movement causing other forms of quakerism to drift...)

Anyway, I dusted off some old university books today to take another look at orthodoxy. The first book featured six figures: Augustine, Pascal, beloved well-thumbed Blake, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Tolstoy. And reading snippets from each, one after the other, I could hear the trumpets and timpani. Yes, here was orthodoxy, arguably some of the best of it.

Yet as I did my little romp through orthodoxy, something occurred to me that had never occurred before – that each was not orthodox in his time, but only after; and that each was breaking from the preceding orthodoxy in some significant way.

Augustine wrapped the fledgling religion into an ark and tossed it out in to the ocean of the Dark Ages, just as the Roman Empire caved literally around his feet. He hooked it to Platonism and bound it with the twine of harsh scriptural interpretation so that it would survive. I guess we can thank him for that, otherwise Christianity would have died with the Roman Empire, but without forgetting that his simplistic orthodoxy seeded the inquisitions, crusades, and power priesthoods.

Then flip ahead to Pascal, rebelling against the Age of Reason, but by using reason. He questioned, peeled off the twine of Augustine and Aquinas, and set a new orthodoxy that could survive philosophy. All the while, he lived under the threat of excommunication.

Then flip to Blake, rebelling against the Steam Engine, but by using the imagination and senses. The church nearly consigned him to an asylum for madness.

Then Kierkegaard, the mystic schizophrenic outcast. Bonhoeffer, the executed. Tolstoy, the excommunicated. And the others, the ones I haven't read.

We could back up further to the Old Testament prophets, who rebelled against the tribal violence that was proto-judaic orthodoxy and organized religion into rules and principles. And then Jesus, tearing down the pharisaic orthodoxy of rules and principles to replace it with the principle of compassion.

And what of the orthodox people of their time? Do we ever quote the French Church that persecuted Pascal, the English clergy that shunned Blake, the Danish theologians that publicly ridiculed Kierkegaard? Do we even know their names?

What we call orthodoxy appears to me right now to be a conglomeration of heretic rebellions against previous orthodoxies. By the time something becomes orthodoxy, it is already old orthodoxy. There is always someone reaching ahead to a new vision of Jesus' teachings that will work with the changing age.

Were these men all insane? I can't rule that out. I don't like most of what I read in their writings, especially the common theme of blaming women for men's failings. Or rejecting ordinary life as something perverted. Or the logic embroidery they did to knit their experiences to Christian doctrines.

Yet despite this, I have deep respect for them. They must have heard something or sensed something that called them deeper. They took spiritual risks, went out on a limb, climbed into the New Nothing because they were called into it.

As I read what these men wrote, I realize I don't have any inclination to believe what they wrote, even if I could make myself. I just want to be like them. I want to do what they did, not say what they said. The New Nothing interests me far more than the old orthodoxy, even if it doesn't have a name.

And there's the rub. For no matter how much it compels me,what kind of a new thing can be built out of a New Nothing?

Next on Next

2006-12-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

So there I was, sitting in Next, looking around at the fridge art. Kids were running around, lovers with cuddling on the sofas, announcements were popping up on the slide show board, the guitarists at the front were strumming a little.

The pastor dude with his goatee and 1970s sideburns managed to get things started at about 11:15. It was kind of a mellow start. We had to stand to sing three rather long songs on the slides, but the band was very good. People were sitting by the end of them. The pianist had her arm around one of her kids while she played. Most of the other kids were running and hopping around. (An observation: there were no kids above 10 years of age, like, no teens. Maybe that was due to the limited ages of the adults. But then again, maybe not.)

The theme for the day was advent. Apparently, last year, Next didn't "do" Christmas because it was kind of a tired theme, so they thought they'd do it this year. Today's subtopic was waiting.

It sounded okay to me so far. Then instantly the theme of waiting for Christmas suddenly morphed into waiting for the Second Coming, and how we all just couldn't wait for the end of the world. I caught my friend's eye, she gave a slight grimace.

Waiting for Christmas AND Waiting for the End of the World. Oh, but we don't know where and when it will happen or EVEN if it will happen during our lifetime, so we're supposed to wait for it.

Okay, so I'm not a fundamentalist. I found this interpretation of Christmas waiting very weird.

A young woman did the sermon on waiting. She happened to be pregnant with her third, so that was kind of a neat idea. She did her sermon about Mary waiting for the birth and talked about her trials and tribulations, such as explaining to Joseph that she was pregnant. She spoke well about her theme, although without in any way digressing from the official church line about what happened at Jesus's birth and conception. She dragged in the Waiting For the End of the World theme too and talked as if she just assumed we all knew what "post trib" and "pre trib" was all about.

Not much happened after the sermon -- just one more song.

Overall sense of Next? Well, it was a lot more subdued that I had thought it would be. In fact, it was pretty mellow. When I've seen Christian rock-type events on TV, they've seemed a lot more over-the-top. My friend, who had been to Vineyard churches in her twenties, said that Vineyard was a lot more high energy. But maybe this is just Canadian culture: we don't tend to be over-the-top about anything. Next was more cozy and comfortable than high octane.

Then there's the "sense of the meeting" there in that room. Whatever list of sins can be cast at the feet of Quakers, we do tend to be able to "feel a room." There is a big difference between a group that has centred in some way and one that is spiritually skimming the surface. My sense was that this group was surfing. They were seeking, desiring, trying, but in a loose and vague sense. I sensed that they weren't able or willing to Go There, if you know what I mean.

The service talked mainly about particular Christian doctrines. And they worked in talking a bit about their experiences. But these weren't experiences of the doctrines: they were just experiences that had something in common with the topic. Nobody talked about experiences of the doctrine messages themselves. I had a sense of parotting -- saying what you are supposed to say, wishing to believe it, working to stay within the lines. For example, the energy sagged during the sermon, even though I believe people were generally listening. There just wasn't anything to connect to. Can one really have an experience of doctrines?

There were two moments when I had a sense of something a little deeper happening. One was when the keyboard player played a song she'd written herself, words up on the slides, so everybody sang along. There was a vibrating sincerity to it, even if I found the words a bit too churchy for my taste.

The other moment when the room seemed to ring like churchbells was during the U2 song, the chorus line: "But I still haven't found what I'm looking for." This line is repeated many times throughout the song, and each time, it became more naked and powerful.

It was also the opening song. Come to think of it, it may have left the people too vulnerable to soak up the doctrinal message or to Go There.

I wonder if that never occurred to the music planners...

2006-12-03T13:43:00.000-05:00

I went to Next today with an RC friend. Next is the only "emerging" style church in our city. It's just called Next, without the Church.

On the whole, the experience was interesting. I found their website almost deliberately obtuse trying to be trendy. Figuring out when the meeting/service was was a bit of a challenge (they called it Next Classic and stated that it started at "about 11").

What struck me most about Next was that my friend and I, in our mid 40s, were probably the oldest people there. This was a twenty-something crowd with some thirty-somethings, and with lots of little kids. Funny how all the other churches are full of grey heads. This church had none. And it was that kind of grungy young-intellectual look -- goatees, dreadlocks, noserings, counter-cultural clothes. What also struck me was that this young crowd was 50% male. The young male cohort is the hardest to pull into a church. And here they were.

The church had pews, but it also had some sofas thrown in, apparently for the people in love, because they seemed to grab them. There was a large toy and play area at the back with some pews facing backward. The office was part of the main room. There was coffee and muffins on arrival, although they were in a back room, so you had to know they were there. And of course, there was the rock band at the front.

My son's piano teacher happened to be at the piano, leading the music. They did U2 (Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For), Joan Osborne (What If God Was One of Us), and Bruce Cockburn (some Christmas song I'd never heard of). They also did one song written by one of the musicians, which the congregation apparently knew very well. The music was pretty good, although the guitars and drums were amped slightly more than the piano and vocals, so the main theme was hard to follow. People sang, at least for the songs they knew. The words were up on a slide.

The pastor was impossibly young with a facial hair thing going. He kept handing around the microphone to let others talk -- e.g., he interviewed three children about waiting for Christmas and let another woman improvise a prayer before the sermon. Another woman did the sermon, her first time speaking before the group. Before the service, he walked around and talked to people, not officiously, just very quietly and naturally. He came up to us and introduced himself. Very friendly, not pushy.

The art on the walls was intriguing. One piece looked like a fridge door spattered with paint. I think it was a fridge door spattered with paint. There were some kids' paintings and some canvas boards with paint dripping down them. Purpose of this art? I'm not sure.

I won't get into the theology of what I saw -- I'll save that for another post. But I am occupied right now thinking about the demographics. Why do these young people come to this church? Was it the music? Maybe the sense of community? That and the fact that there aren't any people their parents' age?

I've often thought that churches are based around personality types. Quakerism is for introverts and would push an extrovert to the brink of insanity. Evangelicalism is for extroverts and gives introverts the willies. Mainstream churches try to cater to both groups, possibly very unsuccessfully.

But maybe age groups need certain types of churches too. Maybe there isn't much point in fishing around for other age groups to round out the ones we have. Maybe we should just come out and say it: "Quakerism - a silent worship community targeted at the older educated adult."

No, don't get mad -- I'm just telling it like I saw it.

Crossroads

2006-11-26T14:48:00.000-05:00

It wasn't November bla.

Sometimes it takes a while for the Light to seep through. I teach the children about how we often fail to listen, and it turns out that I was speaking to myself. And all the advice I've been giving to people lately about how they need to start something, that was really advice to myself. I'm the one who needs to start something. And it's not in addition to meeting; it's in place of it.

We've been riding out a bit of a storm, my spouse and I. We took a 25% drop in income last year when his job ended and we started his corporation. It's been lean and stressful. I've had to take on more contracts to help cover the difference, which meant a major double shift for me, and long hours for him. But it seems that the big break comes this week in the form of a five-year deal to start a Canadian subsidiary of a US company right here in our basement. He's negotiated to work only 80% because he wants time to play and can afford it on what they will pay him. This means I can reduce my work to 60%.

It's kind of like Noah's ark. When the storm is on, you hunker down inside the ark and shut all the doors, ride it out. Then when the calm returns, you open that window and let out the bird. Where is the shore? That's the next part of the journey.

As soon as the news of the contract came, my window opened. Things became clear in a rush of fresh air, now that the possibility of doing something about it was real. The restlessness I've felt in my current quaker meeting has been more than seasonal affective disorder or anything like that. I just find silence insufficient. Not bad or anything, just insufficient. I find constant yada-yada of churches insufficient too. There's nothing much in between-- either all yin and no yang, or all yang and no yin.

Nothing personal against the people in our meeting, who are all lovely and I do feel a responsibility to help out, but there is this nudging. It's got something to do with the disconnect that I feel with both churches and silent meetings (there's something vaguely sanctimonious about both, isn't there?), and the disconnect that I sense between people and religion.

My efforts over the past year to introduce change to my meeting have been subconscious responses to this nudging. I have been (and am) sure the meeting would grow in numbers if we adopted a more experimental style. But the truth is, the people who currently come to our meeting come to it precisely because it is the way it is. Anyone who didn't like it has already left and gone elsewhere. Or nowhere. To change, we would have to start doing things that these people dislike. So then they would leave.

That is the problem with organizational change. The organization has to go through a death before it gets a new life. We have to be honest: nobody really wants to do that.

Start something.

Instead of sitting in meeting today, I went downstairs and poked around in our bookshelves. I signed out two books: The Way Out is the Way In (Damaris Parker-Rhodes) and Encounter with Silence (John Punshon). The title of the first one struck a chord with me. I wonder if it's another nudge. The second, well, I've always liked Punshon.

I'm making arrangements to visit our city's only emerging church with an RC friend, just to see what it's all about. Hopefully next Sunday, if she can go.

I've started a meeting blog, but of course, with resistance and so far weak participation from my meeting. I may need to open it up to a wider group of people. This appeals to me.

I've made a list of books to order from Chapters, once we're sure our income is secure.

Start something.

Everything beyond that is vague right now.

Teaching Quakerism to Unitarians

2006-11-10T12:54:00.000-05:00

I've volunteered to teach a two-lesson program about Quakerism to the children at the local Unitarian Fellowship. They are doing a year-long unit on religions of the world. Apparently, some other groups have gone in to do stuff with them.

Age range is 5 to 14, anywhere from five to fifteen kids. I'd have them for under an hour, with assistants. It had all sounded easy when I had volunteered for this last spring, but at that time, I was told I'd be presenting to a group of 12-14-year-olds, which would have been much easier. I guess they've changed their program a little...

The program facilitator says the group is "active" and tends to go for the story/drama activity followed by an art/drama application.

I had one idea to do a listening activity (borrowed from the FGC Education site), where the kids lie on the floor with their heads together in a star formation and then focus on something and sense how the Light pulls at them. But how long would we be able to do that?

If anyone has done this sort of presentation before, I'd appreciate suggestions, tips, ideas, websites to go to, etc.

Poppies for Peace

2006-11-04T15:02:00.000-05:00

Thanks to suggestions from several kind Friends, we've put together a shoebox of stuff for a soldier. I realized fromthe list of items the Cub leaderhad given us that she had assumed that the receiving soldier would be male. So we made a box of treats and nice things for a female officer and then put in a hand puppet, 4 pairs of children's socks, and several coloured markers (I wasn't sure if crayons would melt) for Afghani children.

Now we have to write a little postcard to her. We've got four more days to come up with something to say. My son just wants to write stop shooting people. I have suggested to him that this is probably inappropriate.

However, in November, there's no getting away from the soldier theme and the war theme. Remembrance Day is on the 11th, and every year, I find myself asking: What does a Quaker do with Remembrance Day? Every year, I wrestle with the whole notion of wearing a poppy.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

What does wearing a poppy mean? The official meaning is lest we forget. I think at one time that translated to lest we forget that soldiers died so that we could be free. Now sometimes I wonder if it has come to mean lest we forget that war is hell.

Should we be concerned about what a symbol officially means? Another website said wearing the poppy was a "tribute" to fallen Canadian soldiers. I don't know what "tribute" means.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Should a Quaker wear a poppy is the type of question that Margaret Fell might have called a poor silly gospel. Sort of like being concerned whether someone wears a hat or doesn't wear a hat, or whether they have buttons or no buttons. Religion is inward. Symbols are outward. Right? So it should be straightforward: wearing this symbol does not mean anything outward. It just means something to the wearer.

Yet I wonder how it is interpreted.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The prime minister has tried to boost support for the Afghanistan war by asking people to wear red on Fridays in support of the troops. I guess he managed to get a few military families to do this. But most of them are weary and just want their loved ones home, so I suspect that compliance has already fallen off. I know of no one who wears red on Fridays.

In contrast, even this year, compliance with wearing a poppy is near 100%. To not wear a poppy is to be boorish, selfish, ignorant. It's always been that way, as long as I can remember. Is this a type of knee-jerk traditionalism? Or do people see a difference between one set of symbols and another?

I bought a poppy as a cash register today and wore it. And I joined the sea of people wearing poppies, I'm sure each with their own meaning.

I'm wearing it for my shoebox soldier in Afghanistan, who probably has children back here in Canada, or if not, then parents or a boyfriend. I'm wearing it because of her companions that have already been killed and those who will be killed over the next few months.

And because in war, there are no good guys and bad guys. There's just guys.

And war is hell.

November Bla

2006-10-31T21:54:00.000-05:00

There was a book of poems about the months of the year that we used to read to the kids when they were little. The poem for November ended:

Rough November
Tough November
I have had enough November.

It's been November here for over a month now. Southern Ontario skipped the pretty part of fall and plunged right into the chill, the wind, the rain, the sleet, and the relentless gloom.

I find myself thinking about leaving our meeting.

Maybe it's because of November.

Numbers are down at our meeting. Last Sunday, there were only two children there (both mine), and maybe a dozen adult members, and I had to take the children's program because it was the coordinator's week off.

Since we moved into the new building over the summer, I have gotten the meeting to arrange the chairs into concentric squares instead of a single circle, because the square arrangement allows for more rows, and the open corners allow people to move into the middle rows; whereas a circle is a closed, unaccommodating shape. But Sunday, they had arranged the chairs in a circle again. So when my children came back from the children's program, they didn't see chairs available to them, so they didn't even want to come in the room. Someone had also decided to leave most of the lights off -- maybe to save electricity -- which meant with the late afternoon gloom, the room was in semi-darkness. Hardly welcoming to a child.

Or maybe it was just too close to Halloween.

I'm tired of explaining again and again that we've moved to a bigger place to make the meeting more open to newcomers, that we need to leave many chairs empty, and that we need to break up the "circle" idea. At the first opportunity, back it goes.

And then I feel weary of it all.

My efforts over the past several months to start up learning programs (at the request of several members) have also all fizzled. We had managed to run a study group for about 10 weeks last spring, and it was great while it lasted. Then I got the meeting started on after-meeting discussions into the late spring and summer, which lasted about two months. Time constraints had conspired against these efforts, I was told. Now I'm trying to get the group up on a team blog for an exchange of thoughts, ideas, readings, etc., but I'm not meeting with much success.

People seem to think it is "just one more thing that I have to do."

I continue to go to meeting because there are a few Friends that I learn from and several that I care about. Moreover, I kind of feel as if things will start to fall apart if I leave. Maybe that's a puffed-up sense of my own importance, but I do a lot to keep things going. As well, we have three new people out to meeting, all of them young (under 25). So I feel a responsibility to stay.

And yet, I'm restless for something with a bit more umph, some edge and drive.

Yes, there is a sort of spiritual laziness that we can associate with Friends. Being Quaker consists of being very nice, supporting good causes in pro-active ways, and being at Meeting on Sunday, whether you have anything to offer to the meeting in the way of spiritual health, depth, learning, or vocal ministry, or not. We tend to limit Quakerism to what we already are and already think. We do what we've always done. We leave the spiritual leadership to someone else and just hope it comes on Sunday.

But then, what religions are so different? The churches-of-the-holy-hootenanny make a lot more noise, but are they any less spiritually lazy? Anybody can shout Halleluiah. Anybody can play follow the leader, repeat what the leader says, think what the leader thinks. Drink-box religions aren't much different: just stick in the straw and suck it all in. You don't even need to read the label or question what's inside. They do all the packaging for you. And the mainstream churches work at being earnest, at playing "let's pretend" about their traditions and beliefs, when they just don't believe them anymore. Maybe it looks like the people are making spiritual effort, but I suspect there's not much going on there.

At least when (unprogrammed) Quakers do nothing, they have the decency to make it look like doing nothing.

And all churches have difficulty with change. Even changing the colour of the hymnbook or the choir robes is enough to send a quarter of a congregation packing. And churches that introduce that handshake thing or the kiss of peace, well, they can kiss their congregations good-bye.

So if I left Quakers, where would I go? Is there a religion that is not encumbered by silly poor gospels and by the people who adhere to them? Is there a religion where people don't flee from learning, hiding behind rituals or dogmas, quotes or preachers?

I suspect that creative, forward-thinking religion is very rare. And it's scary too -- too many deep, difficult questions to probe. Who really wants to rip off their layers of protective skin to stand naked in the November winds of unanswerable questions? Not many, I suspect.

American author Annie Dillard says if we had any real faith, we'd wear hardhats to church/meeting -- after all, we are calling on or getting in touch with the very forces of the universe. The universe might come crashing down on our heads.

Imagine church pews or Quaker benches equipped with seatbelts.

So yes, I'm thinking again about leaving and wondering if there is any place to go.

Or maybe it's just November.

If it's November, then that isn't so good, because there's at least another month of it to go.

Shoeboxes for Soldiers

2006-10-28T11:42:00.000-04:00

My son's Cub troop is being asked to fill two shoeboxes with little gifts to send to the 50 soldiers from our city who are stationed in Afghanistan over Christmas. The troop leader is retired military, and so is her husband. They're very nice people -- and living in a military town, you get used to being around soldiers. In fact, two members of our meeting are soldiers. In her eyes, this is just a nice gesture to do for people who are far away from home.

However, there is the rather significant problem that I can't support this Afghanistan mission, nor do I think it's going to succeed. Two other parents are in the same uncomfortable situation -- that I know of. The majority of Canadians have never been behind this mission, so the likelihood that other parents feel as I do is high.

However, the other side is that soldiers are simply human beings, stuck in a wretched situation. There is the issue of "that of God" in those soldiers as well. Does it do harm to send them some gifts? Also, I don't want to single out my kid from the troop as the one who wouldn't support the project, nor do I want to offend the troop leader, who is trying to get the group to do a "good deed."

We are being asked to send things like gum, candy, shaving tools, Tim Hortons coupons (I guess they had to open a Tim Hortons in Kandahar for the Canadian soldiers to deal with doughnut deprivation -- go figure), wet naps, used paperbacks, jerky, febreeze, chapstick, and then add a message of support.

I don't really know how to handle this.

I'm open to suggestions.

Meeting Blog

2006-10-18T19:14:00.000-04:00

One of the conclusions from our last Outreach Committee meeting is that we need an online version of our meeting as well as a "live" version on firstdays. I suggested a team blog, with some of the members/attenders registered as team members (as many as would want to), and others merely readers and commenters. The online version would offer these advantages:

It would allow us to keep in spiritual touch with members who can't make it to meeting. They can come to the online meeting whenever they have time and simply read, reflect, and comment instead of sitting with us.
It would allow us to make spiritual contact with visitors to our website (assuming they follow the link to our blog). This is a form of outreach, even if those people never come out to our meeting.
It would foster spiritual growth and learning, something that is sadly lacking in many liberal Friends meetings. It would allow us to get to know each other in that which is eternal.
It would keep our batteries charged during the week so that we don't come to meeting on firstday completely drained and hoping for a jumpstart. If we learn, reflect, read, explore and question at least once during the week, we'll have something inside to bring to meeting.
It would avoid the confrontational nature of listservs and forums and be more conducive to reflection, prayer, poetry, stories, queries, etc.

At least, that's the theory.

The reality is -- oh, dear God, getting Quakers to do anything online!

A couple of very plucky older-folks have made some efforts, but they're still not sure what a blog is, and I haven't succeeded in getting them registered. They haven't successfully made a comment anywhere yet either. (If you get an incoherent anonymous comment sometime over the next couple of weeks, suspect it's coming from one of my flock!)

So far, the "younger" set say they are currently "too busy" to get online, just as they are often "too busy" to come to meeting. I want to say "all the more reason to do it, because this way you'll have a place of spiritual rest and rejuvenation when you can't get to meeting" and "all the more reason to do it, because you can't keep going at this frenetic pace."

One person told me she doesn't have anything to blog about -- and I want to say "all the more reason to do it so that you live up to the Light you have and get more granted to thee." Have nothing to blog about! I mean, jeesh -- What canst thou say?

Anyway, some day, maybe weeks from now, when I have a good half-dozen of them registered and something is actually happening on that blogsite, I'll post a link to it from here. Then maybe some of you can give a comment or two, just to encourage them?

They're gonna need it.

Christmas Materialism (again)

2006-10-10T19:06:00.000-04:00

I had lunch with a friend R. today, the co-clerk of our meeting. We got talking about Christmas, since one of the outreach ideas that came out of today's Outreach Committee meeting was to do some newspaper advertising to promote non-material alternatives to the Christmas orgy of buying stuff.

R. told me how her family (a nice, church-going extended family that includes cousins and their children as well as the grandparent generation) doesn't know what Christmas is without the presents. When she suggested this weekend that the adult members stop exchanging gifts, her own mother started to cry, saying she was ashamed that she had raised a daughter who didn't know the real meaning of Christmas.

R's own brother goes into debt some $2G every year to prove to the rest of the family that he can keep up with them. The rest of family is generally very well off. For the adult gift exchange, they have set the recommended spending amount at $250. That's $250 per person -- so a couple, such as K. and her husband, have to cough up $500. And this is for gifts for far wealthier adults. What meaning could this possibly have?

R. and her husband don't, of course, spend all this money, because they don't have it. Just finishing up an M.Div. degree with three children and a husband on a military salary, she can't afford materialism. Does the family not know that her brother suffers under these spending expectations, and that R. can't afford it at all? Do they not know that they are causing suffering insteading of spreading peace and joy?

How many other families are dragged under by the material expectations of Christmas? How many parents dread Christmas because of the financial strain it represents and the desperate choices they have to make?

Can we not help to free our culture from this torture?

Querying Evangelism

2006-10-05T20:42:00.000-04:00

There is a United Church minister in Toronto who took an empty downtown church and filled it by doing a reverse evangelism. Traditional evangelism has people within the church "selling" or "marketing" the church to the unchurched. The idea is that "church" is a package of goods and services that can be sold or marketed and bought at the other end. The church provides the package, the evangelized are the buyers.

Cheri Dinovo's type of evangelism goes the other way. The outsiders evangelize to the church. They teach, we listen. They have more to teach us about suffering, love, neglect, peace, violence, inhumanity, etc. than we have to teach them. We seek them out so that we can remain a church.

Dinovo spent time walking into the rougher neighbourhoods listening to people, bringing them into her church, not to follow but to lead. One person that had a big impact on her congregation was a cross-dresser drug addict who became the music director. She eventually died of an overdose. Dinovo points out that street people and poor people die a lot, so her church does a lot of funerals. But her church is filled with these kinds of people, sitting beside average families. This church requires a lot of close supervision to deal with potential situations -- so they provide it. They don't use the need for more supervision as an excuse not to let these people evangelize to them.

Dinovo's point is that the real preachers, movers, message-bearers always come from the margins of society. Jesus did, so did John the Baptist. If movers and shakers do come from within our congregations, we have a regrettable tendency to kick them out. Consider Lucretia Mott, George Fox, William Penn, John Woolman. The real evangelism comes from the outside in.

Churches do too much talking and too little learning and listening. Certainly, Quakers are a little different because everyone is equally a minister, and anyone can give ministry in Meeting. There is less of a marketable "package" to Quakerism. Yet our meetings have remarkably few drug addicts, street dwellers, runaways, etc. When we do outreach to these marginalized groups, it's usually to provide them with physical necessities, often through a third-party group.We have an arm's length approach to the very poor and unfortunate, perhaps not conscious, but it's still there.

Yet Jesus sat with prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, thieves, fishmongers. He didn't market his religion to them; he just listened to them, accepted them. He used washing to symbolize to them that their "sins" wash away like water, making them just as good as the "righteous" people. His message was: You're good enough the way you are - be one of my apostles.

I will ponder this idea over the Thanksgiving weekend so that I can talk clearly about it at the outreach committee meeting on Tuesday.

Broken Windows

2006-10-03T13:38:00.000-04:00

All I can think about is little blondeAmish girls in pigtails and pinafores. And the horror. Will the nightmare of violence never end?

My husband says it's because of a climate of violence. With terrorist attacks and counter attacks, fears, wars, torture stories, prisons, hate demonstrations, violence in television shows, in movies, on the news, in music -- our culture has become saturated with images and messages of violence.

It's called the Broken Windows Theory. If cars parked along a street in a rough neighbourhood are all in good shape, nothing is likely to happen to any of them. But if one car has one broken window, then in a short time, all the cars will get smashed to bits. The existence of violence invites other violence, and as each invites more, it builds to a frenzy.

It's like the disintegration of our civilization. This is the fatal flaw in the notion of a "right" to bear arms -- because arms have only one purpose: to kill people. There's no other way to dress it up. If you have a "right" to bear arms, you will eventually have no other rights. Rights are the opposite of the rule of violence.

The last thing I want to do is to forgive the screwed-up, hate-filled, self-centred b****** that did this. Yet I know that's what the families will do. The Amish forgive sins to stop the cycle of violence. They repair the windows, even if it kills them to do it.

I wish I were more like them.

Instead, all I feel is insane grieve for the families, for the little girls, and for our tortured, bleeding world.

Travelling

2006-10-01T20:19:00.000-04:00

I lived in Central America in the 1980s. Mostly Costa Rica, where I had a teaching post, but I travelled around. I saw a lot of dirt roads, a lot of villages, lakes, pebbly rivers, jungle canopies, roadside shrines.

On this day, we were driving on a backroad through the jungle. It wasn't dense jungle, because I can still picture it -- there was a lot of grass around, so we must have been near some fincas. The memory stands out because we were in a car. Usually, we were in a bus, a cattle truck, or on foot. Alan Dixon from Ottawa Meeting was with me, as were some Friends from the States, someone, at least, who had access to a car.

As we put-putted along the road heading to wherever we were going (and I confess now that I can't remember -- we did travel a lot), we saw an elderly North American woman walking alone along the roadside. We drove up to her and offered her a ride (we gringos tended to stick together). She accepted and we scrunched over to make room for her.

As we drove along, we chatted about who we were, where we were going, etc. She was 75. Her husband had died not too long ago, and she was spending her time travelling around since his death. Alone. I found that remarkable. Costa Rica was a fairly safe place back then, but there was a US-backed war going on in the north against Nicaragua, and Noriega was in power in Panama, not to mention the military repression in El Salvador and Guatemala. She had been to all those places. Alone. There was a serenity to her face that I found remarkable, tinged with grief and maybe loneliness too, but still a remarkable face.

I asked her how much longer she was planning to travel. She answered: Another 25 years.

We had come up to the place where we needed to drop her off, a little dirt road heading down to a remote village, where apparently she had a place to sleep for the night. Before she left, I asked her what her secret was. She smiled and answered: Whatever it is that you are most afraid of, that is what you must do next. Put your fears always behind you.

Then she was gone.

How many times in the years since then I have not known what to do, I have been in a dilemma, I have been afraid, I have known what tasks I had to do but couldn't face doing them -- her words have guided me. I have always known what to do next -- whatever it was that I most feared.

I've told her story many times, in many meetings, to many friends/Friends. And now I pass it on again.

Apocalypse Now

2006-09-24T21:17:00.000-04:00

Kate gave post-meeting ministry today about how many sects of fundamentalist Christianity have a profound belief in the Book of Revelations as a prophecy. They believe this dream-story tells how the world will end. They look forward to the end of the world with the same joy and enthusiasm that suicider jihadis seek their own end. Never mind that the rest of us really like this planet: all they care about is getting their precious saved selves to heaven, and the rest of us can rot.

But this preoccupation with the "end times" is important because it means that Christian fundamentalist groups don't want peace in the Middle East. The Middle East is supposed to be the battle ground for the apocalypse, so the more unrest there, the better. In fact, there are many indications that conservatives are doing all that they can to make sure the fighting continues.

Consider the mind-boggling support for Israel during the clearing obscene bombing of Lebanon. Did Britain take such actions against Ireland for IRA attacks-- razing entire Irish communities to the ground? No. Then obviously these extremes of reaction are not necessary. Yet the United States and then Canada gave its support to Israel. How is this possible?

Consider also the unbelievable trail of failure at catching Bin Laden. The CIA has apparently been chasing him for more than a decade. Plenty of people have reported his whereabouts directly to the CIA, such as when he visits his relatives; yet the CIA has not moved in to capture him. This suggests that they want him free to continue his work.

I once saw a PBS documentary about a born-again convention in the States -- the Israeli PM was invited to speak. He was cheered so much he could barely start his talk. The crowd loved him because he had been aggressive in bombing the Arabs and in stirring up unrest.

It was a case of strange bedmates, as far as I could tell, because the born-agains did certainly not believe that a Jew like Sharon could get to heaven; and they certainly didn't care that Jews might die in the fighting (and then all of them die in the apocalypse that would follow). What they cared about was that the fighting continued so that they could get to heaven. What the Israeli PM cared about was that these voters kept the conservatives in power so that he could keep US support. They had complete cross-agendas. Yet they were working together, cooking up their evil plans each at the apparent expense of the other.

It was so weird I hardly believed it.

Politics doesn't make sense at the best of times. There are all sorts of hidden agendas, veiled threats, backroom deals, etc. that we don't know about. But when the absurdity of politics is combined with the wingnut, suicidal, we-don't-even-try-to-make-sense values of fundamentalism, we end up with something dripping with evil, a festering sore that is not allowed to heal, a torture that won't end.

The Arabs think the fighting in the Middle East is about a crusade.

I used to think they were nuts.

Nuclear Family (and Christmas Materialism)

2006-09-22T20:34:00.000-04:00

I think it's called the "nuclear" family because it's about to blow up.

Two adults are not enough to raise children. I'm convinced of this. I watch my friends struggle to keep sane while working and parenting. My family is faring better than most, probably because we live in a small city with low housing costs, so I can afford to run a business part-time. But in big cities with long commutes and high mortgages, I honestly don't know how they survive. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to do what has to be done.

Imagine how different it would be if grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins still all lived together, as was the norm in our culture less than a century ago. All adults back then had paying work of some kind, but all contributed in some way to the household unpaid work and the parenting as well. In effect, the childran had more than one mother, more than one father, and extra brothers and sisters. There was flexibility and durability to this family unit. Nobody needed layers of life insurance, health insurance, and retirement plans to protect against all of life's travails -- that was what the family was for.

Compare that with two dead exhausted parents siloed in their "single family homes" and high-stress lives and paying big money for it, wondering if this is the dream life they were sold the bill of goods on.

Why? Because a highly industrialized economy needs more portable workers. For this reason, back in the 1940s and 1950s, our culture invented The Career, luring people into thinking that they must structure their lives around their work, rather than around their people. This made industry more efficient, because it could move people around like chess pieces. For workers to be this portable, families had to be divided into smaller units -- nuclear families. Somehow, they managed to make this sound normal.

Of course, at that time, only one person in the family could have The Career. The woman had to stay at home to make up for all the other adults who were no longer part of the family unit.

Now that both parents are working again, the nuclear family is cracking under the strain.

In the meantime, we've built entire cities of single-family houses and commuter highways. We've taught seniors that they don't actually want to live with their adult children. We've invented the idea of the "empty nest" to justify the feelings of grief that come when the already tiny family unit disintegrates further. It's as if we've tried to shore up the nuclear family and career ideals so that we can never return to the larger families of earlier times.

I think we are homesick for the extended family.

And that's where Christmas comes in. Nowhere is this homesickness more evident than in Christmas traditions. The warm-fuzzy images are all of big tables with multiple generations together. We get in cars and planes and trains to get back to whatever extended family we still have so that we can get a smidge of this warm-fuzzy. But it's not the same. These are people we hardly ever see, only a notch above strangers. We have to work hard sometimes to manufacture the warm-fuzzy we're supposed to feel. Besides, there are always relatives who can't come, who won't come, etc.

How many of us haven't seen our nieces and nephews in months? Our grandparents or aging parents? Our aunts and uncles? We're all so far away from each other.

The nuclear family seems like a thin, sad substitute for the support, warmth, and economic stability of a larger family. Christmas merely pushes this into our faces.

We're homesick.

So we solace ourselves with cheap plastic junk.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the rise of Christmas materialism in the 1950s coincided with the rise of the nuclear family and the rise of The Career.

Memory

2006-09-09T18:29:00.000-04:00

Two days ago, I learned that someone I had been involved with 15 years ago died last year.

D-- had been a youth minister, about my age, at a United Church. We were both young and single and spiritually active. Then after 1991, except for seeing him briefly at a Bruce Cockburn concert, he left Canada, and I hadn't thought of him since.

Last year, about this time, I googled his name, just to see where he was. Of course, he had his own website, his-own-name-dot-com. Why would I have expected anything different? He had gone to the States to have his own show on a Christian radio network and to be editor of a Christian music magazine. He had also done some stints with nonprofits. He had a long-running blog and was frequently quoted by other Christian blogs, among whom he had a loyal following. Yes, it was D--, all right.

He also had cancer and was going through some painful treatments. I remember I sent him a carefully worded email wishing him well. I did mean it sincerely. He had replied, briefly, sounding amazed to have heard from me, and very very tired. I had meant to check back again sometime to see how he was doing.

I checked two days ago. He'd died about four weeks after I'd emailed him.

Sigh. So it goes.

It was too late now, a year later, to send any condolences to anyone. I never knew his wife, and he had no children. I have lost touch with the other people in our little group from back then.

My emotional response is what surprised me. How is it that hurts from so many years ago can surface like that?

D-- was extremely intelligent and had a strong personality, two things that I had been immediately drawn to. I was Quaker then, but single and lonely and living in a new city, not averse to joining a church group for company. But soon I had found that in interactions with him and his group I was hitting against an invisible wall. I didn't understand it. Eventually I discovered (to my amazement) that behind D--'s keen, sensual mind and moving, articulate style was a doctrinal and patriarchal set of values; and behind the charismatic, attracting personality was someone who didn't believe in his own ability to be in error.

He taught; he didn't learn. He led; he didn't follow. He spoke; he didn't listen. He wanted his words never to be questioned. It takes a while to learn these things about people. When someone is clearly and obviously intelligent, one assumes.

I assumed. Then I saw. But even when one can see, the charisma can still draw.

He wanted Christianity to be cool. He wanted to be cool. In many ways, he was. He didn't like my presence there because it was a challenge to his image. What he didn't know was how much others simply kept out of his path, especially the women of the church, most of whom felt they couldn't work with him at all. Why did I stay? I don't know – I guess I was that lonely.

He didn't think much of Quakers – it was just "recycle and be kind to squirrels," he would say. I would say nothing in response. I had learned by then that Quaker silence can be as useful as karate, letting someone's words echo back so that they hear what they have said – and others hear them too.

But it hurt.

In 1990, the church sent a small mission down to Peru to work with children who'd had polio. I was accepted to go, mainly because I was the only person to apply who had ever lived down there and who could speak Spanish. This put me and D-- at silent loggerheads, because he was not the centre of authority for the trip he had planned and organized. He wanted to do bible readings to prepare for the trip. I wanted to talk about cultural expectations, sanitation, prevention of disease from insects, and terrorist activity.

The group looked to me for guidance.

Peru was an amazing experience. Our little group bonded well, and D-- remained very much on the outside. He spent his spare time off by himself writing in his journal or talking with the evangelical missionaries who were running the camp. He expected us all to take part in the religious aspects of the camp. But the spiritual practices were offensive to us -- shopping-list prayer sessions, hymn sings about being washed in the blood of the lamb, wild exchanges of miracle stories. We ended up holding our own spiritual sessions in a quiet room in one of the cabins. We shared and had silence. They led the sharing, I led the silence.

He had this habit of tagging on biblical quotations with biblical references at the end of any note he sent to the Peru group. I recall once sending out a note of my own to everyone, an update on our post-mission photo exchange. I tagged on the end: Someday my prints will come. (Snow White 1:67-68).

Everyone else thought it was funny.

Ironically, he would talk to me. I suspect it's lonely at the top too. I guess he thought I was a lost cause, so it didn't matter if he showed some of his true colours. Maybe he was trying to prove something to me. I don't know. We talked a lot, wrestled with ideas, exposed ourselves, learned from each other. We were both writers, both thinkers, artists, musicians. I wasn't in awe of him, saw him as just a flawed person, the way I saw myself.

Only afterward did I discover that I was too impure for him to take seriously. A real woman did not have the kind of thoughts, the kind of past, the kind of philosophies that I had. He'd only taken what he must have considered a man's privileges. Secretly, quietly. No one else knew.

I had mistaken it all.

I learned about his new girlfriend while listening to one of his Christian radio broadcasts, only a few days after we'd been together. I don't remember breathing for a long, long time. He hadn't even told me. I guess he hadn't thought it was important. She was Christian and pure and too young to have ideas of her own. She was a woman. I was not.

Years have passed. I have a husband who tells me he loves me every day. I have a home of my own. I, unlike him, am very much alive.

But for these two days the ghosts of hurt and bewilderment have been swimming around in my head. I wonder at it all, so many years later.

Evangelicals Anonymous

2006-08-30T21:10:00.000-04:00

[ring]
Hello? Is this Evangelicals Anonymous? …

Good, okay. Here goes. [deep breath] My name is Susie FGC Quaker, and I am an evangelical…

What kind of evangelical? You mean there are different kinds?…

Well, then, I guess a peace evangelical, a compassion evangelical, a Jesus-is-not-copyright evangelical, a truth-is-a-seed-not-a-pearl evangelical, and a church-is-not-the-only-way-to-do-christianity evangelical. Oh, and an integrity-of-creation evangelical and a political evangelical. Pretty badly infected, as you can tell…

Well, I feel a kind of zeal, a spark of something, a vision of the future, of what could be. I want to reach out, draw people into it. Not to meeting, but to wherever they need to be, wherever they are. I've even starting to believe that Quakerism can take many shapes…

That's right, I'm a Quaker. So I'm sure you understand how difficult this can be. I really have to keep a very, very low profile…

Yes, yes, But even if their ideas and values are the same as mine, they know the evils of evangelism – that illicit spark, that bloodsucking energy. They know it turns perfectly comfortable philosophies and values into missions. They also have a healthy fear of doing anything loud or anything that might offend someone. So the similarities are just superficial…

Yes, the support is excellent. I have Quaker process to slow everything down and my fellow Quakers to question every suggestion to death. Quakers are very skilled at removing the "Demon E" from anything they do. They edit every message down till it says nothing. They take no risks, do nothing new. I'm so lucky, you know. I don't think I could get this kind of support anywhere else…

Well, I always thought it would give me immunity. Quaker practice means listening to the Spirit and sometimes listening to each other. We don't do much outreach because we don't really focus on people outside of our circle. It's like a little intellectual cocoon. Or so I thought. Then suddenly, here I am, thinking more about other people than about the meeting itself -- all those people whose lives are untouched by the Spirit and who hunger for something more. Suddenly, I don't care about Quaker process and traditions. I want what we do to have real life and purpose. You see? It's creepy. So now I know that Quakers aren't immune. We can get infected too, if we're not careful…

Yes, they do some outreach, but I wouldn't call it evangelism. They're always pleased when a new person shows up and wants to stay. It's a major event in some meetings, it happens so infrequently! But if numbers rise too much, there's always some helpful person to point out that if you wait long enough, those numbers will fall back down again, so there's no need to do anything about it or make any changes. That keeps it a tightly knit club, with just enough new people trickling in that it doesn't die completely...

Exactly! I mean, if we all became evangelicals, there would be so much to do in our meetings, there would be more and more people, there would be kids all over the place, and there'd be way too much vision. I can see their point. I have to change my misguided ways before I infect too many others. I've already noticed some other Quakers getting interested in outreach and getting excited about touching other people's lives…

Well, gosh, no, I don't know how seriously they are infected. I mean, they're just out there, talking about it, making suggestions for changes…

How many? Well, a few. Maybe lots, I don't know. But there are these others that kind of dumb them down with words and language. You know, they take the idea and turn it into a minute and then quibble over the wording for a half hour, which makes the ordinary people present afraid to open their mouths, incase they use one of the Wrong Words. Then we start running out of time to do anything about the minute. And pretty soon, the energy gets laid over to the next meeting…

Well, no, you see, it's not entirely safe—because these kinds of ideas are still very contagious…

No, I'm not arguing with you. I'm just saying they can end up spreading--…

Of course, I'm not defending them!…

Wait a minute, I'm very sincere about changing my ways!…

Take business meetings more seriously? How can that be possible? They're nearly moribund as it is!…

Can't I just take an aspirin and call a doctor? Or go to a 12-step meeting?…

Wait! There's got to be hope for me! Hello? Hello?…

[click]
[long pause]

[ring]
Hello. Indecisiveness Anonymous? My name is Susie FGC Quaker, and I am indecisive. Or at least, I used to be. Now I'm not so sure...

Boycott Bottled Water

2006-08-23T13:56:00.000-04:00

The United Church of Canada (the largest Protestant denomination in Canada) held their annual General Council this week. Earlier this week, the CBC had reported that the Council would be voting on a boycott of bottled water.

Well, hurray!

Water as a right and resource has been a theme in all churches belonging to KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives this year, and has been taught in churches across the country. The timing was good. I think a large portion of the population would have been very receptive.

However, reading the reports from the General Council, I see that enough voters hedged on the idea of a boycott that the whole idea got "watered down" in the final decision.

Sigh. I was so looking forward to the United Church leading the way on this one. What were people afraid of? Or was it that so many of the people voting at the Council were bottled-water drinkers?

As long as "nice" people think it's okay to buy bottled water, then it's only a matter of time before the only water available comes with a pricetag.

Quaker Intellectuals

2006-08-15T08:11:00.000-04:00

When I taught a stewardship theme in FDS last week, I used the example of the Cadbury family for stewardship of wealth and power. Uncomfortable with 19th-century Birmingham living standards for their chocolate factory workers, the Cadburys moved an entire factory and all its workers to a new "village" they created, complete with schools, green parks, and excellent housing, far away from city pollution. They paid high wages and treated employees well. People expected Cadbury to fail because they were wasting money. But Cadbury proved them wrong -- their chocolate became the most popular in England.

This is just one example of the legacy of 18th- and 19th-century Quakers, who were pioneers in changing the way business was done. What we don't seem to remember is that before the 1900s, Quakers were not intellectuals. Universities were closed to anyone who was not a member of that university's church denomination. Thus, Quakers, as non-church people, were not allowed to go to university. They had to become businesspeople, shopkeepers, farmers, bankers, or manufacturers.

Of course, in the process, they brought Quaker values into those industries. Quakers "invented" trust in business, overcoming the belief that only through cheating could a business make money. They created banks that didn't swindle, price tags that prevented the lying that goes on in haggling, and workers' rights. Quaker banks became the most prosperous in all of England, and so did most Quaker businesses. The word "Quaker" soon came to be synonymous with honesty, which is why many nonquaker businesses started using the word in their business names (e.g., Quaker Oats). As Quakers became wealthy, they started using their wealth to promote social change, to change industry, to infect commerce with Quaker ideas.

How many Quakers today go into business or banking? How many into industry? How many work in prisons (not as chaplains) or the military, for that matter?

Once Quakers were permitted to go to university, that's what we did. We are now clustered in intellectual and social-work jobs. Sure, there's still Quaker work to do in these areas. But we've abandoned all the other work sectors.

What would a Meeting think of a banker who joins the meeting? Or a factory owner? Or a businessperson? Would we not subconsciously think poorly of them for their career choice? Would we think very quietly that they really aren't suitable for Quakerism? Where do we get these ideas?

Imagine if Quakers were running the banking system in North America. What changes might we expect to see? Or if we were running all the energy businesses -- would we still be pretending that peak oil and global warming weren't happening? Would we not have more influence than we have where we are?

I wonder if the bald truth is that being a Quaker is business, commerce, and industry (and prisons or military) means some hard work. It requires thinking, working, trying new things, taking risks, speaking out. Intellectual jobs are much safer. We get to be Quaker without putting ourselves at any risk. But in so doing, we've lost our influence. When we want to bring up social, environmental, and commercial change, we have to yell from the sidelines.

I wonder if this is why Quakers have lost so much of their influence in the world.

Wars Again

2006-08-12T18:36:00.000-04:00

Back to wars again. Too much watching late-night TV news--it's on my mind. I'll bet I'm not the only one watching the news, shaking my head, trying to grasp what goes on in some people's heads.

My husband and I ended up philosophizing about war till after midnight. Whether Israel's invasion of Lebanon really qualifies as a war (more of a rampage, really, the point being destruction more than anything else), whether the "war on terror" is really a war or just an insane publicity stunt or maybe modernism's last gasp, unable to even comprehend its own death. Whether al Quaeda suiciders really believe in dying for a cause or whether they have their own reasons for not wanting to live anymore when they sign up to blow up planes.

We decided that war is a dumb word for it. We should just call it violence. War seems to legitimize these exercises. People should stop using that word -- it's so... twentieth century.

We also talked about the root causes of war. There may have been a time when war was war, armies marching under orders of a king, quarrels over territories and flags, one team against another team. But postmodern wars are not like those. Postmodern wars have causes very specific to our times. Here they are IOHO:

Overpopulation: This planet cannot hold more than 1 billion people. We have six times that amount. This has to lead to violence.
Environmental degradation: An inevitable by-product of overpopulation -- like bacteria in a test tube, we pollute ourselves.
Corporations: Organizations with rights but no responsibilities, artificial humans whose "human" status cannot currently be revoked, and who therefore act with complete disregard for anything but themselves. Corporations are making a sorry mess of the planet.
Unemployment: As a byproduct of all three of the above. Idle hands are hands of the devil.
Oil: And the lack thereof.

But since you can't kill any of these with a gun or a bomb, we instead turn to the nearest people to blame and kill them. Someone has to be blamed (i.e., the global poor equate oil demands and corporate greed with the United States, hence their hatred of Americans).

But this is not war -- not one team versus another team. It's a global howling.

Paid Worship

2006-08-09T18:43:00.000-04:00

Now that our meeting has a new meeting space with a great children's area, we parents have upped our demands.

We have asked for a paid-- gasp, yes, PAID -- facilitator for the children's program (3 out of 4 weeks per month - we'll cover the last week). We found one early this summer who'll do the job for what we can afford and got it onto the July MM agenda.

Here's the punchline -- he's not even Quaker.

Oh, let's just say this was a bit of an issue at MM -- that, and the fact that we're going to be doing the P word. The elders were goggle-eyed, sputtering. Process, you know, they choked, not the way it's done. Testimony against paid worship, you realize. Fans out, legs crossing and uncrossing.

The parents were passionate. Losing kids, losing families. Being too embarrassed to invite out our friends. Never being able to sit in meeting while others sit in it every week. Arms folded or gesturing or sweeping the room.

The clerk and recording clerk struggled to keep up.

I know George Fox had a thing against paid worship and "hireling minister" and so do I. I mean, how can you pay someone to pray or be holy? But what about a children's program director? Is that worship?

We had to decide that this was a wrong direction.

So much can still go wrong between now and the next MM at the end of August. But our fingers are crossed that it will pass and we parents and children will be able to be full Quakers.

The letter killeth, as they say.

Dinosaur Wars

2006-08-07T12:59:00.000-04:00

So, Israel and Lebanon, eh? Now, where have we heard that before? Oh, yeah, back in the 1980s.

And what are they saying now? That they're going to "win" this time?

Yeah, I see. And what did they say last time? That they were going to "win"?

And so then why is there a Round 2?

We desperately over-educated Westerners can't help thinking about war when every newscast is regaling us with the surreal details about the conflict between Israel and Lebanon.

Oh, and Palestine. And Iraq. And for Canadians, mustn''t forgets the daily tally of our soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

Even the newscasters are having a hard time finding the required justifications for these conflicts and strategies. But even though they come across as uncomfortable about finding support for the party line, I sense that they aren't entirely aware why they aren't comfortable with the stories they are covering.

There's a certain disconnect going on here, a big one. This disconnect has to do with words and their meanings, past meanings and present meanings, cultural change, and our ability to think two simultaneous but perfectly contradictory thoughts at the same time. War is a very weird concept in postmodern times.

But in case you don't have a foggy notion what I'm talking about, then start by deconstructing some of the "lines" used in the present conflict.

For example, Bush says the Israeli attack on Lebanon is okay because "Every nation has the right to defend itself." Never mind that "defend" usually means protecting oneself from attack, whereas this conflict looks more like "attack" than like "defend." The whole notion of self- defence is really: "But Mooommmm! He started it!" It's a childish irresponsibility to take ownership of one's own side of a conflict. After all, it takes two people to fight.

Also imbedded in the idea of self-defence is the underlying notion that we (whoever the "we" is in that case) have a greater right to life than this other group, either because of a religious doctrine or because of a sense of civil superiority. Think about it: by the logic of self-defence, the other side has the right to defend themselves too. How can both sides in a conflict have the "right" to kill the other?

Once deconstructed, the notion of self-defence reveals itself to be empty of everything except self-righteousness.

Deconstructing the concept of war is a little harder than deconstructing a claim about a war, since war is actions and concepts, rather than words. But since the Vietnam War, war itself has changed. People learned in Vietnam that to win against a large power, you have to play a different game. So they played a different game. Did they win? Not really, because the concept of winning isn't part of the new concept of war. But the Americans certainly didn't win either. Nobody won. Lots of people died. Lots of weapons were fired. Huge environmental damage ensued. People lost their minds. But nobody "won".

And it's this notion of "winning" that is central to the disconnect about the postmodern response to war. Up until this last century, there was perhaps a connection between the killing/bombing and the "winning". But there isn't anymore.

In other centuries, the most powerful armies with the most technologically advanced weapons would normally "win" a war. But is this the case now? Do the super armaments of the United States give it an advantage or a disadvantage in Iraq? Has military "superiority" allowed them to "win"? Or has it worked against them in a thousand subtle ways? Are they, in fact, playing the wrong game?

In the same way, is Israel's aggression into Lebanon going to allow them to "win"? What are they hoping to "win" -- peace? demilitarization of Hezbollah? destruction of Lebanon?

What are they likely to "win" -- the world's fury? the long-term hatred of the Lebanese people and their allies? a regional environmental disaster?

Should we call this a war, or should we call it a Hezbollah Recruitment Fair, since for each Hezbollah soldier who dies, more are inspired to join to ensure that Israel does not "win"?

The United States and Israel have the most technologically advanced weaponry in the world. They are also the most highly militarized countries in the world. Yet because of the sheer weight of their military might, they have proved themselves inflexible, heavy, mired down. When military "superiority" won't "win" a war, big armies don't know what else to do. They can't change tactics. Big is not powerful anymore: nimble is powerful; networked is powerful. These superpower rail against their enemies for hiding in residential areas and lobbing rockets from far away. They believe this gives them the right to flatten villages and destroy countless lives to take out one rocket launcher. They don't realize that the game has changed.

Wars are not winnable anymore, if they ever were. The invention of the atomic bomb ushered in the age of the unwinnable war. Nobody can push that button and expect to win. Guerrilla warfare and suicide bombers have ensured that war would remain unwinnable. War exists now for the sake of war. There is no winning.

War is a dinosaur.

Newscasters are feeling uncomfortable reporting on the Isreali aggression because it seems so, well, dumb after reporting on the four years of failure of the US invasion of Iraq. If the US can't "win" a war against an at-that-time non-existent resistence movement in a despot's country, then how is Israel hoping to "win" against a clever and resilient army like Hezbollah? Don't they know it's futile? Don't they know there's no point?

Weary--that's how the reporters look.

And that's how so many of us feel.

The World According to JK Rowling

2006-07-22T18:47:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I decided to read the first Harry Potter book out loud to my children, one chapter a night. They were delighted by it, so a neighbour lent us a copy of the second book. Which both my son and I read (my daughter is a bit young for a book that length).

Mistake.

No, not that -- the books are wonderful, the characters are so real they are a delight, and the archetypes steal your soul away. But they are supremely addictive. Getting the books out of the library for my son, I have been sneaking time myself to read them. I have just now read to the end of the 6th book. And like everyone else, I have to wait till next year for the 7th and final book to find out how Harry's quest ends.

But besides being swept up by the story, I am struck by the message, so profoundly modern and defiant, here in what's considered a children's book series.

For example, most of the series was published after 9/11. Although Rowling wrote the outline for the seven books five years before she published the first book in 1998 (?), the influence of modern events is still strong. The government (the Ministry of Magic) in the first book is a neutral and even kindly organization. By the third book, it has become profoundly evil, using evil means to fight the evil of Lord Voldemort. It uses arbitrary arrest of innocents to make the War Against Terror look as if it is achieving something. It tries to gain the approval of popular hero figures like Harry and Dumbledore, who refuse on the grounds that they don't want to be posterboys for an organization that is doing harm.

And like in the War on Terror, the evil entity has split itself into terror cells which live hidden in common objects to be awakened when needed.

But I digress... It's the theology of JK Rowling that intrigues me.

Most of the characters are archetypes, while the children/teenagers are ordinary people. This is what gives the book its power. For example, Dumbledore is the all-knowing, all-seeing wizard headmaster of the Hogwarts School, the most powerful wizard in the world, the equal of the evil Lord Voldemort. In fact, he was also the teacher of Lord Voldemort and the one who rescued the orphan from a terrible childhood. Dumbledore is the Zeus figure, the God figure, complete with long white beard, flowing robes, and a kind, forgiving but stern nature.

It's no accident that he is killed at the end of the 6th book, by a man he had forgiven and taken under his wing (Professor Snape).

At the end of Book 6, God is dead. The pain the reader feels at this event is profound. The final chapter is devoted to a funeral so that the reader can grieve.

I am dimly aware that many Christian fundamentalist groups protested the Harry Potter series because it featured magic as witchcraft (laughable, of course, because if it had featured magic as "miracles" then of course it would have all been perfectly acceptable!!). But how much more confrontational to traditional theology is the heart-wrenching death of the God archetype. Rowling does not hide the existentialist implication of this death, either:

And Harry saw very clearly as he sat there under the hot sun how people who cared about him had stood in front of him one by one, his mother, his father, his godfather, and finally Dumbledore, all determined to protect him; but now that was over. He could not let anybody else stand between him and Voldemort; he must abandon forever the illusion he ought to have lost at the age of one: that the shelter of a parent's arms meant that nothing could harm him. There was no waking from his nightmare, no comforting whisper in the dark that he was safe really, that it was all his imagination; the last and greatest of his protectors had died and he was more alone than he had even been before.

So then what is God, what is love, what is the meaning of life in an existential, death-of-God world? The 7th book will feature Harry taking on the quest against evil alone, first by going back to his roots to understand how it all started, and then tackling the problem one piece at a time. He knows there are five pieces. He knows he might die doing it. He is struggling, like us, to find meaning.

In a typical archetypal quest, the hero must "slay" evil. And Harry himself, in the final pages, makes clear his need both for revenge for all these deaths, as he explains to his two friends:

...his eyes upon Dumbledore's white tomb, reflected in the water on the other side of the lake. 'That's what he wanted me to do, that's why he told me all about them [the horcruxes of Voldemort's soul]. If Dumbledore was right -- and I'm sure he was -- there are sitll four of them out there. I've got to find them and destroy them and then I've got to go after the seventh bit of Voldemort's soul, the bit that's still in his body, and I'm the one who's going to kill him. And if I meet Severus Snape along the way,' he added, 'so much the better for me, so much the worse for him.'

Certainly, 'killing' the evil one is a necessary part of any archetypal quest. Yet before Dumbledore is killed, on the eve of the last quest he takes with Harry, he suggests that there may be more to conquering evil than mere revenge. He makes this clear during a discussion of Harry's powers, of what he could use to destroy Voldemort. Dumbledore's [God's] statements about prophecy, power, and enmity provide a framework for meaning in a post-doctrinal world:

'But I haven't got uncommon skill and power,' said Harry, before he could stop himself.

'Yes, you have,' said Dumbledore firmly. 'You have a power that Voldemort has never had. You can -- '

'I know!' said Harry impatiently. 'I can love!' It was only with difficulty that he stopped himself from adding, 'Big deal!'

'Yes, Harry, you can love,' said Dumbledore, who looked as though he knew perfectly well what Harry had just refrained from saying. 'Which, given everything that has happened to you, is a great and remarkable thing. You are still too young to understand how unusual you are, Harry.'

'So, when the prophecy says that I'll have "power the Dark Lord knows not", it just means -- love?' asked Harry, feeling a little let down.

'Yes -- just love,' said Dumbledore. 'But Harry, never forget that what the prophecy says is only significant because Voldemort made it so. I told you this at the end of last year. Voldemort singled you out as the person who would be most dangerous to him -- and in doing so, he made you the person who would be most dangerous to him.'

'But it comes to the same --'

'No, it doesn't,' said Dumbledore, sounding impatient now. Pointing at Harry with his black, withered hand, he said, 'You are setting too much store by the prophecy!'

'But,' spluttered Harry, 'but you said the prophecy means --'

'If Voldemort had never heard of the prophecy, would it have been fulfilled? Would it have meant anything? Of course not! Do you think every prophecy in the Hall of Prophecy has been fulfilled?'

'But,' said Harry, bewildered, 'but last year, you said one of us would have to kill the other --'

'Harry, Harry, only because Voldemort made a grave error and acted on Professor Trelawney's words! If Voldemort had never murdered your father, would he had imparted in you a furious desire for revenge? Of course not! If he had not forced your mother to die for you, would he have given you a magical protection he could not penetrate? Of course not. Harry! Don't you see? Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everwhere do! [...]

...It is essential that you understand this!' said Dumbledore, standing up and striding about the room, his glittering robes swooshing in his wake; Harry had never seen him so agitated. 'By attempting to kill you, Voldemort himself singled out the remarkable person who sits here in front of me and gave him the tools for the job! It is Voldemort's fault that you were able to see into his thoughts, his ambitions [...] and yet, Harry, despite your privileged insight into Voldemort's world, you have never been seduced by the Dark Arts, never, even for a second, shown the slightest desire to become one of Voldemort's followers!'

'Of course I haven't!' said Harry indignantly. 'He killed my mum and dad!'

'You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!' said Dumbledore loudly. 'The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort's! [...] I do not think he understands why, Harry, but he was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole.'

We create enemies out of people by treating them like enemies, and we create prophecies out of words by following them as if they were scriptures.

And every act of love we do, even if it fails, is still part of the life that protects against evil. Ultimately, love is the only weapon we have against evil.

And in fighting against evil, we have to protect against destroying our own souls.

Bears and Us

2006-07-13T16:16:00.000-04:00

Most people would believe that bears should be allowed to live in peace out there in the wilderness. But if a bear attacks and kills a human, then that bear should be hunted down and killed.

The reason is a philosophy that says that the value of a human life is more than the value of a bear's life. A human has the right to kill a bear, but a bear never has the right to kill a human and must pay for it with its life. Moreover, humans have the right to take away the land and habitat of a bear, but a bear cannot fight back -- or else pay for it with its life.

Like it or not, this is how the majority of people think. There are levels of life in traditional Western thinking, and human beings are at the top level. Maybe this idea grew out of the fact that people hunted animals for food. But it has become a philosophy of disrespect and lack of concern for animal welfare on the planet.

Unfortunately, there are groups of people -- nations and religions -- that believe that people not of their nation and religion are like the bears. These other groups have a lesser human value. They should be allowed to live in peace; but if one of them kills one of us, then we have the right to kill them.

If they kill one of our soldiers, then we get to bomb a few villages and kill a few hundred of their people. If they kill another of our soldiers, we get to bomb their airports and invade another country. This is not wrong: once one of them killed one of us, they all lost their right to live. There is a single-mindedness to this philosophy that does not see the contradictions or arrogance of their assumptions.

These groups phrase their higher-rights status in different ways. Some call themselves God's chosen people or the one true religion, the only people that God really cares about, which gives them the right not to care too deeply about others. Some consider themselves the great sheriff of the world with an unlimited right to self-defence (such as attacking other nations for having weapons of mass destruction while stockpiling and even using such weapons themselves, or invading any country whose politics displease them or whose resources they want). Such groups refer to other nations as "our interests" rather than as "their country."

Some of these groups call the bears infidels, some call them Indians or natives or slaves, some call them terrorists. They all mean that the other group is somehow less human, has less right to exist or own what they have, than we do.

Israel has this philosophy. Revenge against anyone who kills an Israeli is considered a right. There is no limit to how far this revenge can go. To fail to seek revenge is to debase oneself down to the level of the bears. To them, Muslims are bears. So are Christians.

Fundamentalist Muslims have this philosophy. Infidels can be killed without impunity. In fact, militants believe that God welcomes such killing. To them, Jews are bears. So are Christians.

Moreover, neither group is willing to negotiate with bears.

Matthew and Marilla

2006-07-09T21:07:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about marriage. This is something you end up doing after going on a vacation and being together with your beloved too many hours in a day.

I've heard some little saying (probably nobody ever did say it, but it's been "quoted" so much that it's taken on a life of its own) that if marriage hadn't existed, then our culture would have had to invent it. I've tried to deconstruct this saying to figure out exactly what it means. I conclude that it's a tautology: our marriage-centred culture needs marriage.

Well, no kidding. We've made family synonymous with marriage. And family is the backbone of a civilization.

But are family and marriage necessarily connected? If marriage hadn't existed, would we really have had to invent it? Or would we have had a completely different culture with a different style of family?

I titled this blog Matthew and Marilla because Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert were the elderly brother and sister who adopted Anne in Anne of Green Gables. I try to imagine an unmarried brother and sister pair successfully adopting a child today. The notion of family has evidently changed in these 100 years. I question whether these changes are healthy.

Before I go any further, I just want to toss out polygamy. I'm not supporting polygamy here. Polygamy is dysfunctional wherever it occurs in Western society. It's about power and exists where there is cultural coercion against women. I realize those cherubic polygamist Mormon women with their toothpaste-commercial smiles do TV interviews about how nice it is to live with all the sister-wives. But I note that there is always a Mormon man standing somewhere close by to make sure they say what they're supposed to say.

Moreover, if it's so nice to live with all the sister-wives, then why marry the goofball at all? Polygamist women never talk in the interviews about their relationship with him.

Because there is none. End of story.

Besides, there's the math problem. If some guy gets 20 wives, then there are another 19 guys who don't get anyone. There's no getting around that problem. This is not a real-life solution.

And it's icky.

However, the idea of the group of women raising children together is a powerful one for women. (I don't know what it does for guys.) The single family dwelling is oppressive to female parents, since it parcels us off from each other and sends us to the loonybin. It takes a village to raise a child. Marriage breaks down the village into mcnuggets.

The tribe and the extended family have melted away, and with them, the wider community of women (and men) that used to be central to the notion of family. Somehow over the past two centuries, families have been whittled down to just two people and their biological offspring. My question: how sustainable is this as a family unit? Can two parents really do it alone, raising kids and staring at the same face every morning? Just what percentage of marriages can withstand this kind of pressure?

Maybe the polygamous ladies have a point. It is great to live with other women and share the duties of the day. However, those women don't all have to be married to the same dork to get this community (a point they never raise in the TV interviews, and none of the dickbrain reporters ever have the presence of mind to ask).

*****************
The Mosuo people of Southeastern China don't have our notion of marriage or our notion of family. A Mosuo person is married to their mother, sisters, and brothers and live with them all their life. They have sex whenever they want, with whoever they want. The Mosuo culture is the ultimate "free love" lifestyle, but with a heavy family ethic.

The Mosuo culture is matrilineal and matriarchal: heredity is determined by the mother's line, and all property is owned by women. Children are raised by the mother, the uncles and the aunts. Women do most of the work of farming and fishing, and the men do the hard labour. But in exchange for not owning anything, the men are pretty much free otherwise. For this reason, they are generally happy. The Mosuo are known for singing and dancing a lot, and family strife is almost unknown.

Mosuo women are not taught abstinence or sexual inhibition. They can take on lovers from other households (provided the matriarch determines that they are not cousins). But when they don't want to be sexually active, they don't have to be. Among the Mosuo, relationships last as long as they last. No one expects a lifetime commitment. In fact, even living together is rare (usually only practiced when the man is from outside the culture, because he doesn't have a home). Most of the women practice only "walking marriage" -- that is, in the morning, the man leaves to go back to his house, no bad feelings.

PBS ran a documentary recently about the Mosuo. I was struck by how happy, energetic, confident, and radiant these young women were. They knew they had power over their own lives, and they knew they had the love and support of their biological families all their lives. There was no pressure to find a man to start a family. There was no pressure to make a relationship work. There was just a lifetime of support and security.

One young woman interviewed was in a relationship with a man from Beijing. She said freely that she would be heartbroken if their relationship broke down. But she would never leave her family to go live with him in the city. This was her family and her life. A man was, well, just a man. There would be others.

The Mosuo have an overwhelming duty to family and to children. But they don't have marriage at all. In fact, they see marriage as antithetical to happy family life.

**********

Our culture took a turn somewhere early on toward patriarchy and patrilineality, and then later to smaller and smaller family structures, and finally to elevating marriage to the level of shrine.

Has it helped us to live happily ever after?

As for me and my husband, we've decided to take independent vacations from now on. With that decision, we're both suddenly much more interested in holidays. I have an idea of an annual Mothers and Daughters camping trip. My husband and son will go off and do a guy thing. I think we'll all be happier.

BBC Read

2006-07-06T11:32:00.000-04:00

BBC editorial on Israel and Palestine -- go here. The editor's message to both sides of the conflict is that force doesn't work.

Gee, I wish I'd thought of that!

Heresies

2006-06-23T21:43:00.000-04:00

Heresies is the sort of topic you blog about after someone's said something that has pi**ed you off. Like, royally. Sort of: What is wrong with what that person just said? It pivoted on something, I just can't tell what! And it's driving me nuts!

The Catholic Church is not much use, as I found out from googling "heresy." Sure, they have lists of heresies, all with cool Greek-sounding names, and most accompanied by at least one major slaughter or inquisitional cleansing. But virtually all of these have to do with incorrect perspectives on Jesus' true nature as defined by the Church, or incorrect perspectives on the role of the Church as defined by the Church. There isn't much about plain, vanilla heresy.

And that's the rub with heresies. Because a heresy by definition is relative. It has to be heretical to something. That something is usually a set of doctrines.

But what about just general heresies? Like, heretical to the sense of Jesus' teachings about the nature of God, or heretical to the collected wisdom of spiritual traditions?

This question made me sit down and clarify my notions of heresy in my own mind so that next time I am prepared to speak to them. What strikes me now is that heresy is often disguised in "orthodox" language, which sows confusion and helps imbed heresy into our culture.

Here are my eight heresies. You may be able to think of more.

1. God as Santa Claus

From "God's friends get rich" down to people who pray with shopping lists (I've met some), the people who ascribe to this heresy view God more as a servant than anything else. For them, spiritual life is a means of furthering self-centred interests. For example, going to church is a way of celebrating your good fortune of being "saved" and being chosen by God to be on the fast-track to heaven. God is a source of stuff. God always answers your prayers -- provided you pray them enough. The difficulty with this belief system occurs when God fails to give the stuff demanded. This heresy posits that God can be manipulated or controlled by prayer. God is a weak-egoed being in constant need of praise and adulation, a selfish God who simply ignores those who don't toady enough.

2. God as Bogeyman

This is the flip side of God as Santa Claus. Those who believe that God is Santa Claus for themselves generally also believe that God is Bogeyman for people not like themselves (e.g., for foreigners, for people of other religions, or even for their neighbours who dress funny). They pore through the bible to find curses to fling on others and promises to bless themselves. Belief in this kind of God means believing that God has enemies and that God hates. From this, believers of this heresy determine that they too can hate. They covertly celebrate the tragedies of others, such as diseases and catastrophes, saying, "I told you!" However, this God does not reflect the loving, forgiving, accepting God that Jesus described in the gospels.

3. God as Lord of Hosts

This is the very-old-testament view of God -- that God is a warrior who rains down punishments on enemies. This God is always on our side in a battle, never on the other side. LIke God as Bogeyman, this God has enemies -- our enemies. Unfortunately, this kind of God is useful for justifying any kind of vengeance, from genocides to honour killings. In effect, this God is a projection of our military hostilities and our desire for justification of violence.

4. God of the Gaps

This heresy developed after the theory of evolution became solid science and was hard to run away from. People would point out the "gaps" in scientific theory and declare that that was where God was. God accounted for the gaps in the scientific theory. One problem with this heresy is that it completely opposes science and religion: where there is science, there is no God; where there is God, there is no science. In effect, it also separated religion from truth, and replaced truth with beliefs. These dichotomies do not speak well for religion at all! They just turn God into a polite word for our own ignorance! Worse for this heresy is the lamentable habit of science to keep closing the gaps as new discoveries are made, such that this God always risks being squeezed out entirely.

5. God as Tylenol

In this heresy, God makes you feel good and takes your problems away. This is the "opium of the people" heresy that Marx was so familiar with. Woozy-headed people don't think, so they don't demand justice, peace, equality, or environmental protection. But because this feel-good sedation doesn't consistently occur in real life, the mere belief that it should occur is usually enough to keep people preoccupied with "trying harder" to get it. God as Tylenol combines well with God as Flag to create a very handy state religion.

6. God as our Concept of God

This is a anthropomorphic and semantic heresy, the hubris of thinking that God is what we think God is. In this heresy, God is a fixed, unchanging being and concept, framed by a fixed and unchanging set of words and images. By staking claim to those words and images, a religion can make God copyright. Then the people come to worship the words and images because of the copyright. In somes ways, this heresy is loyalty to the mistakes of the past. It's kind of like painting oneself into a corner with one's words, then realizing one is stuck in the corner and deciding to live there forever (instead of admitting it was a bad paint job and walking out through it).

7. God as Flag

I couldn't resist this one. Believe it or not, there are people out there who confuse nationalism with God's will. Yes, it's true. This heresy has been pumped by sharp politicians, who use it to justify war, exploitation, and arrogance. It's also linked with God as Santa Claus and God as Bogeyman. This heresy would regard the writing of the bible and the writing of the nation's constitution as approximately equivalent. It maintains that there is something holy about that nation's every action. It places patriotism above love, rugged individualism above humility, capitalism above justice, and consumerism above spiritual living. Yet, according to Jesus, the former are the things of Mammon, and the latter are the things of God.

8. God as Civilization

This heresy believes that what is primitive is Godless. This applies not only to First Nations and Wiccan spirituality, but also to nature itself. Through the din of modern life, people can no longer hear the whisper of the spirit of the trees; so people can end up believing that there is no whisper or spirit there. They become suspicious of anyone who claims there is. Religion to them can only exist in books, doctrines, and buildings. It can never be simple or otherwise attainable.

Collapse

2006-06-22T08:14:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I'd read his earlier book, Guns, Germs and, and Steel. This one is even more powerful. It's not bedtime reading, though.

Diamond examines several small and large civilizations throughout history that have collapsed (e.g., Easter Islands, Mayans, Greenland, New Mexico) and discusses the five main scientifically-substantiated causes of the fall of civilizations:

overpopulation
degradation of the environment
loss of trade allies
conflict
leadership and cultural values that are out of sync with what's happening

He then examines some current situations (e.g., Montana, Australia, Rwanda, Haiti, and China) to explore to what extent some of our civilizations are following the same path toward collapse. The parallels he finds are striking.

Once the land has been cleared so long that the soil deteriorates, once the cities have spread to the point that they cover the arable soil, and once all the trees have been cut down, a civilization is in its terminal phase. The social factors follow: transportation and communication become impossible, trade and alliancing fade away, leadership becomes extreme or absurd, and factions start to fight over the few remaining resources. At this point, the people have choices to make: to keep their culture or change it.

Few people think about how precarious our civilization is. If oil were cut off tomorrow, we wouldn't be able to carry on. I don't want democracy to die, nor modern medicine and education. I don't want the planet to become more desertified. And I don't want the spiritual evolution of religion to stop dead as extremism takes over.

I was thinking last night of the choices we need to make:

developing a global, universal contraception program to bring populations down
creating awards for nations whose populations are falling to reinforce the idea that growth is not good
admiring people who choose not to have children
resisting and refusing changes (e.g., Seattle)
developing a long-term (a century or two) global reforestation and de-desertification program
revising corporate law to remove the need to provide returns on investment at all cost
creating "costs" for corporations, individuals, and businesses to ensure compliance with the people's will
replacing individual rights with group rights
preserving old means of survival, such as heritage seeds
replacing as much of the energy infrastructure as possible with non-fossil-fuel technology
promoting pacifism in all religions to help create alternatives to conflict as resources dwindle further

I don't know why this book has moved me so much. I have been a member of the Green Party and environmental groups for years. I think of environmentalism as a spiritual value, and I work to place group values above my individual rights. Maybe because this book goes beyond spiritual and scientific values and focuses on a cultural imperative: change or collapse.

It's that simple.

Movin'!

2006-06-18T13:15:00.000-04:00

BOING. . . boing . . . BOING!
. . . boing . . . !

Today, our Meeting agreed that we would move to a new meeting space starting in two weeks.

I can't believe that a year of searching is over! And I can't believe that we are finally FINALLY getting out of that tiny little hole in the wall where we were meeting!

The meeting turned down our last two choices, which were expensive and less than ideal. One church only grudgingly offered their space, adding a hefty rental fee on top of it (nearly four times what they charged every other group that used the space!). The meeting decided it was very bad karma to rent from a group that didn't want us.

I had to agree, but we were running out of options, and I was about the give up on Quaker process. After all, we had minuted the need to move a year ago -- and here we were still not moved! But then our assistant clerk suggested moving the meeting time to late afternoon. I expected an instant thumbs-down, but the members were cautiously accepting of this idea.

I have to learn to trust the process of Quaker discernment, because by turning down our last choices, they helped open the way for a new notion of who we are.

Within two weeks, our committee found an ideal and very affordable spot: the local Unitarian Fellowship Hall. It's a compact Shaker-like meeting space on two floors, formerly a meeting hall for a union group. Simple amber walls with airy windows, clean hardwood floors, chairs stacked in a row along the walls, and everything else folding away into neat cupboards. The meeting room has space for us to grow; and the children's area downstairs offers five comfortable rooms (two classrooms, two playrooms, and a lounge, all attached to the kitchen).

I was a bit unsure whether the meeting would go for the 4 p.m. meeting time. A few people did express their dislike of the time change. But then others started talking about outreach. They expressed their hesitations about doing outreach to people in other churches when coming to Meeting means not attending their current services. With an afternoon time-slot, we can feel free to do as much outreach as we want, without feeling that we are proselysing or pushing people into an either/or situation.

Moreover, we can encourage people to come out while they maintain their first commitment to their Sunday-morning spiritual community.

We also felt that clergy from other churches might find our meeting a good space for prayer and spiritual rest, in contrast to their Sunday-morning activities.

Our meeting can now position ourselves not just as a religion that people join, but as a spiritual service to the community, regardless of one's religious commitments. We can bring our Quaker light into their churches, their sermons, their committee work. After all, what does it matter whether someone calls or doesn't call themself a Quaker, as long as they are following the Light? We must bring the Light to them wherever they are.

Hence, the meeting also minuted a need to start doing active outreach into the community to offer the spiritual opportunity of coming to Meeting.

Not only do we have a new space: we have a new mission.

. . . boing . . . BOING . . . !

Devils and Walls

2006-06-14T17:07:00.000-04:00

Last week's arrest of 17 young Muslim males in Ontario who were planning to blow up parliament and (apparently) lop off heads of our heads of state kind of took everyone off guard here. For some reason, it's not something we expected to come out of Toronto. There was a bit of stunned silence from the public, then a bit of high-drama flapping around by the media, then more puzzled silence.

What does it mean?

Of course, there were immediate questions whether we should cut off immigration. But the irony there, and everybody saw it, is that these were Canadian boys, all raised here in Canadian schools. Just like the terrorists who blew up the subway in London, who were all Londoners. And the Madrid bombers, who were home-grown Spaniards.

Terrorism isn't about immigration.

It isn't about borders either. Terrorism flows across borders because it is not people. It's not even in people. Terrorism is ideas and emotions. It's on the Internet and the airwaves. It comes in shipped books, CDs, tapes, music. It comes from here and goes there, and it comes back again. It's like an infection: it spreads, it doesn't walk. It infects some, bypasses others.

If the military campaign in Afghanistan found bin Ladin tomorrow and threw him down an elevator chute, there would still be terrorism the next day.

A line from "The George Fox Song" kept going through my head last week.

"If we give you a pistol, will you fight for the Lord?
But you can't kill the devil with a gun or a sword!"

In other words, you can only kill people with a gun or a sword. The "devil" lives on, moves on.

You can't stop the devil with a wall either. It's like building a wall to stop bird flu. (Or trying to stop the rising oceans with a levee!)

Walls are modern; terrorism is postmodern.

The Pope Replies

2006-06-12T13:09:00.000-04:00

Well, what was in my mailbox today but a letter from Rome. Notta bene la signatura:

The signature was on the card that accompanied the letter. The letter was really written by someone named Monsignore Gabriele Caccia, but excuse me for a minute while I kind of gloat over this.

The pope sent a letter to l'il ol' me.

Anyway, here's what he said:

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI has received your letter and he has asked me to thank you. He appreciates the sentiments which prompted you to share your thoughts with him.

In regard to the matter you raise, I would suggest that you consult a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Article 2302-2317 (Safeguarding Peace and Avoiding War) will be of interest to you.

Trusting this information will be of help to you and assuring you of a remembrance in the Holy Father's prayers, I am

Yours sincerely,

Monsignore Gabriele Caccia

I googled this catechism document and found a summary on a very nice Catholic peace and social justice website. Article 2302-2317 includes information about respecting life, rejecting violence, addressing causes of war, morality in war, and the criteria for the ol' just war theory (which is, in my opinion, the Trojan Horse of the apocalypse).

So what's come out of this exercise in witnessing peace to other churches? Sigh - I'm not sure. But to badly paraphrase Rufus Jones, an act of love which has completely ambivalent or unquantifiable results is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that has measurable success. Because love is measured by its own fullness and takes its sweet time in producing results.

Bumper Sticker Politics

2006-05-28T20:57:00.000-04:00

Two months ago, Kwakersaur posted a link to an organization I'd never heard of -- Every Church a Peace Church. Two months ago, also, Tom Fox died in Iraq for asserting pacifist beliefs in a war situation. At the same time, while many churches openly supported the peace effort, too many condemned it. I was dismayed at the lack of peace orientation in Christian churches. Tom's giving of his life made me consider becoming more assertively pacifist.

So, if you've been following this blog at all, you'll know I've been writing letters to church leaders asking about their peace orientation. The replies have died off, so I'm assuming I won't be hearing from any more of them. Pope Benedict appears to have declined to reply. I'm crushed.

I contacted this organization Every Church a Peace Church and asked for a bumper sticker. Fortunately for me, they sent two, because the bumper sticker read: "Is your church a peace church?" instead of what you see in the picture. That's just a little too in-your-face for Canada. Or maybe it was just a little too assertive for me. Confrontational, even accusatory. I dunno - I wasn't comfortable with it.

So I cut-and-paste letters from one bumper sticker onto the other to make the current message, whichto me reads more like an idea or a query, something to think about or wish for. A wouldn't-it-be-great-if message or a how-it-should-be message. Getting the letters to line up was a bit of a trick, but it doesn't look too bad from here. I covered it all with clear mack-tack to hold it all in place.

And for the first time in my life, I put a bumper sticker on my car.

It seems like such a small gesture. Slack-tivism, as a friend of mine calls it. "It's the least I could do." Very literally.

But there it is on my car for all the world to see. My neighbours, my friends, dog walkers, shoppers. It's like I'm outed as a pacifist.

Every time I see it, I'm taken aback. It's as if I'm not used to it. I return to the parking lot, key in hand, and then I see it.

Bumper sticker.

For a second, I'm always surprised. Who put that there? I feel naked.

This is an army town. It's also a university town. There is one soldier in our Meeting, who served in Rwanda (and another from upstate NY who sneaks across the border to come to Meeting occasionally -- we don't even know his phone number).

My son's Cub leaders are ex-military. They would have seen my car by now. They're nice people. What do they make of it? Do they think I'm a nutcase? They always smile and talk very nicely to me. Is that for real, or is it because they've read the bumper sticker and want to show that they're open-minded?

It's been on my car for a few weeks now. Nobody has even mentioned it, not even my next-door neighbours, who are very kindly and chatty. Do people feel embarrassed by it? Are they afraid to mention it to me in case I go on a tirade?

I can't hide it because it's there.

Bumper sticker. Read who I am in five words or less.

It doesn't go away now. I need a special soap to remove it.

