All posts by Chuck Fager

A Hospice for Hope: Another Quaker Holiday Story

“This place always gives me the creeps, ” she told her sister. Allyson was sitting safe at home in Cincinnati, more than a thousand miles away.

“Why?” Asked Allyson. “Because it’s full of dying people?”

“Maybe partly,” Lexie said, “but I think it’s more the way they kinda package the whole thing here, like everybody’s getting ready for a birthday party. I mean–

A woman’s voice interrupted. “Can you help me?” It sounded weak, but piercing. “Can you help me?” Again.

Lexie slowed and glanced to her right. In a lounge doorway a woman sat in a wheelchair. Her hair was tousled, her hands outstretched, reaching toward Lexie.

“I, uh — I” Lexie started, then noticed that the woman’s gaze was fixed somewhere behind her, and her eyes seemed unfocused. The image came to Lexie of someone caught in a swirling river at floodtide, about to be swept away.

Lexie swayed uncertainly. Both her hands were full. She heard Allyson saying, distantly, “Are you there?” as if the call had dropped, which it often did. And looking closer, she saw the woman was strapped into the chair, with what looked like a seat belt.

Lexie thought, I bet she’s from the Memory Unit at the other end, and she was parked here while the attendant is outside smoking. She probably doesn’t remember how to unbuckle the belt.

The woman repeated her call, “Can you help me?” and Lexie snapped back to her own reality. “Sorry,” she told the woman, and started walking again. “I’m here,” she said into the phone. “Just got derailed for a minute.”

Lexie was headed for the second last room in the long hallway. Each door she passed had someone’s last name in block black letters on a card in a slot, and she knew most of them by now: Callahan, Bradley, Washington–

— No. Washington’s slot was now empty. Washington — Lexie didn’t know if it was he or she — was dead.

“Looks like another one bit the dust,” she told Allyson.

Cultural Appropriation: the Sad Case of AFSC

In this issue, forty years of observation, research and writing on AFSC is compiled and summarized. The thesis drawn from this compilation is that it is theology – or whatever is behind that term — which makes Quakerism real, and this difficult-to-pin-down “quotidian” (aka, real Quakerism’s everyday community and spiritual life) is what animates Quaker witness and service; and that without it, the service is fatally compromised..
Further, that AFSC, in cutting loose from the RSOF, in all its messy “quotidian” (yet through which somehow the Spirit seems to work; after all, it birthed AFSC) has undermined the most precious aspect of its brand: its authenticity. Marketing experts agree that without that, a brand is like a cut flower, the roots severed. You can put the stems in a vase, change the water & add Floralife, but the blossoms are still mortally wounded, and will eventually wither or stiffen, fade and crumble.

Civility, Schmivility: A Quaker Dialectic, Then & Now

Debates over “civility” are nothing new for Quakers.

The last time I was thrown out of a retail establishment, it was a screen printing shop in Fayetteville NC, near Fort Bragg. I came in on a warm day in 2007, wanting some tee shirts made for a conference being planned by Quaker House. The shirts were to be black, and the wording something like this:

I handed over a CD with the image on it, and the guy at the desk put down his cigarette & slid it into a computer. I couldn’t see the screen when the image came up; but his widened eyes told me when it appeared.

He stood up as the CD slid back out of the slot. “Hey, Sarge,” he called, and carried it into a back room.

“Sarge” was out in a couple moments; likely retired Army. He didn’t throw the CD at me, but dropped it on the counter as he made clear in a loud voice that anybody at Guantanamo or what we were just learning to call “black sites” was a goddam terrorist who deserved whatever they got, and that he was not about to print such treason as this on any of his shirts.

I didn’t quibble. But I called the next shop on my list before I went in, to see if they too had any objection. The shirts got done. And I didn’t think til later about how the issue of who was being uncivil here could be fitted into the “It’s Complicated” category: