This past First Day (Quaker talk for Sunday) I Zoomed into worship in my Friends meeting, the one out in the farmland of Flyover County, North By-God Carolina, where I missed one of my favorite annual scenes there: the appearance in the back 40 of a big unruly spread of wild daffodils. But I did hear a stirring message.

No one among the elders knows when or by whom the daffodils came. Their location, out behind the community building we fondly call The Hut, isn’t visible from the road, so passersby mostly miss the spread, too bad for them.

Even tho I couldn’t see them thru the Zoom hookup, their arrival brightened the morning.  I had turned in early the night before, after waves of chills came over me again. The spells have struck several times lately, from no clear outward cause: not yet a new big virus, or the prelude to nausea from something I ate.

The treatment is to turn off the screen, burrow under a stack of blankets, pop a big Tylenol, and drift into a long wrestle with disturbing dreams. It’s worked to this point.

I call it the Existential Flu, because the waves typically arrive after a day of outward shocks, which have been coming frequently since late January. Also because Constitutional Crisis Flu is clunky, and  Flourishing Fascist Freakout Fever is both too cutesy and hysteria-adjacent. But the chills, however named, like the shocks, are real.

Mostly the bigger blows have missed me: after all, twelve years retired I’ve no job to be snatched away; also, my creased and faded Kansas birth certificate has (thus far) warded off the grip of ICE-y fingers. And though I’ve been involved in racial justice efforts for 50-plus years, I was over the hill well before DEI arrived, so you could say I was grandfathered out of the current dragnet.

Still, these weeks have been like a steady succession of the severe thunderstorms that have marked recent summers: sudden lightning, thunder, and when the rain squalls pass, suddenly fallen trees are blockading some nearby streets or embedded in a neighbor’s roof.

Each close call provokes a spasm of survivor’s guilt and the echo of some mournful folksinger twanging “There but for fortune. . . .”

This past week was especially unnerving, rattling the bones of memory as far back as I recall, and all about Russia.

Yes, Russia — where I’ve never been, and which culturally for me comes down to doses of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and having actually made it through War and Peace unabridged (took me a year); otherwise, Russia has been the unwelcome guest of all my days:

It’s more precise to say my early1940s infant years were an exception:  while my father was flying bombing missions over Europe for the new U. S. Air Force, Russia was America’s ally against Hitler.

But that was a brief forced connection; by the time I began to remember words, Russia and Stalin were other names for evil and enemy, along with something called communism. The unholy trinity, they were parts of a refrain I heard more often than all the choruses to Elvis Presley’s biggest hits.

Postwar Russia was both far away and close to home

Through the Fifties, still in the Air Force, my father piloted much bigger bombers on much longer missions along the endless Russian borders. He was likely lugging cargoes of atomic bombs to “contain” Stalin’s successors and their growing pile of nukes.

All that was classified & he never talked about it. But I watched Air Force propaganda films which said as much. I also figured out that crouching under our desks during civil defense drills wouldn’t save us if the real thing came, but at least we’d all probably die quick.

The late 1980s found me having turned from a Catholic-raised military kid to a Quaker peacenik, grappling with the typical midlife angsts. Yet a welcome part of that shaking time was the crackup of communist Russia and its eastern European empire.

I watched in amazement as the television showed communist Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev arriving in Washington in June of 1990, basically hat in hand. Asked why he had come, he or a spokesman was unusually blunt: “he is here to rob you of an enemy,” is the meme I remember.

Gorby was as good as his word, tho it didn’t save his job: shortly the communist Soviet Union version of Russia was gone, its satellite countries lining up to join NATO and get in on the prosperity of the European Union. What looked like the crabgrass of beginning democracy seemed to be sprouting in the Kremlin’s rubble. “Peace in our time,” maybe was nigh?

Of course, this euphoric episode soon dissipated. Our nimble warmongers found Muslim replacements for communism as the Big Threat, and Al Queda on 9/11 obliged with all the evidence they needed to sell three big, dragged-out and ultimately pointless wars.

Meantime, the democratic green shoots of ex-communist Russia were being quickly withered by the political equivalent of Roundup and Agent Orange, sprayed by a ruthless kleptocrat who replanted an iron rule and built a billion-dollar personal dacha. Soon most of the bravest and vocal dissidents there had fallen out of windows, rotted in dank prisons, or were otherwise dispatched.  Evil Russia was back.

The new ruler’s vision was to replace the lost communist union with a revived Russian empire. And to smash NATO. When Ukraine, the breadbasket and rare mineral cache of that region, decided to join the queue for NATO and EU membership, the  de facto Czar wasn’t having it.

Hence, three years ago last month he started a new war, a big, serious one, a Russian invasion marked by massacre, torture, and so many other war crimes. It was so shocking to me that after fifty years, I found myself sheepishly slicing a carve-out in my longtime Quaker pacifism for Ukraine’s self-defense, and quietly cheering Finland and Sweden as they ditched generations of neutrality for NATO’s seeming shelter.

You know the rest: after making an international star and hero of Ukraine’s doughty president, and showering that war-torn land with all the leftover stockpiles of old, and a few new weapons we could find, and the repeated oaths by our older president and a bipartisan chorus roaring eternal support (or the diplomatic equivalent, i. e., “for as long as it takes”) for Ukraine’s survival . . . .

Last week a new very old president and his arrogant tyro Veep expelled Ukraine’s beleaguered leader from the white house like a burglar caught pilfering the official silverware, and then loudly and formally switched sides.

Which means that I, like you, woke up that morning in a country which had staunchly backed Ukraine’s struggle for independence against Russia, and after my fevered sleep that night, woke up the next morning in a different country, that had repudiated Ukraine, disavowed its firmest allies, and joined the aggressor with a cheerleader’s chant of “Russia Russia Russia.”

All this hung in the air that First Day morning, there in Flyover Friends Meeting, echoing clearly even through the filter of Zoom. It was like — What could we do? What could we say, even if only to ourselves?

An opening message, like many we hear, went for inward calm and serenity, more of a focus on the daffodils.

But then a relatively young attender rose and walked to the podium, ready to straighten us out. He quoted the prophet Samuel, whom the Israelites lobbied to ask God’s permission to appoint them a king.  Which Joshua did, after God grudgingly acceded to their rebellious request, with a stern warning that they would regret it (which they did, as noted in detail in several more biblical books).

Samuel was followed, the speaker reminded us, by several more biblical prophets, who repeatedly denounced the injustice, oppression and corruptions that came in the wake of royal governance. They did so despite persecution from, and even violence by establishment forces. But their names are immortalized on at least a dozen more biblical books.

There were also, he added, Quakers who had played this prophetic role, many of whose names and witness are likewise familiar to many, against slavery, oppression of women, and wars and more, many also facing sometimes bloody backlash.

Today, he concluded, the time has come again for us to follow these examples, to speak out and renew their costly witness. Then he returned to the benches.

I pondered this message, and found that, while I shared a devotion to the prophets and my sense of their message, this call was not really landing with me.

Why not? The answer was not comforting: one lesson I have recently noted, and events have repeatedly confirmed, is the relative impotence and irrelevance of most of us.

Take me: I have little money for donations; then, due to age and health, my mobility is limited, so other than worship I am not nearly as active as in earlier years. I still write, including missives to officials, and still believe in the power of the pen, but its impact is unpredictable and often easy to ignore. (For that matter, much of the best “big media” is being either destroyed, neutralized or co-opted. It’s an unfolding tragedy and disaster.) I vote, but (have you noticed?) — the ruling forces are working to dilute the franchise and make it ever less meaningful. We are even on the cusp of having our court system neutralized.

So while I don’t mean to discourage anyone from public protest and organizing, I have to say that when I hear talk of the classical prophets, I often also hear a voice from the past with a different message.

The different voice is that of Garrison Keillor, from one of his “Prairie Home Companion” shows in early 1991, his “News from Lake Wobegon” monologue, a tale called simply “Prophet.”

In it he imagines a Fourth of July community picnic in 1951, when he was nine, where something very unusual (miraculous?) happens: snow suddenly starts falling from a clear warm summer sky. All the adults around dismiss it as normal fluff that the breeze knocks off nearby cottonwood trees.