On the outside, I feel uncomfortable, nervous, apprehensive. But on the inside, deep down, something somewhere is dancing.

Da Vinci Code

2006-05-16T19:24:00.000-04:00

In the news today are reports of protests and calls for boycotts of the opening of the Da Vinci Code. Thailand, the Phillipines, Singapore, India, Greece. Probably the US Midwest too, somewhere. Hindu India has put a hold on the release (because in a country of 1 billion people, they've received 200 phone calls!). Even conservative Muslims in some countries have joined in the protest, I guess to help smooth over some of the excesses of the cartoon controversy and possibly to show some open-mindedness. They're saying nobody should ever be allowed to say anything against anybody's religion. Like I said, open-mindedness.

It's kind of funny, really. The media keep interviewing the actors and directors about the controversy. And I admire them all for keeping a straight face, giving solemn answers, refraining from rubbing their hands in glee. I mean, you can *buy* advertising like that.

I'm living proof. I normally wouldn't go to see a thriller. Heck, I normally wouldn't get out to see a movie at all. I didn't even go see The Passion of Christ (I hate when I already know the ending). But I'll probably go see the Da Vinci Code. I want to see what all the fuss was about. I've watched so many documentaries and newscasts and skimmed enough of my husband's copy of the book when he isn't reading it that now I'm intrigued. What a cool idea for a movie.

You see, advertising in action.

The advertisers -- I mean, the protesters -- are conservative Catholic, fundamentalist evangelical, and orthodox. They say that the movie disseminates an untruth, that it will poison people's minds, that it shows disrespect for their religion.

I say it's a movie, people. It's Hollywood. And I think deep down the protesters know that. You'd have to be living in the Pleistocene not to be aware that movies are entertainment. Nobody walked out of Jurassic Park looking for dinosaur eggs to hatch. Nobody protested that Honey I Shrunk the Kids was going to poison kids' minds about relativity. Movies are about the "willing suspension of disbelief." We all get that -- and so do the protesters. So I don't think that's what this protest is all about.

I don't buy the disrespect for religion argument either -- it seems too weak somehow. Does anyone really believe that respect for your religion mean that I'm not allowed to read books or watch movies about whatever my religion-slash-ideology is? I suspect these are just handy slogans to print on protest signs, maybe to drum up a bit of sympathy. They imply that this is a human rights issue somehow, that the protesters are victims of religious intolerance. It's kind of pitiful bleating, to my way of thinking.

But I'm not saying that they shouldn't be angry. They should. I mean, they really, really should. But I think they should be more clear about what they're angry about. Maybe they're not really clear themselves. So I'm going to say it here.

Here's my point -- The arrival of this movie on this theme at this period in our cultural evolution is not exactly an accident. Directors like Ron Howard take on movies that they know people are ready to see, maybe even hungering to see. This movie is not about what Jesus and Mary M did or didn't do, because in the modern world, who cares? The story is a direct attack on the conservative religious mindset. It's a howling of rage against the stranglehold that theology has had on truth. Never mind whether that truth is true, or whether it's a fiction, or whether people will believe it or not, or whether it will make our hands fall off. Stop looking at the plotline and look at the faces.

In this story, fundamentalism is the enemy. Opus Dei is the enemy. Theological suppression of truth is the theme. In this story, fiction and truth battle each other -- and it's orthodoxy that is the fiction.

This is no accident. There is a starkly modern theology to this movie. It says that truth is more holy than books and doctrines. That those who hold themselves up as holy often do so to the point of becoming evil. That a Jesus who was earthy and real is more sacred and believable than a Jesus who was starchy and pure. That fundamentalism and unquestioning orthodoxy is evil. That apostates are heroes. That the pervasive religious ideology of this age is truthful, curious, natural, human.

It's this unspoken message in the movie that should make conservatives shudder.

But I think what really makes them take to the streets is their dread of seeing themselves on the screen. Who would want to be portrayed as being cunning, power-hungry, and darkly efficient? Who would want to see themselves presented as the arch enemy of modern civilization, the stiflers of true inquiry, the upholders of ancient lies?

That's gotta hit a nerve or two.

But it ain't the sort of thing you'd want to put on a protest sign, now, is it?

Baptist Peace Testimony

2006-05-08T21:55:00.000-04:00

Today I received a letter from the American Baptist Churches USA to my letter regarding the need to speak out as peace churches. (See previous responses and letters)

It was like getting hit in the head. I've got Baptists all wrong. I am humbled. Here where I would have least expected it is a peace church. So much for stereotypes.

The letter was brief, but enclosed were three documents. The first two were the American Baptist Resolution the Abolition of War, and the American Baptist Policy Statement on Peace. These one-paragraph statements echo our own Peace Testimony.

We record our conviction that war as a method of settling international disputes is barbarous, wasteful, and manifestly contrary to every Christian ideal and teaching...

Therefore, the Christian community is compelled by its understanding of the gospel to seek peaceful solutions to international crises for the sake of abundant life...We will persistently seek alternatives to war as a means of settling international disputes.

The third document was a three-page document entitled the American Baptist Policy Statement on Violence (which can be accessed here), a powerful and deeply moving discussion of violence. Violence in their definition is not limited to war: in fact, war is merely the effect of a history and culture of violence.

Modern U. S. society was born through violent ways, through the subjugation and exploitation of many of its peoples. The multiple horrors of the destruction of native peoples, the enslavement of African peoples, and the exploitation of immigrants are major strands of a web of economic, cultural, political, and societal commitments that have inevitably led to violence.

The culture of violence is manifested both in the pervasiveness of overt acts of physical force and in the more subtle dynamics by which harm is persistently done to people. This culture of violence is reflected in such ways as: the glorified role of violence in historic frontier communities; violence in the family; violence of sexual abuse, incest and rape; violence in the workplace; violence in the schools; violence in the streets; violence in the criminal justice system; violence in the use of guns, knives, and other weapons of assault; violence in the military; violence in war; violence in the marketing of weapons; violence of industries that profit by harming others; violence in the media; violence in music; violence of hate crimes; violence of the systematic destruction of the earth; and the existence of nuclear weapons, wherein we have seized the divine prerogative to determine the destiny of humanity.

Wow. That about covers it.

The paper goes on to discuss how Christians become "numbed by [violence's] frequency and enculturation in our lives." It presents a list of biblical reasons why Christians cannot support violence and must work to dismantle violence as a "witness that affirms the well-being of the creation, peacemaking, and life."

Then the paper lists the prophetic calls of American Baptists:

1. To be peacemakers, builders of God's shalom;

2. To work for the prevention of violence, the peaceful resolution of conflicts and just reconciliation;

3. To advocate for a more responsible media;

4. To challenge ideologies, structures, politics and policies that lead to violence.

The paper ends with a list of tasks:

1. To call on our churches to preach the life-transforming power of Christ, applying this message concretely to our tendency toward violence;

2. To educate ourselves on the constructive use of conflict;

3. To educate ourselves about the violence in the media and culture and to advocate for corrective measures as part of our responsibility as disciples of Christ;

4. To facilitate the development of conflict-resolution teams, violence prevention strategies and nonviolent means of political and social change;

5. To promote the inclusion of victims in the process of creating solutions to issues of violence;

6. To identify and utilize effective models of healing for those who have been victimized by violence;

7. To advocate for further regulations on the manufacturing and use of life-threatening products;

8. To join with other organizations to act locally and nationally to curtail violence.
9. To avoid investments in companies that are involved in the manufacture and/or distribution of life-threatening products.

I've read Jimmy Carter's books and listened to Bruce Cockburn's songs all my life, and I always wondered why they seemed so, well, cool despite being Baptist. But I see their compassion and devotion to Jesusian principles in these statements.

I'll never tell a Baptist joke again.

Me and My Big Mouth

2006-04-24T14:43:00.000-04:00

At MM yesterday, a subject that has been kicking around on the Agenda for a couple of months finally reached discussion. I had brought it up -- the need for a regular Sunday morning discussion after Meeting, based on someone's spiritual reading. Those present at MM really liked the idea and saw it as having potential for drawing us all to deeper communion and richer spiritual growth. They decided we should "try" the idea for two weeks in May (Meeting members are great believers in trials of new things). They asked for a volunteer to cover those two weeks.

In a moment or weakness or enthusiasm, I volunteered.

(Mental note in the future to bring duct tape to MM to fasten my hands to the chair)

So now I have to find something to read so that I can be prepared to lead something.

I've given it a bit of thought (emphasis on bit). Our Meeting has never really discussed much of anything, except through worship-sharing type dialogue. I sense a fear of talking among us, partly because we have a few strong personalities who might just blurt out something, partly because we don't know what language to use that won't put out someone, and partly because our library is locked upstairs in an attic closet so we never do any spiritual reading. So I thought I should devote the two weeks (20 minutes each week) to a discussion about language and communication about spiritual topics.

Great -- except that I don't have any books or booklets on that topic. I grazed our little library in the pitch-black attic for a few minutes after MM closed, but the handful of pamphlets I took away don't look too promising.

I do have Deborah Haight's "Meeting" pamphlet, which I hope to go through more closely tomorrow. It tends to have far-reaching applications. I also have my old copy of "Jacob the Baker." Of course, there's the bible, but... eee... not a great choice for a first discussion with this group.

But can anyone of you of the great Quaker Literati suggest anything else? The book doesn't have to be specifically Quaker, as long as it talks about the problem of words, the Babel of spiritual discussion in a world of pluralism and politeness, or something else interesting and vital and inspiring -- even just one chapter.

It has to be a book I can get my hands on relatively quickly.

Yeah, me and my big mouth...

Another Letter

2006-04-19T18:26:00.000-04:00

Today's letter was from P Borgdorff, Ex. Dir. of the Christian Reformed Church based in Kalamazoo, MI, USA. It was a personal letter, one that seemed to wrestle with my questions (see previous posts).

Although he stated firmly that his church was "officially committed to the 'just war' position," I was fascinated that he preceded this statement with another that stated that "we live in a sinful and broken world, and it is unrealistic to make generalized statements [i.e., that war is incompatible with the teachings of Jesus] that do not take into account the complexities of our world."

There is a leap of logic (or faith?), a chasm of difference, between these two ideas. The two statements together seem to suggest that the 'just war' idea is part of human sinfulness. Because we are sinful, we end up creating wars, and so as a result, we are obliged to participate in them. Sort of we make our bed, so we must lie in it. But I wonder if this juxtaposition reveals a subconscious awareness that the 'just war' is not so just after all. It suggests to me that perhaps there is within conservative churches a discomforting awareness that the 'just war' idea belongs in the box marked SIN.

He goes on to state that "we believe that the state has been given the power of the sword, and as such, must wage war against tyranny and is obligated to protect its citizenry." Here is the not-so-subtle jihadi sentiment that runs like an eerie thread through much of conservative Christianity. We in the West believe that our wars are just, that we are fighting tyranny. Every war we have entered, God has been on our side. And like us, the Muslim insurgents believe their war is just too and that they are fighting tyranny. Allah is on their side.

Everyone believes that their war is just. Everyone believes that their enemies are tyrants. Nobody ever stands up and says, "All right, all right! We give up. You're right -- we're the tyrants. Your war against us is quite fair." I mean, nobody does this.

That's why there is war. War is about two sides each thinking they are right and the other is wrong. It's about miscommunication, misunderstanding, suspicion, fear. The truth is that neither side is right, especially at the instant they pick up weapons. And I suspect most people realize that too, but they hate to admit it. Who wants to admit that we in the West are tyrants? That we treat the rest of the world unjustly? That our wars are about exploitation of others for our own purposes? That maybe the jihadis have a point? -- or had one, that is, till they picked up weapons too.

Why do so few people see that?

My husband and I argue about this from time to time. He says war stopped the Nazis.

I respond, "But did it stop Naziism?"

Silence.

He counters: "It stopped Hitler."

"Did it?" I ask. "Why then, whenever we see another dictator do we say he's another Hitler? We say Saddam Hussein was a Hitler. We say Somoza was a Hitler. Idi Amin was a Hitler. Pol Pot is a Hitler. If war stopped Hitler, then why does he keep coming back?"

Because you can't kill the devil with a gun or a sword. It comes back, again and again, in different forms and by different names. But it always comes back -- because it is not defeated. To defeat the devil, you must disarm it, subdue it. Then there will be no more Hitler.

Hitler is not a person, and Naziism is not a historical political movement. They are both paths. Both Hitler and the Nazis believed they were right and just in what they were doing. They chose violence as a means of ending the oppression of their people after the cruelty of the previous war; and once they did, they placed themselves firmly in the hands of the one who delights in evil. Whoever chooses violence does the same, regardless of their goals.

I mused for a while: if I were to respond to Peter Borgdorff's letter, what kind of letter would I write? I think it would be a story of some kind, a fable about Hitlers and Nazis and just wars and jihadis. It would show that justice looks different depending where you stand. It would show how all sides all read from the same script when they justify harming each other.

But responding to the responses to my original letters was not my original intention. The task I had set out to do was simply to sow seeds. And perhaps I did with P Borgdorff. For he ended his letter: "But I will further reflect on your point in the days ahead."

That's good enough for me.

Sowing Seeds

2006-04-03T16:00:00.000-04:00

Today I received the first three responses to my letters to church leaders about the need for all churches to become peace churches compatable with the teachings of Jesus. (See my March 23 post) Two of these letters were one-pagers; one was a bundle of papers. All were written directly by person in question and signed in pen.

Quite honestly, I didn't expect to receive any replies, except maybe a proselytizing pamphlet. So I feel quite honoured.

As to the content of the letters, here are brief summaries.

President JE Kaiser of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada gave firm but noncommittal response. He avoided referencing Jesus' teachings and instead focused what his church members believed was right or wrong :

There may well be some of our members who would agree with you that all military action is wrong. I suspect that the majority would believe that the use of deadly force is morally right under some conditions and not under other conditions. As to particular instances of military force exercised by Canada, the United States, or other nations around the world, I suspect our members would hold an even wider variety of personal views. We would encourage them to form these views prayerful [sic] based on the teachings of Jesus, which include the entire Bible. [emphasis mine]
JE Kaiser, Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada

As emphasized, JE Kaiser ends the letter by stating that the teachings of Jesus refers to the entire bible (perhaps in oblique response to my statement that war was incompatable with the teachings of Jesus). This extraordinarily broad interpretation of what Jesus taught t may explain why conservative-theology churches, who strive to be very biblical, cannot distinguish between Jesus' actual teachings and those of people who came before or after him-- or even those who contradict him. I suspect what John Kaiser meant was that the whole bible is the Word of God; and since Jesus is God, then the whole bible is Jesus' teachings. As a result, his church can assign more weight to statements in the Old Testament or in the pseudo-Pauline letters than to Jesus' teachings about turning the other cheek, forgiving seventy times seven, and loving your enemies. Or could it mean something else?

WD Morrow, general superintendent of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, also gave a one-page response to my letter. His was a somewhat nuanced look at the idea of "righteous war," which I found very thoughtful. But the letter ended with a suprisingly emphatic "civic religion" defence of non-action on Jesus' teachings:

...as you know, there are people who in the name of religion advocate the so-called "righteous war." They define certain values and sitautions which they believe must be defended--by the sword if necessary. The problem of course is that sinful human beings have no proven ability to discern the just occasion for taking up arms.

...Respectfully, I must say that while I do not disagree with many of the comments you have made in your letter, I do not believe it is appropriate for us to make a public declaration on the wars which are presently being waged, including fronts where Canadian men and women are following the military instructions of our government.
WD Morrow, Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada

To me, this response suggests that Pentecostals may not be interested in real-life applications of Jesus' teachings, except as they pertain to soul salvation. But this interpretation may not be fair to the wider theology of this church.

The final letter came from the United Church of Canada, through moderator P Short. This letter had attachments which included copies of letters and press releases calling for the end of the occupation of Iraq, the disregard for human rights in Iraqi prisons, and support for the Christian Peacemakers being held hostage. The letter itself was very brief. However, toward the end, P Short expressed what I sensed was a disquiet and a spiritual ache about the issue of pacifism:

I am aware that all of the above does not address the spirit of your compelling letter. Please know that I respect your point of view and long for the day when we will not be reading the kind of headline that I read in the paper this morning.
P Short, United Church of Canada

Maybe the pope will write tomorrow.

Dear Pope Benedict

2006-03-23T13:51:00.000-05:00

Pope Benedict XVI
Apostolic Palace
00120 Vatican City

Dear Holy Father of the Roman Catholic Church

It has been several days now since the death of Tom Fox, one of the four Christian Peacemakers abducted in Iraq last year. In many parts of the world, Christians have grieved his death and have worried about the fate of the other three Christian hostages. They, like me, have been awed and humbled by their powerful example of the spirit of Jesus.

We live in a world crippled by war – and not just by war, but by justifications of violence and revenge, partly by Christians. Churches throughout the world have been caught up in this spirit of war and vengeance, thereby doing great harm to the spirit of Christ.

Is it not time for the whole Christian church to formally proclaim that war is incompatible with Jesus’ teachings?

Christ taught that we must use kindness, compassion, and wisdom to turn our enemies into friends. He taught us to use pacifism and forgiveness, not violence and revenge. There is no end that is worth the cost of war.

I realize that most Catholics are peace-loving people and work throughout their lives to reduce war and suffering. They are responding to the spirit of Christ in their lives and to the gospels they have read. But the world desperately needs a formal declaration that war is contrary to the spirit of Jesus. Then those churches that do support war, either actively or passively, would be pressed to justify their position. I believe in time such a proclamation would bring the world closer to real long-term peace.

Your position as leader of the Roman Catholic Church is very powerful, even for non-Catholic churches. If the Roman Catholic Church were to proclaim that war and violence is contrary to the spirit of Jesus, then this would have an impact on all churches. Just as Pope John Paul tried to stop the war in Iraq and tried to bring the world’s attention to the plight of the world’s poor, you can use your role to bring the world to greater peace.

Please reflect on the spirit of this message. Thank you.

In peace,

Mailed today, along with similar letters to leaders of other churches in Canada and the US, before I heard that the other three hostages were freed.

Tom Fox: 1952-2006

2006-03-11T09:39:00.000-05:00

His light shines for me. But what heartbreak to lose such a person.

David speaks more eloquently: In Memoriam.

Free Will

2006-03-10T17:44:00.000-05:00

It's March Break, a time when families head off to warmer climes or barge in on relatives to share some time together. We were supposed to go visit my sister and play with the babies. But my son's medications started pooping out four weeks ago, so instead we are spending the week transitioning him onto a new drug regime. He has ADHD, Asperger's and an anxiety disorder, a heavy load for a 10-year-old to carry. His life is stress, agitation, fear, and insecurity. All we want for him now is some quality of life, some peace and calm in his days.

And maybe, if we're lucky, in ours.

I worry about him and about his future. What will his adult life be like? How much of who he is is this psychological imbalance? Can we separate that imbalance from who he is, or is it all one in the same?

And like him, are we at all separate from our biochemistry, or is our biochemistry who and what human beings ultimately are?

More to the point, how much free will do we really have to be good people, rational people, worthy of heaven and rewards? How much can our will guide our lives? I know we all want to say pip pip old chap chin up I think I can I think I can and all that. Certainly that's the dominant philosophy in the West. The platitude answer would be that everyone lives by choices they make. And twenty years ago, I know I would have said free will all the way. But in those twenty years since, I've seen the complexity of life and wonder if we aren't deluding ourselves.

The number of people I know on hormone replacement therapies, not for health reasons, but for mental sanity reasons. The number I know on antidepressants caused by sudden changes in chemistry (like menopause or surgery). The number I know who have developed anxiety disorders, bipolar disorders, autism spectrum disorders. The number who are angry and irritable all the time. The ones who are never angry, even when they should be. The ones who are constant over-achievers, always doing more, spurred by metabolisms that won't stop. Others who can't spare the energy to do more than the minimum. Others who have been damaged by childhood traumas that they never escape throughout their adult lives. Others who have been through hell and seem okay.

My aunt, who had a severely deformed child who was only supposed to live 6 years but ended up dragging on for 12. Her life of suffering, of putting on a brave face, of giving up everything that had been her life before, of losing her health, then succumbing to a slow-growing cancer caused by years of stress that took her life at 58.

Free will? Or were the Calvinists right?

I studied predestination in university religion courses. I thought then that it was kind of nutty, this belief that certain people are destined before their birth to be saved, while others are doomed from the same moment. Of course, Calvinists based this on a notion that since God knows everything, ergo God would know the future (an example of anthropomorphic thinking about God: see prior posts). But perhaps in their pre-scientific-world way, what the Calvinists saw was similar to what I see -- that most (all?) people have minimal control over their lives. The Calvinists put that down to God's will. In our age, we put it down to science. But the result is the same: that free will is limited.

Sure, certain people seem able to make the best of a bad situation, while others make the worst of a decent one. Yet is there something in their chemical makeup that pushes them in these directions? If they have friends that tend to guide them on the better path, is this because there is something in their make-up that prods them to create and maintain these friendships?

If we could find out who we our in our biochemical, DNA/RNA make-up, would we really want to know? Maybe it's better just to believe that we do have free will, even if we don't.

When I was at university, I had the fortune or misfortune of participating in a psychology study (I needed cash). The purpose, as I found out later, was to look at personality groups. In the debriefing session, I was told I was in the personality group called Survivors. It seems that regardless of outward appearances, principles, or motivations, Survivors ultimately and always make decisions in favour of survival. While other groups might lie down and die rather than give up a principle, or others might give up everything to fight against a adversarial situations, Survivors regroup, pull up the ladder, protect the food stores, do whatever they need to.

I cringe inwardly. That doesn't bode well for my Quakerly pacifist principles.

The nineteenth-century Quakers who didn't help out with the Underground Railway, the ones who withdrew, ignored the plight of the slaves, kept their stores running, kept their children fed, worried out their public image -- are these my real spiritual forebears, instead of the Lucretia Motts and John Woolmans whose sermons and journals I read? Were these weak-kneed Quakers just doing what their DNA was programmed to do, living out their biochemistry?

Am I, as a Survivor, only idealistic because the times are good? If times were bad, would my principles flee and Survivor DNA take over?

I want to believe that I believe in my principles. I want to believe that I believe in free will. On so many levels, I do believe. Otherwise, so much of what I have come to believe becomes nonsense.

Ah, but what I see, what I see.

South Dakota Sharia

2006-03-07T08:11:00.000-05:00

The news became surreal today, as if somehow it hadn't already been surreal enough.

Sometimes when I watch CNN, I have a sense that I'm looking at a nation that never quite made it to modern democracy. It's the nation that invented modern democracy for the world to take up, but then failed itself to maintain it, develop it, bring it to its full potential -- like healthcare, eliminating the death penalty, maternity benefits, respect for plurality and differences, all those hallmarks of modern democracy that are weirdly absent. The abortion debate that was considered and decided in virtually all other western democracies still rages here like a fresh wound. The nation's constitution is the same one that was written in the 1700s. Things got stuck and didn't grow. Meanwhile, the world changed. Maybe the effort of maintaining super-power pulled too much thought and energy from democracy. I can't quite figure it.

On the news, the governor gave his reasons. He wanted to protect the vulnerable.

Protect the vulnerable.

With one sweep of a pen, he has brought South Dakota back to the days of backroom abortions, women dead on motel floors.

Who decides who is vulnerable?

What about persistently low incomes and systemic barriers to financial independence? What about those who have been shuffled from foster home to foster homes all their lives so that they don't know what touch means anymore, or those whose bodies have been bought and sold, exchanged for someone's kicks or someone's cocaine or for what someone told them was love? What about those who are too old, too young, too mentally infirm, too broken or weak to bear more burdens? Those whose jobs will be taken away, who have no health care, who have too many other mouths to feed? Those who have been raped or defiled or taken? Those who die or become physically damaged through pregnancy and childbirth? Those with youth, intelligence, and a promising future, like their male counterparts, but whose birth control can fail and push them into a life of poverty, unlike their male counterparts?

These women will never have the power or wealth to influence public decision-making, never have the bus fare to get to a rally or demonstration. Who decides who gets to be vulnerable?

Oh, no, no, this is not about protecting the vulnerable. This is about sharia.

Sharia is religious law. It's based on the rules and values of religion, not open to rational discussion. It is imposed by religious people in power and does not respect laws, traditions, rights, or differences. It is opportunistic, sly, watching for the right moment to strike. It cares for nothing but itself.

In any sharia, women come last. They are told what they must suffer, what rights they can have, who is unclean and who is holy. They take a backseat to the men who sign the documents into law, who run the religions, who want their exclusive power uncontested. They take a backseat to the children, even to the scraps of DNA that create children. All these are greater than woman. She is the least, the last.

Sharia is the failure of democracy, of rights, of reason.

We who live beyond the US borders watch the debates in the US in great amazement. What we see is a culture spiralling out of control. The traditional divisions between the judicial, legislative and executive functions are gone. Laws and rights that have taken decades or centuries to create are now at the mercy of groups with agendas. Guantanamo Bay hangs like an offshore flag to the erosion of a culture of integrity and rights. Any law, any document can be ignored or overruled. Power rules, nothing else. More sharia is on its way.

Like you, I watched yet another man in history sign a document to remove women's self-determination. Inside, I wept for American women and the struggles they face. But I also felt a cold shiver, echoes of The Handmaid's Tale, that book I wish I'd never read.

Please God, don't let it come here.

Creator Dude

2006-03-01T13:05:00.000-05:00

Last night, at our weekly reading and discussion group, we got onto the topic of concepts of the Creator. Some in the group considered the Light Within more of an abstraction of a great life force. Others saw it as a distinct thing of creative power. Some thought of Supreme Being as a verb, and some, as a noun. By this time, we were way off topic, so we just went with this idea.

BH talked about a painting class he'd once taken, where everyone had to paint the same collection of objects on the centre table. What he marvelled at was how everyone's paintings were completely different, yet all very clearly were paintings of the same set of objects. By the end of the course, he could look at a painting and know which person had painted it -- through the light and tone, the brush strokes, the favourite colours and textures.

That of the creator gets left in the creation. BH compared this to his concept of the Creator Being. We can't know It or see It, but Its creation bears its imprint. We carry that of the Creator in us, as creations ourselves.

William Littleboy in the old blue Faith and Practice (#82) says "God is above all the God of the normal." The Creator is invisible, soundless, beyond senses, inseparable from any part of creation because we lack the means to separate It out from what It made. We can see that of the Creator when we study creation, sit with it, rub against it. Nowhere is one more close to the Creator than when canoeing or showshoeing.

We talked about the problems that occur with images of the Creator. The fallacy is to assume the Creator is anything like us: that the Creator feels like us or thinks like us -- or feels or thinks at all. This is the heresy of anthropomorphism. It leads to more heresies: God as Bogey Man. God as Santa Claus. God who is always on our side in any war. God who has a Chosen People above all other people (usually ourselves). God who wants us to harm our enemies. God who worships our Bible or Koran or our rules for living. God who loves or hates, wants or doesn't want, says or doesn't say, does or doesn't do.

The greatest heresy of all is to think that the Creator in any way resembles what is described in the Bible or Koran. All we can glean is the ideas of the individual writer-creators of the stories -- their desires, their dreams, their experiences, their fears, their favourite images and words. Their stamp is in the stories. The Creator's stamp is in creation.

We decided that the truest and least erroneous image of the Creator that humans can come up with is that of an amorphous blob, an amoeba, a great glowing humming sphere. The image has to be so different from our experience of ourselves as to defy our projecting of our own personalities, shortcomings, and desires onto it. It would be hard to fight a war over a blob.

So then what can we know about the Creator? Assuming we conceive of the Creator as a being, we can see flickers of It in creation itself.

The Creator's favourite colours are green and blue. Its favourite shapes are the circle and the elongated ovoid. It likes numbers, especially big ones, but also 2, 4, 5, and 10. It loves sound, tonality, and rhythm. It likes things to spin and circle, bounce and roll. It likes yin-yang balances, complementary opposites. If favours brushstrokes of many colours that blend to form one great mass of a single colour, like hairs on a head, or pine needles in a fuzzy forest.

Life Cycle

2006-02-23T14:06:00.000-05:00

An anglican (episcopalian) priest friend of mine once told me about an anglican nun he'd once met, one of the very last ones in Canada. I guess it's no secret: nuns are a dying breed, even in the more nun-friendly catholic church. But anglicans didn't have many to begin with.

He chatted with this woman for a while and then asked her how she felt about her order dying.

She answered that anything that is truly alive has to die some day. The death of a religious institution is just proof that it was alive. It means it has lived out its purpose in life and now must make room for other purposes. She had no regrets, no fears about it.

Her response is not what we would expect. We expect institutions to rage against the dying of the light, to do anything to stop a downward spiral. Death of a religious institution is Bad. It's a sign of failure. There's institutional panic, lots of sermons (and blogs), a mad groping for Solutions. Anything but death.

In the Faustian sense, we could instead sell our souls to become immortal. And many religions do: they give up their faith and replace it with belief and strictures and rules. They place limits on love and compassion, draw careful circles around Jesus' teachings, nail things to the floor with doctrines and books. They allow nothing to be fluid or to flow freely from the spirit; everything mystic is suspect; the past is holy, the present is defiled.

At a certain point, rigor mortis sets in. IMHO some religions are walking cadavres. But never on all levels. I suspect the Spirit has a way of working despite our institutions, rather than because of them.

But maybe there are other options than death and soul-selling. I'm willing to consider that religions could die and be reborn. We let the old, tired-out ways of the religion fall into meaninglessness, then from the ashes find something to create a new thing. It ends up keeping the same name, but it's really something entirely different.

Maybe death and rebirth can overlap - such that at any time, someone could always say "This kind of Quakerism/Christianity is dying," when really, just a part of it is -- and maybe for a good reason. Something is always dying, something else is always growing. Some people focus on the dying bits, others focus on the growing bits.

I'm thinking about what this all means for Quakerism.

Europe and Christianity

2006-02-14T09:14:00.000-05:00

Recently, in the midst of the "cartoon controversy" (so aptly named!), a Turkish editorial stated that ‘If Jesus Christ was Depicted as a Terrorist, Europe Would Take to Streets’.

This I highly doubt.

Europe has the lowest religious-attendance rate in the world. In some countries, it's lower than 5 percent. For missionaries, Europe the toughest gig on the planet. Europeans would probably write these anti-Christian cartoons themselves.

I recently read an article about Christianity and Democracy at intelligent russian written by Vladimir Kantor. It explores (from a Russian perspective) the Christian roots of European democracy, maintaining that modern democracy is a Christian invention that rests on certain Christian teachings. Interesting -- I'm not sure I buy his whole argument, but he has some quotable ideas:

The Church (institutionalized Christianity, as it were) played a tremendously important yet dual role: on the one hand, it brought up the nations in the Christian spirit and carried Christian ideas and intuitions into the depths of the masses; but on the other, Christianity’s original doctrines gave way to politically and venally profitable theories and an alliance with the powers that be, while the vibrant religious life gave way to dogmas…

Totalitarianism was essentially an anti-Christian and therefore an anti-European movement that set up, in opposition to reason, a mythologically constructed consciousness that rested on the masses’ impulsive desire to live in non-freedom, without problems…

It may be pertinent to place side by side two utterances by Stepun (who repeatedly spoke of democracy being utterly powerless in Russia and Germany): “I definitely and fully reject any ideocracy of the communist, fascist, racist or Eurasian persuasion, i.e. any violence inflicted on people’s life. <…> I firmly believe that Europe’s parliamentarianism supposedly ‘past its ideological prime’ still contains a more profound idea than the notorious ideocracy. So what if contemporary West European parliamentarianism constitutes degeneration of freedom; so what if contemporary bourgeois democracy is increasingly sliding into philistinism. The ideocracy about to replace it is far worse because it represents the birth of violence and clearly gravitates toward Bolshevist Satanism.”…

Democracy is none other than a political projection of this supreme humanist faith of the last four centuries. Together with the entire culture of humanism it establishes the human personality as the highest value of life, and the form of autonomy as a form of action obedient to God.”…

There is only one thing that can save democracy and freedom of the individual: a religious sanction for cultural values. But to do that the Church, too, has to be free instead of being torn apart by confessional quarrels, to say nothing of smearing itself by servile kowtowing before the powers that be. As for those who feel Christian, the main thing for them is “not to betray the religious meaning of freedom.”…

At the moment we are witnessing the construction of a new global civilization, so far the most successful, that started with European-Christian culture. Its extensive spread proved possible as a result of the secularization of the “Christian world” (which until the 15^th century was identified with Europe). Having fulfilled its role of teacher, Christianity exerted a beneficial influence on human mentality within its radiation field, inculcating in it the humanist norms of behavior and morality. It would seem that Christian ideas have taken root in European civilization forming its subsoil, for without understanding Christian symbolism it is impossible to understand the most sublime achievements of literature, art or music. But the experience of the 20^th century shows that this referred only to the best of art, while the soil remained perfectly pagan. The revolt of the masses rejected Christianity falling back on the gods of the soil...

Well, you get the idea. It's a long article, so you get just the best nuggets here.

If the gist (and really, only the gist) of what Vladimir is saying it on the mark, then for European-style democracy to survive, it needs a spiritual strength. But for that strength to "take" in modern European culture, it needs to combine humanism (considered the anti-Christ by N.Am. fundamentalist Christians!) with the teachings of Jesus, and then together with a culturally relevant form of of worship + spiritual exploration + community. It couldn't be top-down (Europe has too much experience with totalitarianism), dogmatic (ditto here), or smells-and-bells (too anti-intellectual).

In other words, trying to convert Europeans to the kind of Christianity that many North Americans would accept (dogmatic, top-down, book-centred, liturgical/euphoric, nonhumanistic-- and never mind what this says about North Americans) won't work. So mebbe them missionaries should try a different tack -- like how about asking Europeans what kind of Christianity they would want?

On the flip side, the most church-attending nation in the world in the United States. The state of democracy there? Maybe Christian church attendance isn't enough to support democracy.

Clearcut Blogging

2006-02-10T22:09:00.000-05:00

I have been by to visit the Quaker blogs and have been reading them, especially the ones that Martin posts. But I haven't been doing much on this blog since I decided two weeks ago to wade into political blogging.

Gasp, yes, I've become a moonlighter-blogger.

I wanted to do a sort of guerrilla blogging -- you know, drop by a variety of politically oriented blogs and give my comments, seed some new ideas, nothing too strong, just to roll the ball in a different (read: Green Party) direction. I was feeling that for change to happen (read: get our vote tally up over 5%), we have to change the agenda. And the place to do that was the political blogs. So I'm in hip-deep, wading around through the muck of Canadian politics (and rather mucky it is these days!), trying to walk cheerfully recognizing that of God in everyone.

However, to be quite honest, it's harder than I thought it would be. It's a bit of an effort going through the Blogging Tories site to find topics I can comment on gently and persuasively without getting myself flamed or torpedoed. All I can say is I'm glad these people are now allowed to own guns.

I also go to the Blogging Dippers (New Democratic Party) or Progressive Blogs Canada (basically Liberal Party, but I managed to get listed as an affiliate -- ha, successful guerrilla action). They're not so bad, but they seem content to follow the trail of dust behind the leaders, complaining constantly but never stopping to think or talk about something new, maybe a few levels deeper than what's on CBC.

Hm, how to seed ideas, how to comment gently but unoffensively, maybe with a touch of humour. It's a tricky business.

Maybe I just need to develop some psychic callouses. I find I retreat to the humorous sites, the ones who make fun of an issue with a well-placed sentence or two.

Alas, I am a lazy blog guerrilla.

Anyway, that's why I'm not here writing so much.

However, on the other hand, your ministry to me over the past few months, which has spurred some ministry of mine to my meeting, has borne some fruit. A mid-week meeting to study Quaker writings has been meeting now at my house for two weeks. There is talk of incorporating it into Sunday morning twice a month after M4W so that all attenders can deepen their spiritual learning and journeying. So thanks for your little nudges in that direction.

And it looks as if we've found a new meetinghouse option -- YAY! -- a "servage house" attached to a very old United Church downtown with a dwindling congregation. We hope to hear from them soon whether we can move in.

Okay, that's it for today. Back to Clearcut Blogging for me.

I am a Christian

2006-01-31T21:43:00.000-05:00

I am a Christian.

There, I've said it, I'm sure for the first time. Now why was it so hard to say -- as if I'm at an AA meeting or something? Why do I trip over the word? Why is it scary-feeling, as if I'm letting go of my brain?

When I first came to Quakers, I came to get away from all that. I remember my former meeting giving me a Faith and Practice book when I was accepted into membership. And I liked the book -- except for all the stuff about Jesus. And the stuff about God was a bit hard to take too, but I could afford to be more generous about it. Yet over time, I pencil-marked the book up, and even some of the Jesus parts got underlining.

Some years later, John Lampen's book, Twenty Questions About Jesus, that got me over the worst of the choking at the J word. It was the first reasoned look at Jesus' life and teachings I'd ever read. And I realized there were options here, that theology didn't require a lobotomy, that people like me did consider themselves Christian.

Another turning point was reading Stephen Mitchell's book, The Gospel According to Jesus, some years after that. Here I saw the humanity of Jesus, the Jewish boy born of an unwed mother, whose wounds became his Light. He became a person, a life story I could relate to. I decided then that I liked him.

After that, it became easier to face the words and ideas of Christianity. I could distinguish between the Jesus of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the Christ of John, Paul, and others -- and the FrankenGod of the Old Testament.

What tipped this over the edge was an article that Richard sent me (via this blog) on the difference between Christian and Jewish ideas about evil and forgiveness. And as I read it, I became awash in the awareness that I am a Christian, that I was part of the Christian side of his essay.

Never mind the theology. Never mind the rites of passage, salvation schemes, and unthinking dogmatism. I belong to this part of the world's spiritual journey, this chapter started by Jesus deliberately or nondeliberately, whose teachings have shaped us to work miracles in the world. The teachings had secretly, over time, without my knowing, become precious to me, a beacon that guides me.

It just kind of snuck up on me.

Space Needed

2006-01-29T10:19:00.000-05:00

Our meeting had finally decided it was time to move, although late enough that the large group of newcomers had faded away and we were back down to our usual number.

Then we found the perfect space: a small, abandoned Christian Science church that had been bought up by a nonprofit that only used it on weekdays. It was the right amount of space in a nice neighbourhood surrounded by parks.

But after weeks of back-and-forth, they've informed us that if they rent space to us, Revenue Canada will revoke their charitable status. In short, according to the law, nonprofits can't rent out their property.

This is a major blow. Now we're back to Square One.

Our meeting isn't large enough to buy a building right now, although the city is large enough to support a large meeting. The problem has been the space we've been in: too small to allow the group to grow. That's why we're looking for larger space.

So we have to rent or enter some kind of shared arrangement. And it has to be on Sunday mornings because of the number of out-of-towners and border-crossers who come to the meeting.

Any suggestions where to look? What kind of organizations to contact?

Where do renting Quakers usually meet?

Thanks for any suggestions. I'm coming up dry here.

Jesus' Teachings

2006-01-27T18:11:00.000-05:00

Don't be afraid.

Don’t be afraid to teach your elders.

Don’t be afraid to befriend the sick and the poor, the prostitutes, the tax-collectors, and the lepers.

Don’t be afraid to work miracles.

Don’t be afraid to walk on water.

Don’t be afraid to say in the light what you hear in the dark.

Don’t be afraid to welcome sinners to your table.

Don’t be afraid to drop your nets and follow me.

Don’t be afraid to live like the lilies of the field.

Don’t be afraid to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Don’t be afraid to turn the other cheek.

Don’t be afraid to forgive seventy times seven.

Don’t be afraid to speak truth to power.

And don’t be afraid to die.

Grounded

2006-01-20T20:14:00.000-05:00

The topic of being grounded in faith has passed around a few blogs lately. I've been thinking about it and came up with this list.

Why Quaker silent-meetings often don’t feel grounded in faith:

Reason #1.Because newcomers can teach and speak as much as seasoned Friends. Newcomer ministry adds freshness to the meeting and allows newcomers to grow into their spirituality. But it also means that many who teach and speak have no grounding in faith. They haven’t read books on religious theologies and teachings, haven’t thumbed occasionally through scriptures, haven’t learned Quaker and Christian history. Sure, this adds freshness. But it doesn’t strengthen a sense of a meeting’s being grounded in faith.

Reason #2. Because many silent-meeting Friends are not actively learning; thus, we are not on a faith journey: we are staying where we are. Quakers don’t have clergy, so the onus is on us to keep learning. We need to read, discuss, and consider new ideas, especially those we have rejected in the past and those that touch a nerve. We need to become our own spiritual authority. If a silent meeting doesn’t have adequate outlets for such learning, the meeting may end up feeling not grounded in faith.

Reason #3. Because many silent-meeting Friends are dedicated seekers without being dedicated finders. We welcome questions and sincerely probe our own spirituality, but we distrust answers, even the ones we find ourselves. It’s as if a part of us is saying, “I want to believe in something, but I’ll be damned if I’ll believe that!” We’re on a spiritual treadmill that we can’t escape. This can leave a meeting feeling ungrounded in faith.

Reason #4. Because faith is letting go, and silent-meeting Quakers are intellectuals. (Do any Quakers have less than a university education these days?) We know how to think and weight evidence, how to balance and test, but we don’t know how to free-fall, to trust in something unknowable, to follow something unseeable. The product of our rational age, something inside us whispers, “Mustn’t.” And we don’t.

Reason #5. Because we don't get to know each other. Anonymity can interfere in knowing one another in "that which is eternal," and that can in turn prohibit a "being known" to one another through the Spirit in the silence. (Thanks to Liz for this one)

Reason #6: ...?

