Category Archives: Hard-Core Quaker

Carolina Quakers & “The Way Forward” — Or Is It The Way Backward?

And here’s a suggestion to meetings: when this Plan comes up, how about you start by asking thyselves: do we really want to do this? Or are there more urgent and constructive priorities for our meeting and NCYM?

Because if many others are as tired of this kind of thing as I am, maybe that’s feedback the Task Force needs to hear, and soon. As my early Clearness Committee, The Supremes, put it so well in 1965: “STOP! In The Name Of Love!”

My own uneasiness deepens when moving from the first four “Steps” in “The Plan” (we’ll come back to them) to the “Recommended Way Forward” section. That’s the “action part,” and the more times I read it, the more uneasy I get.

The fact is, Friends, it doesn’t sound like a “request” for input into a collective, transparent, open-to-the-spirit discernment process.

Not at all. Which sets off the alarms and raises the warning flags.

For one thing, look at this instruction:

“This request shall be considered by all monthly meetings and a copy of the approved minute related to this request submitted to the Yearly Meeting office by December 1, 2015 for review by the Task Force.”

The paper says “request,” but I grew up in a military family. I know an order when I read it. I also did pretty well in English class. And I know that “Shall” used in the third person connotes an order, a requirement or an obligation. I got it.

Another North Carolina Meeting Bails Out. Who’s Next?

A year ago, on August 30, 2014, Friends from Pine Hill Meeting of Ararat, NC, were at North Carolina Yearly Meeting-FUM’s annual session, demanding a purifying division in NCYM, to banish the iniquity of “dual affiliation.”

The “dual affiliation” which was so repugnant was membership by a handful of NCYM meetings in Piedmont Friends Fellowship (PFF), a loose regional network of meetings from various YMs (and none), founded in the 1960s, and connected to the liberal association, Friends General Conference (FGC).
Now fast-forward to September 13, 2015: last First Day (Sunday) evening.

In a lightly-attended business meeting, Pine Hills Meeting achieved its goal of a separation from these tainted groups.

But it didn’t happen quite the way they were expecting it to in 2014. Instead, it was Pine Hills that quit NCYM, “effective immediately.”

Ban The Bible Among Quakers? Maybe Not.

A lengthy thread on the ‘Quakers” Facebook group went one more round on the Bible, kicked off by a liberal California Friend’s insistence that reading/teaching Bible stories to kids in First Day School was awful and shouldn’t happen. The reasons were the usual, about fundamentalist literalism, oppressive notions, and so forth. Nothing new really.

But I couldn’t let the subject alone. After all, the bible, for better & worse, is woven into western history, culture & law, through & through. One can hate it, with reason; parts of it are dangerous. But one can’t escape it, only pretend to. And Quakerism emerged from a particular piece of this context, which was largely dominated by struggles over the bible, its meaning & role.
Some of the outcomes of those struggles among Quakers (opposition to slavery, equality for women) I think are good; others not so much. And Quaker struggles over the bible continue, quite intensely in many places. (Hello, North Carolina, Northwest, Indiana, etc.) Ignoring all this, or pretending it never happened (or isn’t happening now) is possible, but mistaken & a disservice to Friends, especially our youth.

Arguing With God: Quaker House & My 9-11 Story

Back home in Pennsylvania, I struggled through the next days, like everyone else, to make sense of what had happened. Only one thing about the aftermath seemed clear to me: the U.S would soon be at war. Where and when were obscure, but this had seemed to me a bottom-line certainty even before we finally rose and left Arla alone with her smoking television screen that morning.

This certainty was not a sign of any prophetic gift. It came, I think, more from my roots in a military family. Many of the reflexes of that culture were ingrained: You (whoever “you” were, we still weren’t sure) don’t get away with attacking the Pentagon, the nerve center of all the US military. Somebody will soon face some heavy payback from the armed men and women whose center and stronghold is in that building.

And chances were very good that when this war started, there would be many more of the innocent killed in their frenzied, fiery search for the guilty. U.S. revenge would be painted on some part of the world in a very broad brush of death.

And me? What would I do in the face of this impending war? The attacks had shaken me, truly, but had not undermined my basic Quaker pacifist convictions. I had just seen murder, on a huge scale. But more murder was not an answer to murder. That was my conviction on September 10; it remained so on September 12th. And I also sensed that I would have some small part in struggling to frame and lift up some voice for an alternative. Hell, any serious Quaker (or Christian?) would. Right?
But what alternative? And how to raise it?

I didn’t know. But Quakers in circumstances like these are taught to wait for “way to open.” Our spirituality is that if we are properly attentive, we will be given “leadings,” which will point us in the way to go.

Tom Fox And The Last Supper

Tom had grown up in Chattanooga, then did twenty years in the Marine band in Washington DC. He played bass clarinet – and was about as unmilitary a soldier as one could feature. He began attending Friends meetings during this time. My first memories of him was being at meeting in a khaki uniform.
After the Marine band, he became a baker and assistant supervisor at a health food supermarket. He was good at this, and his bosses wanted him to move up in management.

But Tom heard a “different drummer,” especially after September 11, 2001. With a war on, he felt called to “pursue peace” in a concrete way. After much prayer and reflection, he joined the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT).

CPT sets out to bring the “weapons of the spirit” into the front lines of conflict, places where death and life are often but a hair’s breadth apart. This was dangerous work, in a region where conflicts seem hopelessly intractable.