March 10 — how could I forget? How dare I fail to remember?
Nineteen years and four months ago, John Stephens and I began a blog site called freethecaptivesnow.org , as both a personal vigil and a community service, compiling and posting nightly updates of reports — or mostly the lack of reports — about the fate of four peaceworkers kidnapped in Iraq. They had been taken in Baghdad, and one of them, Tom Fox, was a Quaker and a friend of both John and me.
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.
I’m not sure Pope Francis would endorse my headline. But I didn’t ask his permission. He ostensibly wrote this letter to the (all-male) U. S. Catholic bishops, not to Quakers (or Quaker adjacents, who make up the bulk of this blog’s audience).
Vatican logo
But instead he released it to via the official Vatican website, in English & Spanish, which amounts to sending it to the world. And for that matter, Quakers flatter ourselves as being open to the movings of the universal Spirit from other corners than our own; if that’s so, this letter is a fine opportunity. So I don’t think Francis will mind my turning it into a guest blog post.
Which I decided to do after reading it over, and finding it one of the best statements about the combination immigration-and-governance crisis we’re sinking into here in Orange Gringo land.
Let’s hope his missive is arriving in the nick of time.
The letter is superior in many ways: first of all, clearly written, easily understandable even by non-religious folks; yet it shows full command of some of the deepest & most broadly appealing points of Roman Catholic social witness, borne lightly, but presented cogently.
Types & Shadowsis the quarterly journal of the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts.(FQA) It first appeared in 1996, and has been produced ever since by dedicated and creative volunteers.
The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) were strongly against the arts for their first two centuries, regarding them as “vain” and hazardous distractions from plainness and more serious and “spiritual” things.
Their evolution away from this prohibition is traced in an FQA Booklet, Beyond Uneasy Tolerance, which is also available free on the FQA website.
In 1992, I spent much of my free time planning a murder.
I mapped it out it out to the last detail: victim, weapon, motive, opportunity, covering the tracks, the whole meticulous homicidal mess. In the end, it went almost exactly according to plan, and was a complete success.
Almost.
Fortunately for all concerned, the murder was fictional: the plot of a mystery novel, Murder Among Friends, published in 1993. It sold out two printings; that was the successful part.
But I’m remembering it now for a different reason. One of its central plot elements, indeed the underlying theme — the reason I wrote it —was not the homicide, but the context: the murder was a portent, a forerunner of a larger real-life conflict, with a grim history and an ominous future. I could feel it coming then; two decades later, long after the novel ended with this part unresolved, it has moved from fiction to perilously close to fact.
Its history was our American Civil War (the first one): my tale was set in one of its most contested killing fields, the splendid and fertile Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, near Winchester. The Valley was fought over repeatedly, and changed hands between Blue and Grey dozens of times. Today its landscape is dotted with battlefield memorials and war cemeteries.
It seemed an apt locale for early warnings of a potential repeat catastrophe. Further, the Valley had the other feature I wanted for my story: a long and turbulent, but little-known Quaker presence.
March 10 — how could I forget? How dare I fail to remember?
In 1992, I spent much of my free time planning a murder.