But the lad Keillor knows better “cottonwood fluff does not melt.” He decides it was a message from God to him, calling him to go and tell the unwelcome truth  that God has done something there they should pay attention to; i.e., to be a prophet:

Keillor: That’s what God was offering me when he had the snow fall on the Fourth of July and I saw it.

He was saying, “Witness to people about this. Reveal the truth of this and be a prophet.”

I said, “No thank you, I don’t want it.”

God said, “This will be a great service to people whom you love, to tell them the truth”.

I said, “Well they’re not going to thank me for it. I know that for sure. People hurt prophets. They throw sharp things at them. They rip the clothes off them and they make them sit for long periods of time in uncomfortable positions on top of sharp objects that are extremely flammable.

That’s what they do to prophets. I don’t want that. I don’t want any pain whatsoever. I don’t ever want to experience any pain. Minor dentistry is more than enough for me.

So, no thank you. I don’t want to be a prophet and tell the truth. What can I do that’s the opposite of that?”

And so, I got into this line of work. Telling lies and I’ve never regretted it, which is a terrible thing to say in front of children.

To say that you’ve spent your life telling lies, but I have and I’ve had a wonderful time, and I have been very well rewarded for this, and I have been congratulated by all sorts of people including members of the clergy, whereas if I had been a prophet and told the truth, I would be broke and I would be unhappy myself and I would be despised and I would be condemned from most pulpits in the country.

No thanks, I don’t really care for that. …

I heard Keillor tell this story just days before the first president Bush and General Schwartzkopf unleashed forty kinds of hell on Iraq in what was then called “Desert Storm,” now in the books as the Gulf War.

I was then working nights at a major post office in suburban DC, slinging big sacks of mail, feeling completely awful about the impending war, and utterly powerless to do anything to stop it. I was listening on a walkman (an antique device for hands-free listening) to hourly reports about the enormous military buildup. When his show came on, I was glad for the spell of relief: the music, the banter, the silly ads, and the chance to hear of someplace where there had been a quiet week.

Except when Garrison started his riff, he soon veered off into the monologue about  turning away a call from God to be a prophet.

Keillor’s refusal is not the only one on record. The biblical book of Jonah revolves around Jonah’s attempts to refuse and flee from God’s call. And the prophet Jeremiah (20:9) also tried to quit:  “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name’, then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

For that matter, for every prophet named and remembered in biblical texts, there were thousands of their countrymen (& women) who were either not called, aren’t remembered, were suppressed, or turned away.  Theologically, G-d also “called” people to do many other non-prophetic tasks, many routine. And many lived “normal” lives, while others ended as nameless refugees, slaves, casualties of wars, famines or plagues; everyone  had a story, though most are forgotten or never told. Yet the Books of the Words and Acts of Nobodies could fill whole libraries; and if the biblical G-d exists, he has read them all.

Anyway, this time, Keillor said, God accepted his refusal. And once Garrison started this confession, I tossed away the last mail sack, and retreated to a semi-dark corner of the room and listened, transfixed, until it was done.

He didn’t close with any call to action or repentance.

Keillor: God was disappointed in me at first, but He’s come around to seeing this more and more from my point of view. … God made mistakes…you spread the truth around and it becomes common and people ignore it. … Whereas, with someone like me, if I ever told the truth, people remember it. … I remember every time I told the truth. Like a snowfall in July — you remember every time. 

Thus he diffused the starkness of this dialogue, and slid obliquely back into a closing skit or music.

A few days later, the first Bush Iraq war started, and was indeed horrible. Keillor’s life, and mine, though, went on. But his tale did not sound like fiction to me, not one bit.  I believe it encapsulates a big piece of Keillor’s personal truth. It sank into my memory and has lodged there ever since. It reappears at unexpected moments — such as last First Day at Flyover Friends Meeting, as much of our world was collapsing around us, and there wasn’t much we could do beyond sit together, and then go admire the wild daffodils.

And at Flyover Friends Meeting, the non-prophetic plurality of attenders listened for the spirit, worried about the manmade chaos outside, encouraged each other, and are now going quietly about their week. I wonder if anyone else is concerned about which side we’ll be on in another month, or has had chills of The Existential Flu.