Category Archives: Signs of the Times

Carolina Quakers’ “Grand Plan” II: Gotta Do Better, Friends

this “Grand Plan” ought to be an opportunity to take “steps” that put NCYM on the path of learning to live with each other, in the spirit of Galatians 6:2 (“Bear one another’s burdens, for in this you fulfill the law of Christ”) and Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, growing together until the harvest, when the true Judge (which is NOT one of us) will make the needed reckoning (Matthew 13:24-30), instead of some narrow and divisive notions of “unity-by-exclusion and division.”

But “The Plan” is not anything like that. Not yet. So let’s send it back to the drawing board and come up with some new “steps” that will begin to really take us “forward”, rather than backward into another round of fruitless wrangling over tired and pointless disputes.

Otherwise, we’ll just be fulfilling (again) Paul’s prediction in Galatians 5:15: “If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.”

Friends can do better in North Carolina. It’s time.

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.”

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.

Who’s More Scared of Free Speech? Baltimore Friends School, Or The N.Y. Times?

Baltimore Friends School Philosophy: “Quaker education is a pilgrimage–a continual seeking after Truth. The search for truth requires a willingness to listen openly to the ideas of others, even in fields of controversy.”

Except they were not about “to listen openly to” THIS controversy:

“At Friends, we work together to build and sustain a community that is inclusive, respectful, and supportive of all people; we value diversity and cherish differences. With this ideal in mind, the celebration of divergent viewpoints is not, and cannot be, without boundaries.”

And linking to an article in which conservative BFS alum Ryan Anderson argued for leaving same sex marriage decisions to the states was, Matt Micciche determined, beyond the boundary; it was evidently in the same league with organizing a lynch mob or shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

Oy vey. There’s no blinking it: The BFS head’s actions and statements were incoherent, anti-intellectual, cowardly, and un-Quakerly. If this sounds harsh, so be it. Right-wing blogs and pundits had a field day, and who could blame them?