Sons of Al Qaeda

2006-01-14T16:34:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the Khadr family, mainly because Omar Khadr is so much in the news lately.

Omar Khadr is the Canadian boy who has been held in Guantanamo Bay and is now on military trial. He was taken prisoner in Afghanistan when he was 15. He is 19 now. He has been charged with causing the death of an American soldier and may face life in prison, though the prosecution originally was arguing for the death penalty. Omar is in the news daily, at least here in Canada, as we await what unfolds for him. For reasons that probably had to do with the Mad Cow Disease controversy and softwood lumber dispute, the Canadian government did not negotiate this boy’s release, as Britain and Australia did for their citizens, much to our shame.

Omar is one of six children of Ahmed Said Khadr, an Al-Qaeda member who was killed in a shoot-out in Pakistan. Ahmed Khadr was Canadian, though he was living in Afghanistan with his wife and family. They lived in close connection with the bin Laden family.

Ahmed’s wife Maha has returned to Canada with the youngest son, Abdul Karim, who was injured in the same shootout that killed his father. He is paralysed from the waist down. His mother returned to Canada to get better health care for him. There was a bit of an uproar when she returned, for obvious reasons. However, her rights were guaranteed as a Canadian citizen. Despite her husband’s apparent terrorist activities, she does not appear to have been directly involved. However, she is still quite loyal to her husband’s memory and to his politics and has made very pro-terrorist statements on television. She has lost a great deal--husband, son's health, son's freedom, son's love--and she has become hardened by that loss. There is also a younger daughter, Mariam, though I don’t know what her situation is.

The elder daughter, Zaynab, has also returned to Canada. She is also very devoted to her father’s memory and to his politics. Her computer has been comfiscated by police, but they couldn’t find anything on it that was directly incriminating. In television interviews, she has come across as angry about her father’s death and defensive about his anti-Americanism/anti-Westernism.

The eldest son Abdullah (25) has just returned to Canada after being released from a secret prison in Pakistan. It’s not known who held him or why he was released. However, the US immediately demanded an extradition so that they can charge him with terrorist-type crimes. Abdullah is currently in custody in a Canadian prison. Since it’s against Canadian law to extradite anyone who might face death or torture in another country, Abdullah will be able to use this law to prevent or indefinitely delay the extradition. However, he’ll remain in prison while he does so.

The middle son Abdurahman (21) returned to Canada two years ago in a flurry of controversy. He later appeared on television (CBC/PBS documentary “Son of Al Qaeda”) to say that he had been arrested by the US military in Afghanistan and then paid by the CIA to become a spy (or else face penalties). He was brought to Guantanamo Bay, tortured as much as the other prisoners, and grilled daily on what he had found out. He was later released to do missions in other Muslim countries, some of them extremely dangerous. Because of the risks to his life, Abdurahman wanted out and called his grandmother to secure his return to Canada (the US military had taken his passport). The US military and CIA have not denied Abdurahman’s claims, so his story is probably true. However, he is now estranged from his family, who consider him a traitor.

That’s the family. That’s their life: someone always in jail, someone always watching their every move, always fear.

I think this is what is meant by the expression: "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons." The father led the family into this situation. The kids had to do what they were told. They grew up in an Al Qaeda camp surrounded by a bizarre value system. When war broke out and afterward, they each did what they had to in order to survive.

Does it make any sense to go after these people to put them in prison? Will it in any way stop the flurry of terrorist activity in the world?

It makes me think about hijacking. You can hijack a plane. You can hijack people’s minds and souls to get them to fly those planes. You can hijack a religion--or a democracy.

You can also hijack children’s lives and hold them hostage forever.

Different Song, Please

2006-01-10T20:24:00.000-05:00

I was at choir rehearsal last night. We came to the song I never get to sing. It never fails. We get halfway through and come to that line about “the will to go on, go on.” And my breath stops, it clenches, I choke it all back. And I listen to the words assault me.

Late at night, I hear it singing,

Then again when I wake at dawn.

And it fills me up with hope and good will,

The will to go on, go on…

There is a river in Judea that I heard of long ago

And it’s a singing, ringing river that my soul cries out

To know.

Three of us who sing together in the second sopranos, we’re all mothers of Asperger children. I mean, what are the odds, right? We also drive to choir together. Sometimes we talk about it, joke a little, congratulate each other on small gains. For once, we don’t need to explain, to apologize.

I spent the afternoon today with a woman who called me for help about her son. Like I’m an expert. I listened to her, the long list of her programs and efforts and specialists, admiring her control over her facial muscles and voice as she talked about her fears and the fruitlessness of her efforts. And about her son’s bewilderment at the constant daily failure of everything he tries, the constant constant constant daily failure of his everything. About where it was all going.

Like I knew.

When I got home, I sat outside on the back deck staring at the snow till it grew dark.

I thought about us, about the shipwrecks of our careers and dreams, and the heavy heavy weight of our children. No matter how hard we try. What lies ahead?

I don’t have any answers. I never do. I just have questions.

So much of life is just carrying on.

Weightlessness

2006-01-08T19:11:00.000-05:00

Weighty Friends were absent from Meeting today. And the clerk was downstairs doing first-day school. So the silence was loose and scattered somehow. You can feel the room: no one had anything to say, everyone was trying to get deep into some thought. Or so I thought. Maybe I was right.

A copy of Advices & Queries and F&P were on the central table, just outside my reach. I could read a query, help people focus and centre down. But should I? I had no quivering sense of a leading, no nudge. Just an urgency to break a skim-milk silence, pour something into it.

Is it a leading to want to rescue a Meeting?

Should I? Or should I not?

A new attender arrived a bit late, one who had told me on occasion that she feels she gets nothing from Meeting when no one speaks. I feel uncomfortable.

Someone’s gotta say something.

After a few minutes, she got up and took both the A&Q and F&P to her seat. She began leafing through them, taking matters into her own hands.

I sensed an uncertainty in the room, whether she should be reading or not.

Should she? Shouldn’t she?

Restless, I pulled a pamphlet from the shelf beside me. Something by Rufus Jones. The first excerpt said little to me. The second was more promising.

Should I?

Still no one had said anything.

I read it out loud. It was an essay about Psalm 1, how we grow like a tree. That we work too hard, that growth is silent, invisible, like the lilies. That growth needs water, soil, sun. And we are the soil, the farm, while the Spirit is the rain. How the Kingdom is not like a great event, but like a mustard seed, small, needing to be planted, but then it grows.

No one spoke afterward. The silence had changed somewhat, maybe more focused. A few legs crossed and uncrossed. The new attender had put the book down. She was deep in thought now.

My thoughts focused on images of trees and seeds. I imagined a new type of communion service, except instead of bread and wine, the priest would hand out a single mustard seed to chase with a glass of water. Take this, eat it, and let it grow.

To speak or not to speak. It always seems like a good idea at the time.

Quakers and Sacraments

2006-01-04T18:48:00.000-05:00

My favourite religious movie is Life of Brian. In one of my favourite scenes in this my favourite movie, Brian loses a sandal as he is walking, and his followers snatch it up reverently, crooning:

“He has given us a sign! Let us follow his example. Let us like him hold up one shoe, and let the other be upon our foot, for this is His sign, and all who follow Him shall do likewise!” They all remove a sandal, tie it to a stick, and carry it for the rest of their lives.

Such is my take on sacraments.

However, the topic of sacraments has come up on two Quaker blogs in this network this week. And I can’t help wanting to jump into the fray.

I know about sacraments. I should. I was born and raised Catholic and went to a Catholic school. I don’t have any resentment about my spiritual upbringing (in fact, I thought it was rather good because it got me where I am now: of course, the nuns might not agree), but I’m just saying that I know what sacraments are and what they’re not.

The French church where I grew up had a priest that rode a motorcycle. He eventually ran off and married the church secretary, but that's another story. He used to take the whole gang of us teenagers out ice-fishing during the winter. Afterward, he did mass around a fire at the shoreline or inside someone’s cottage. If someone caught a fish, it was used for the communion instead of the bread. “Just as good,” he used to say, ”and much fresher.” Sometimes, the fish was used in addition to the bread. “Loaves and fishes,” he would say, “Jesus’ secret recipe to feed thousands.”

(A big however: Not all Catholics “get” sacraments, even though that’s all they do. I knew a guy who used to keep holy water in the freezer – so it would stay holy longer!)

I have also been to protestant versions of the bread-and-wine sacrament. And I can tell you right now: they don’t get it. For Catholics, it’s the whole song-and-dance, smells-and-bells routine leading up to the eucharist – the mystical words, the drone, the silences, the kneeling, the layers of spirituality that descend one after another – it’s all this that makes the “communion” thing happen. But Protestantism is a verbal religion. You know: talking heads, word recitations, follow the book, even yelp and holler, otherwise don’t move (My seven-year-old daughter calls them “the noisy Christians”). The holiness is in the words, not the symbols. So, alas, most of the time when they get to the bread-and-wine event, they talk the thing to death. Then it’s not communion: it’s just snack.

You see, communion is something you have to do and be; it’s not something you take. It’s also not something you can just staple to the side of a service or a religion that has nothing to do with it, as if it just does the thing all by itself. Trust me, it takes the whole knee-numbing hour to get there.

So do Quakers need sacraments?

We already have one. Quaker silence is the sacrament. It’s a ritual as ritualistic as sandals on a stick or wafers dunked in wine, and it takes about as long. We enter the meeting and surrender ourselves entirely to listening to the Spirit, becoming one with It and each other, with all the vulnerabilities, fears, and trembling that go with it. That’s what’s meant by “com + union.” That’s also why we’re called Quakers.

Sacrament is a concept, not a thing. It’s a verb, not a noun. The Quaker sacrament of silence is an all-encompassing verb. It allows us to commune together and with God, and to take that communion out with us into the world, to see ourselves as part of a holy whole. It gives us the discipline to discern leadings and minister to each other. So our silence as a sacrament is not stapled to the side of our religion: it is a vital, life-giving foundation. Without that regular sacramental silence, ours skills of discernment and listening would atrophy away. Soon anything would sound like a leading: a sermon on the radio, a speech by a president, a news documentary. We would become swayed by popular ideologies that run counter to the plain teachings of the Spirit.

The sacramentalness of Quaker process is evident in the ease with which Catholics blend into our traditions. At my last Meeting, we occasionally invited nuns in to help lead special meetings on spiritual topics. My current regional gathering meets at a Catholic centre, and the staff join in. My Catholic friends understand what a Quaker meeting is.

My born-again protestant friends are mystified by it. They don’t know why I bother going, they can’t see the point. “It’s kind of like going to church, except you’re spiritually naked,” I explain. Helpfully. Their eyes cross.

I rest my case.

George Fox’s point in chucking out sacraments was that the spiritual unity and vulnerability and holiness that one feels in a sacrament is not in the bread and wine, nor in the water, nor even the words: it’s in the person’s spirit approaching that sacrament. Sometimes it takes all week to get to meeting, if you know what I mean. (David M says Yes, I know what you mean!) But if we start early enough, we get there often enough.

**********

Having said all this and before I drift into more pointless stories from my childhood, I should bring up two caveats: The first is the difference between “rites of passage” and “sacraments.” Rites of passage occur at key transitions in life (e.g., birth, marriage, death), when we feel the need to touch the Spirit in a sort of holy “high-five” in passing. These we do not as fixed rites, but as outpourings of the Spirit. Our baby welcomings, weddings, and memorial meetings are quite different from fixed religious rituals that purport to have the power to make God-things happen.

Second caveat: While the fluid, in-the-moment, living-Spirit-whispering-in-my-ear qualities of Quaker life render sacraments superfluous, they don’t precisely exclude sacraments – because they don’t precisely exclude anything.

Many years ago, one of the Canadian Quaker gatherings met at a Catholic retreat centre. The centre’s priest was part of the gathering. At the opening of the weekend, he invited anyone to come and talk to him at any time privately as they wished. The weekend ran smoothly, and at the wrap-up, the priest thanked everyone for a deep and spiritual weekend. But he added that every person at the gathering had come to talk to him privately. And every one had asked him for the same thing -- absolution.

This was a confusing story to me when I first heard it offered in Meeting, and it’s still hard to wrap my mind around. Were these Friends actively seeking out a sacrament? And what on earth for?

But I understand now that for Quakers, sacraments exist in time, in specific moments, in feeling that the Spirit was nudging right then, right there. In that weekend, the Friends gathered had felt a hunger to be relieved of the burden of sin, all those sins of omission and commission and of fear and failure. In true openness of Spirit, they searched for and found the humility to say before another person, “Father, forgive me, for I have sinned.”

Life is hard. We don’t know the way. We stumble in the dark. Forgive us.

It wasn’t about not being Quaker. It wasn’t about following rules. It wasn’t about liking or not liking sacraments or believing or not believing in the priest’s power to forgive. It was about that moment, that sense of burden, that hunger for release.

Yes, I understand.

And that understanding came to me during silence.

Good-bye 2005

2006-01-01T14:34:00.000-05:00

Gleanings and ideas from posts and news stories this year:

1. Democracy is in crisis. Secrecy has replaced transparency, unilateralism has replaced public approval, and violence has replaced negotiation and UN direction. We need democratic renewal, which may require major changes to our institutions.

2. The end does *not* justify the means. The means simply determines the end. Whatever path you take, that's where you are going.

3. Religion and politics do not mix well, not even for religious people. What passes as religious government is usually a legalistic, non-spiritually-driven quest for personal power. The separation of religion and state is vital for democracy.

4. Meeting isn't always the most effective place for being Quaker. In fact, Meeting can be downright unpleasant at times. But at other times, the Voice gets through. So somehow Quakerism seems to work in spite of itself.

5. Those who follow the example of Christ sometimes have to pay for it with their lives. But this is how the Light gets passed on. We admire such courage and both hope and dread that we might have such courage some day.

6. Nature is not nice. Rather than a commodity that must be treasured, it is a force that must be obeyed. It gives and it takes. When we disobey nature, we have forgotten who we are--and we will be reminded.

7. Old texts, old traditions, and old events sit gathering dust in the attics of our minds and cultures. Yet when the new fails to provide answers, these can be useful for setting us on new paths.

8. Sometimes the God-in-the-sky seems so far away that we can't find it or know it, let alone follow it. But there is that within us that guides us. There is "that of God" in others that guides us as well.

9. To hear the Light is to receive a task. Often we fear these tasks.

10. We have much to learn from each other. By treating everyone like the messenger, we get the message.

Happy New Year.

Voice and Voicelessness

2005-12-27T19:43:00.000-05:00

As we in Canada slink our way toward a completely unwanted, gloriously stupid national election in January and are (yawn) going through the motions of party support and door-to-door campaigns (BYOS, bring your own snowshovel), the mind naturally wanders to thoughts about how we can do things better.

I am currently thinking about a theory I have about radical politics. I'm pretty sure it relates to Quaker spiritual concerns as well. But maybe it doesn't. I'll leave that to you...

Here's my theory in a nutshell: When a people feels voiceless -- that is, they have yelled till they are hoarse and are still unheard; they are under the invisible thumb of another people or estate; or they sense a mismatch between their reality and a political construct being imposed on them -- when a people feels this way, they will vote radical as a block so that they get a voice. The politics of the radicalism in question isn't as important as how loud it is.

In Canada, we see this in Quebec. Quebecers don't vote for national parties anymore: they vote for separatist parties. Maybe these voters aren't even separatists. It doesn't matter to them. At least with a strong separatist vote, Quebecers know that Quebec will not be ignored. And it's true: the power of the Bloc Quebecois Party to force or block issues for the whole nation is very real. So from a Quebec perspective, putting up with separatist politics is just the price you pay to get a voice.

The same for Alberta. Albertans vote as a block for ultraconservative parties because that gives the West a voice. If they voted like the rest of the country, their concerns would be drowned out by Ontario. In fact, their concerns probably wouldn't even make the radar. They know this from experience.

If you have no voice, you will do almost anything to get one.

If this theory is true, then it can apply equally well to the Middle East.

Arabic nations have long been under the invisible thumb of Western nations, particularly oil interests and US politics. Leaders have been elected, propped up, or eliminated through silent Western intervention. A good example is the Shah of Iran. The West was dumbfounded when he was overthrown by streets full of raging theocrats. We either weren't aware of or didn't want to acknowledge how cruel a leader he was and how much support we gave him. In order to get a real voice, the Iranians turned to the Islamic fundamentalists.

We see a similar trend across the Middle East. The Palestinians, hoarse from protesting the abuses of Israeli soldiers, Zionistic politics, and American support of both, have come to embrace religious extremism as a way to have a voice. Violence and hatred of Americans comes as part of the parcel: it just makes the voice louder. Other nations are flirting with Islamist government simply as a way of escaping the puppet-nation status of being a non-Western democracy.

I note with interest how South America is becoming a leftist block. Rather than giving in to the global capitalism and commodification promoted by the North, the South is saying No with one voice.

Basically, these voting blocks spread because there is fertile ground: a hunger to be heard.

Something tells me that the solution to political extremism and conflict between powerful and powerless peoples is to give powerless people a real voice. If the North wants to woo the South back into global trade talks, then it's going to have to listen to the South instead of talking all the time. If the West wants to reduce the violence and tension in the Middle East, it's going to have to examine its silent politics and its silencing politics, including how it interferes in Middle Eastern politics to serve its own purposes. It's also going to have to de-silence these issues and give them a full perestroika.

There is a proverb somewhere in the Hebrew Testament to the effect that one should not condemn what one has created. Perhaps that's the spiritual implication of all this.

The Carrot of Truth

2005-12-24T03:20:00.000-05:00

Christmas Eve is a daunting day when you're a parent.

In this city, people have organized carol singing that goes from pub to pub on the days before Christmas. I kind of liked that idea and had planned to go. It seems vaguely medieval, but I don't know why. But with Husband not working right now, I've had to take on more contracts, which swallows time. So does parenting. Maybe next year.

My kids are 7 and 9. They stopped believing in Santa last year. Now, I'd just like to point out that we never went in for the Santa thing. But the kids picked it up at daycare, etc., so we just didn't do or say anything to upset their ideas. I guess that's a kind of passive lying, but you've got to meet your culture halfway sometimes.

Last year, my then-6-year-old pragmatic daughter decided the Santa story didn't add up. So she and her brother devised a test, which they called the Carrot of Truth. They would leave out a carrot for the reindeer. If the carrot was eaten in the morning, then Santa was real. If not, then the story was bogus.

I didn't have the heart to tell them that Husband and I could easily take a chomp out of that carrot.

However, in the light of honesty, we did not do so. The kids saw the carrot intact in the morning and triumphantly waved it in our faces. Oh, they'd caught us, hadn't they! And they promptly ran off to trill their truth to all their friends, who still all believed in Santa.

And then I got it from their parents.

I still got it from them this year. Some gently took me aside while we were walking the kids to school to ask if we could muzzle them on the topic, just so they could "get another year out of Santa" for their kids. I mean, these kids are almost 10. In a moment of spleen, I wanted to say, "How mutton-headed do you have to be to believe in Santa when you are ten?!" or "I learned about Santa at school when I was six. This is how it happens!" Instead, I said, "This will require duct tape."

My daughter has since become an atheist. She's not believing anything she can't see, and she just pats me nicely on the head if I try to talk to her about such things. I sent her to a local church's vacation bible school. She said it wouldn't have been too bad if they didn't talk about God all the time. My son, on the other hand, thinks he's more of an agnostic: after all, you can't really know either way, he says.

These things I accept. Someone once said that being a communist at 21 just showed that you had a heart that worked. I guess being an atheist/agnostic at age 7/9 just shows you have a mind that works.

The tree went up four days ago, not too early so that things don't lose their shine. The kids love talking about every decoration (since they made most of them) as they touch them all and put them up.

We only buy them one present (like, one: they have to share). That's been our Christmas M.O. since they were born. They have begged for a GameBoy for years now. Mom, I'm the only kid in the class that doesn't have one. I held off as long as possible, but this year, that's what they get.

Sometimes you have to meet your culture halfway.

Filling the stockings is something that Husband and I do immediately after the kids fall asleep, which is about 30 seconds after their heads hit the pillows. This year, I badly miscalculated. Stocking stuffers will overstuff said stockings rather badly. I picked up odds and sods at second-hand stores, plus miscellaneous art and office supplies, some homemade treats and coupons, socks, mitts, a chocolate orange, too much for their knit hockey-sock stockings. Husband's socks may be called into service this year. I hope they don't stretch too badly.

These are our traditions. My children grow. They're growing so fast now I can hardly stand to watch. I remember how they used to crawl into our bed in the morning with their ice-cold feet, giggling and snuggling against us.

Not any more.

Some days I just want to stop time so that I can enjoy this moment, this day, this period in their lives until I've had my fill of it. But it passes so quickly.

We'll put out the carrot again tonight.

Yule is Cool

2005-12-23T08:20:00.000-05:00

In this age of worshipping our craniums and picking apart our history and customs, looking down our noses at Christmas has become fashionable in certain circles. Yes, it’s not Christian. Yes, it’s basically pagan and thus rowdy and uncontrollable. Yes, it’s become overlaid with centuries of traditions to the point that it’s bulging set to burst. Yes, it’s not part of Quakerism.

But my argument always is: So is popcorn—and we still eat it.

What’s so wrong about having a nonChristian, pagan, nonQuaker, heavily traditioned, rowdy feastday?

Here in the north, our outer world has gone dark and cold. The snow is deep, and the wind has a particular howl to it that only leaves on trees can muffle. Survival is a real concept in the winter: only fools think otherwise. Who wouldn’t want to call back the sun?

What’s more important, our inner world has gone dark and cold too. We are a species of storytellers. We exist for myth and tradition. Without these, our minds and souls starve. And education has a way of nudging out myth and tradition, so that the story-hungry part of our psyche goes dark.

Christmas provides two ingredients we crave: myth and tradition. That these myths and traditions are ancient, predating history and spanning all nordic cultures, makes them all the more compelling.

The myth of the baby king born in the dark and cold of a stable, unwanted by all, but known to the lowly. The Godly in us, the surreal in the dirt, the frailty of greatness. People drawing closer in the darkness, led by something they don’t understand, to find someone for whom there was no room at the inn.

For children, the myth of Santa, reindeer, magic, baby Jesus.

These stories have helped create the landscapes of our minds, our collective unconscious in Jung’s terms. They’ve played again and again since our children, like a mantra repeated, or a hypnotism tape playing in the background. It’s time once again to visit them.

I know Quakers would rather not need myth and tradition, but we are no different than other people. We could choose not to have a Christmas tree because it’s wasteful, not to bake traditional foods because they’re fattening, not to sing carols because we don’t like the words, or tell stories because we don’t believe the events. But then, what would Christmas be? A day like any other day. And we would be impoverished for it.

I think of Christmas (and our other collective traditions and myths) as a chalice that’s been handed down from generation to generation, crusted with everything other ages thought was meaningful and worthy of celebration and filled with ideas, beliefs, fears. It’s now been passed to us. Our task is to take the cup, sift through the contents, touch them all, connect with the past, then put back in the cup--changed or unchanged--what we’ll pass to the next generation.

It’s about connection.

Having said all that, there are two relatively new traditions I could very much do without, and one old myth that I could do with.

The first tradition is materialism—a tradition that soaks the holiday and clouds the light. We try to change the focus on giving, rather than receiving; but to have a giver, you must have a receiver, so it’s really a bit of a cop-out. Sending shoeboxes of trinkets to third-world countries because we believe it’s so important to get stuff at Christmas shows how remarkably google-eyed we are about worshipping Mammon.

The other tradition is “Jesus is the Reason for the Season.” This is from the people who would make Christmas copyright. “It’s only for us Christians,” they say, “so you others just stay out.” They take what was once everyone’s festival and then steal it entirely.

The myth I could do with is Peace on Earth. It’s now within our grasp. We have the teachings of Jesus and the model of Gandhi. New notions of global interrelatedness could make it happen.

We pray for it at Christmas. Then we need to go out and answer our own prayers.

Nancy

PS Have a cool Yule, everyone.

The Glove

2005-12-14T20:24:00.000-05:00

I’d rather not write about evil, but it’s on my mind tonight. Being a pacifist means coming to terms with evil. Again and again and again.

The one that totally bites is religious evil. Evil in the name of God. Hurting people for Jesus. You don’t have to go far to find it.

Now cold, plain vanilla evil, that’s not so hard to figure out. Put it down to a lousy childhood, some greed and gluttony for power, and that about covers it. But religious evil takes more thinking, because it believes itself to be good. And therein lies the power of its evil – because vanilla evil can do only so much harm. It takes religious evil to do massive harm on a massive scale.

Religious evil comes from what was golden, what was the best. Like the myth of the angel Lucifer, the holiest falls to become its antithesis. Osama bin Laden is a deeply religious man in the sense of soulfully following his religion’s rules and praying regularly. He was for a long time the champion of his people against oppression, speaking out where others were afraid, helping those who needed help. But then he was offered arms to fight the Russians. And slowly, his religiosity twisted. He was still a champion of his people against oppression – but now he is doing so by using oppression. Now he kills for God. The light angel before, the dark angel after.

It's the same glove, only now it’s inside out. So now it fits on the other hand.

This is what became of Christianity during the Dark Ages—the Crusades and the Inquisition. The is what explains the hate-filled words of preachers when they talk about pacifists, “leftists,” nonheterosexuals, nonbornagains, and even women. This is how the religious right has come to serve the neocons. Vanilla evil just harnesses a body and mind in service of evil; religious evil harnesses a soul.

They tell us war is about good vs evil, and I know pacifists are supposed to argue against that. But I happen to agree with this idea. Evil is the war itself. Good is the human forces that try to undo the war. You can’t shoot evil: you can only shoot people. The evil is still there after the dying is over.

In effect, as soon as we pick up a weapon, we have joined evil’s side.

And as soon as we decide we get to hate those who carry those weapons, alas, we too have joined that side, perhaps less harmfully, but we know where this road leads.

Religion gets hijacked when we’re looking the wrong way.

I believe the reason is the dark connection between fundamentalism and evil. And fundamentalists come in many stripes: I know fundamentalist quakers, fundamentalist feminists, fundamentalist greens—those who become obsessed with the rightness of the dogma.

The German Lutheran theologian Dorothee Solle says a religion is dead when it can’t distinguish between its God and its Devil. Fundamentalism’s rigidity is like a spiritual rigor mortis.

I don’t believe in a Devil, but I admire the Solle’s metaphor. When a religion becomes preoccupied with rules and dogmas, it lets the rules become the religion. It edits the religion to erase the teachings that don’t fit with the rules. Soon the religion is emptied, quietly and surreptitiously, so that unless you were watching carefully, you wouldn’t have noticed it happening.

They then learn to equate the Spirit with the rules and dogmas, and they watch those rules and dogmas, believing their souls depend on it. So now they are looking the other way. They may have started out on a spiritual journey with God at their side, but they aren’t looking now. Ah, but who are you walking with now? Look away from those rules! See who you are walking with!

How easily the glove slips to the other hand.

Vigil

2005-12-07T16:00:00.000-05:00

It's hard to take time to write a blog now. We wait and wait for news from Iraq. There is so little that can be done but waiting.

The news coverage of the abduction has been exhaustive here in Canada, and for that, I'm glad. I don't think people "get" nonviolence, and here they are seeing a very strong and heartbreaking picture of it. I think they get it now, maybe a little -- that people can die for peace as well as dying for war.

The four peacemakers had at different times made statements about not paying ransoms and not vilifying captors should they be captured. While they didn't condone or participate in violence, they understood that stress and oppression has a breaking point. They still wanted to hold all people in the Light and speak to that of God in them, regardless of the situation. They wanted their efforts at peacemaking to stand on their own strength, not bolstered with guns and institutions and wrangling over dollars and cents.

And their message has been very powerful. One of the most hearwarming things about this agonizing situation is the amount of global response it has evoked. Muslim leaders and clerics around the world, including those leading Hamas in Palestine, have called for their release, citing their strong peaceful witness to the world as the reason. The heads of both the British and Canadian Muslim councils have gone to Bagdad to do what they can. In the middle of a terrible war, at the place that is the closest thing to hell on this planet, the world is focused on the simple efforts of four men to be peace for some forgotten people.

It makes me think of Mary Dyer, returning again and again to fundamentalist Massachusetts despite being told she would be executed for being a Quaker. She bore no weapons and committed no crimes, just witnessed with her presence -- and eventually with her life -- for religious freedom. In the end, even though she was executed, the Light she brought to that colony survived and endured, as she had intended. It was her willingness to die for the Light that made people see it.

And so however this abduction in Iraq plays out, the efforts of the four peacemakers to bring the Light to a land wracked by violence will succeed. The peace they have lived all their lives, even in what could be their last days, has been heard around the world.

And we must accept that. Even if they die.

A quaker song has been going through my head all week: "That Cause Can Neither Be Lost nor Stayed."

"There by itself like a tree it shows;
That high it reaches as deep it grows,
And when the storms are its branches shaking,
It deeper root in the soil is taking.

Be then no more by a storm dismayed,
For by it the full-grown seeds are laid;
And though the tree by its might it shatters,
What then, if thousands of seeds it scatters?"

Emerging Church Idea Emerging

2005-11-29T18:58:00.000-05:00

I had never heard of the "emerging church" until I stumbled on these blogs. Maybe it's not talked about much in Canada. Reginald Bibby's latest book Restless Churches talks about church renewal in Canada, but in no way is he talking about post-modern thinking. In fact, except for a couple of good quotes and some meticulous statistics on church growth/stasis in Canada, it's a bit of a yawn.

Now that our meeting is moving to larger quarters, I'm thinking more about the whole post-modern thang and how to tie that into meeting growth. And even more, how to "sell" it to our meeting.

So I've roamed around the web and culled the basic principles of the "pomo" movement and how it must apply to religious groups. And I created a list of some 15 outreach ideas based on these principles. I know I'll have to work up to them, get the meeting thinking about post-modernism little by little until they start asking the right questions.

And this is always the problem. Once I see the big picture of things, I have difficulty slowing down enough to ease someone else into the idea. Once I gain an inch of ground, I toss all my careful plans out the window and charge in like cavalry.

For example, I can just picture the recording clerk's face at next MM if I were to suggest we start a weekly book club called "Quakerism on Tap" that would meet at a pub. Or if I were to suggest we instigate a city-wide "Drum Down the Sun" on the waterfront every Sunday night during the summer as an act of worship of creation. With just a little slip of the tongue, I could easily end up doing this.

Or worse, if I suggested that we start actively "planting" worship groups in all the surrounding small communities (fertile ground, those small communities. After all, what else is there to do? One has already started up spontaneously at a little town that can only charitably be called a Bend In The Highway.)

There's more. When we finally get our new meeting space, I'd propose having a big sandwich board out in the front. No lamps under no bushelsr. The board would use real language, not Quakerese: something like "Quaker Meeting for Listening, 10:00, No perfect people allowed (All others welcome) [www....]." And I'd propose a second sandwich board right beside it where we put up a long juicy quote of the week, something from Faith and Practice maybe. Something that would change every week, for the entertainment and curiosity of the dog-walkers and park-goers. I'd want them to go home with something to think about.

Maybe as a compromise with the traditionalists, we could try placing more (yawn) ads on the church page of the newspaper (which nobody reads). But this time, use a plain font and language, such as what I suggested for our sandwich board. Or maybe something like "Clergy doesn't do it for you? We have no experts. Quaker Meeting for Listening, 10:00 [address]." It has to be a contrast to the heavy gothic fonts and gagging sermon titles of the other ads.

Or better yet, write the whole ad in texting language. (RU 4 rl?)

So how will I win over the we-don't-proselytize Quakers with this?

I'll tell them outreach has to be cool and funky.

And then wink.

Yes, I can just picture the recording clerk's face...

Movin' On!

2005-11-27T17:19:00.000-05:00

Thanks to everyone who responded to my posting on The Move and to those who may have held out meeting in the Light this morning.

The meeting occurred this morning and this afternoon, and a decision was reached. To my complete surprise, those present felt unequivocably called by the Spirit to move to a larger meeting space. Some said that they felt we had been being "nudged" to move for years. The meeting minute said that we have been called to move and are prepared to act on this calling.

What overwhelmed me was that some of the people who were most opposed to the move at our last meeting on the subject were now the most adamant that it was time to leave. They spoke passionately and with conviction about the need to follow God's will. Some transformation took place over the past few weeks that is difficult to explain.

We are in the process of negotiating with the non-profit owners of the new place. If we can find a way to get around Revenue Canada's rules about non-charity business activities by non-profits, then we hope to be in a new home in a few weeks. But if not this space, then another.

A great peace descended on me as soon as the minute was recorded. I'm sure it was the same for many others.

Quaker Passivism

2005-11-17T15:01:00.000-05:00

Our meeting has a somewhat tense special meeting coming up in 10 days to discuss moving to a larger meeting space. We currently meet in an almost-free room on a university campus and have done so for more than 20 years. However, the meeting has grown, families are now attending, and we're packed in there like sardines. Even with extra folding chairs, the children and their parents have to sit on the floor. On top of that, the little room that is used for the children has been taken over by university groups, so that the only table space is covered with computers. Already, some families have stopped coming. In the spring, a search committee was set up and a new meeting place was found early this fall. It will cost more to rent, but it has excellent facilities for the meeting and accommodates superbly to families.

The problem? Some members and attenders don't see a reason to move.

Go figure.

They speak with glowing faces about simplicity and making do and describe all the wonderful ways we could make "better use" of the place we're in. And they give cheerful descriptions about how meeting memberships rise and fall, so all we have to do is wait a little bit till the numbers drop again.

It's all I can do not to roar.

When did being passive become a Quaker virtue? When did we lose the courage and convictions to live lives lead by the spirit? Why do Quakers gravitate toward hesitation?

And whatever happened to the old Second Advices? ("Live adventurously.") Have we just lost that spark?

Why is it that when an interesting and engaging idea is presented in M4W4B members fall over themselves to quietly put it down, as if somehow it were better to fail to act than to act? Why, when there is a decision between action and non-action, do we let non-action select itself by default, through not deciding, not finding clearness?

What are we so afraid of?

And what is it in our decision-making process that allows the passive to triumph?

Fortunately for the new meeting place idea, the clerk and the "elders" of the meeting are all in favour of it. It's just a few holdouts holding out -- members who are unsure and who are very firm in their unsure-ness.

Unfortunately, I believe that many of the Friends in favour of this move will sit silent during the meeting, afraid to speak out, afraid of upsetting someone. Being decisive and assertive and firm-- saying YES too loud-- is somehow unQuaker.

(End of rant. I'm glad I got it out of my system. Now hopefully I will not be tempted to say ANY of these things at the meeting next week. But just for the record, I do think roaring is very Quaker.)

Dear Pat Robertson

2005-11-13T12:26:00.000-05:00

Dear Pat Robertson:

Please stop calling yourself a Christian. Please stop referring to yourself as a spokesman for God.

Your track record over the past two decades suggests very strongly that you are following your own religion, not Christianity. Through your death threats to world leaders you don’t like, your support of apartheid policies in South Africa, and your vitriolic slurs against women, Hindus, Muslims, atheists, and non-heterosexuals, you present a very non-Christian face to the world. I suggest that your real religion is the worship of all things Pat Robertson – that is, being male, white, Protestant, Christian, American, rightwing, heterosexual. Everything else is on your list to despise.

You see, Pat, that is not Christian, not by anyone’s definition. And to be very frank, it also doesn’t make the least bit of sense. You can’t call yourself a patriotic American when you call on people to denigrate its laws, its supreme courts, and its ethnic diversity. And you can’t make calls to hatred and violence in the same breath as quoting the loving teachings of Jesus.

I have noticed the same tendencies among other fundamentalist groups, such as fundamentalist Jews, Muslims, and Hindus. And before you get angry by that comparison, consider how similar fundamentalist groups are, despite their rigid differences in creed. In fact, creeds are about the only real difference among them: the way they all live, speak, and act on their creeds is exactly the same. Violence, hatred, superiority, claims about what God wants, claims about who gets into heaven, opposition to change, education, science. They also all show a remarkable disdain for democratic principles, human rights, laws, and human progress. We really should consider fundamentalism as its own religion, with sub-sects of Christian, Muslim, and Jew.

And speaking of science, Pat, just a point of information. It’s not a collection of facts approved by the powers that be, as you seem to assume. Science is a method. It is a way of determining the truth of a principle. It is a testing and retesting and reviewing and discussing and experimenting path to truth. So school board authorities can’t dictate to the world’s science community what is and isn’t science, just because fundamentalists are breathing down their necks. Science just is such as it is. So if you really want to discuss creationism or its newer euphemism, intelligent design, then you need to find a more appropriate avenue. I recommend church or home.

Just as science is not a collect of facts, Christianity is not a collection of rules and edicts approved by the powers that be either. It’s especially not a set of rules of who-to-hate and edicts of what-harm-we-get-to-do-to-which-others. It’s a way of life, following the example and teachings of Jesus.

This is why, mysterious as it seems to be to you and your followers – this is why people in your country are demanding a sharp separation between church and state affairs. They don’t want people who know nothing about science or education -- or democracy or decency or human kindness -- returning everyone back to the Dark Ages.

Fundamentalist, it may be. But Christian, it ain't.

Sincerely

Nancy A

******

Dear Dover, Pennsylvania:

You rock. Totally.

Sincerely

Nancy A

Emerging Bible II

2005-11-09T18:40:00.000-05:00

What would a bible be for the new era? I'd like to talk more about an emerging bible.

Certainly, the bible is a great book, but there are parts of it that have only marginal value to the modern age. And I realize with careful interpretation you can make those parts of the bible have some value. But is it enough to compensate for the amount of space these books take up, while excellent stories and writings from the post-Christ era sit in secondary status in non-bible books? My editorial eye sees great potential for a second edition bible, one that keeps the best of the old and includes the new.

First of all, my new bible would focus on narrative (rather than theology), just like the current Old and New Testaments, as well as the Gnostic Gospels. I think it would be a mistake to switch to a theology-centred bible. Let's face it: the most read-worthy parts of the bible are those with a storyline. Stories also leave room for spiritual interpretation and insight, thereby giving the reader a role in the book's message. Into these stories I would intersperse major theological characters and enough of their teachings and sermons to spark ideas and responses.

In order to make room for the new material, I would cut sections of the current bible. (Remember, I'm an editor. Cutting is good.) From the Old Testament, I would cut out the major history section starting after the Creation story up to the prophets (keeping the poetry sections). The concept of God in that time period is so far removed from a modern concept of God that the stories are only of historical interest. From the New Testament, I would cut the Gospel of John, the pseudo-Pauline letters and John letters, and the Revelation. All of these cut sections would go in a separate volume, along with some of the Gnostic Gospels, that people can have around if they really want it--the same way that many people have a copy of the Nag Hammadi or the Lost Gospels on their shelf. The point here is to make room for better, more relevant material in the main book.

Thus, the new bible would have three parts: an OldTestament, a NewTestament, and a brand new Christian Testament.

Exciting, huh!

Here is my first draft of what would go into the Christian Testament. As a whole, the object of the Christian Testament would be to show ongoing revelation and spiritual growth through Christian history. The narrative sections would have a largely neutral tone, leaving the stronger spiritual messages in the speeches, sermons, and writings of the historical characters being discussed and in the characters' actions.

Book 1: Book of Constantine

This book would narrate the stories of the Church Fathers and the creation of Christianity, as well as the story of Constantine and the birth of the Holy Roman Empire. It would then move to the first thousand years of medieval mystics and saints, their stories and writings.

Book 2: Book of Augustine

This would be the "dark" book of the Christian Testament: the story of the inquisition and crusades. It would start by narrating the story and teachings of Augustine and move to their influence on the Holy Roman Empire. Quoted passages from contemporary writing, both for and against the inquisition and crusades, as well as descriptions of other spiritual issues (such as the plagues) would help show that Christianity went astray during this period.

Book 3: Book of Luther

This book would narrate the story of the Reformation with all its major characters. It would also describe the beginning of the early major non-Catholic denominations, with some of the major teachings. This section would juxtapose different emerging theologies to show the diversity of thought on revelation and relationship to God. It would also include a description of the Catholic counter-reformation.

Book 4: Book of Galileo

This book would cover the history of scientific discovery as it gave revelation to Christianity, starting with Galileo and ending with Darwin (the scientific method, astronomy, the Green Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, evolution, etc.). It would also talk about the rise of education and of women's voices. Major religious and poetic voices related to science and truth would be included.

Book 5: Book of Empires

This book would narrate the spiritual history of the modern period (1600s to present): wars related to religion, imperialism, slavery, Christian missionaryism, the rise of democracy, WWI and WWII. Simultaneously, it would cover the major religious voices of this time (for example, Wesleyanism, the early evangelical movement, Vatican I, and women's rights).

Book 6: Book of the World

This book would narrate the end of the imperial era, the rise of independence movements, the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain, and major disasters--showing how the world gradually grew out of distinct, fighting nations into a more global outlook. This section would cover 20th-century theologians and prophets of the future, touching on the major theological contributions of this time period: for example, solidarity, human rights, pacifism, global justic, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and poverty. It would also provide a selection of writings on daily life, including marriage, work, family life, and technology, as well as the major religious trends: fundamentalism, universalism, mysticism, existentialism, and agnosticism, and would include theologians from around the world. Since this is the most recent of the books, its content would be more thorough.

Book 7: Book of Questions

The final book would put a Quaker stamp on the whole new bible: a series of queries related to personal faith and practice, the future of religion, and global responsibilities. This would give the end of the bible a definite future focus.

Those are my thoughts. But I'm negotiable.