Category Archives: Stories-Quaker

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.

Preparing for Life – A Quaker Story

Matthew was examining a sheet of paper in an open folder. His jacket was off, but his tie was a solid navy blue and his demeanor entirely businesslike. He let them stand there in uncomfortable silence for a long moment.

Then he dropped the paper, glanced up and said, “Teacher Ellen?”

“It’s just as you see there,” Ellen said. “I went into the drama building last night, to get a book I’d left in a classroom, and on the way out I heard noises from the auditorium. I went in quietly, and, um, found Kevin and Connie on the mattress behind the stage. They were, um, unclothed, and apparently having sex.”

Matthew shifted a stony gaze to the students. “You knew this was completely against the behavior code?” He said.

Connie stared at the floor and nodded. Kevin’s response was something between a nod and a shrug.

“And you also understand,” Matthew went on, “this infraction is eligible for immediate expulsion?”

More nods, but from the corner of her eye, Ellen caught the hint of a curl to Kevin’s lip, which she took to mean, “You wouldn’t dare.”

A Quaker Holiday Story: A “Carpet of Light” (Again) for (Another) Shadowed New Year

Out of the silence, as moved, Friends came to the table in ones or twos or family groups, and each lit another candle, which they placed on the table; they spoke if moved, then sat down again in the silence.

From the first time I experienced, the way that the whole room was progressively illuminated, seemed in fact to glow, as the number of flickering flames increased, was very moving to me.

In a way it was a visible, wordless, yet eloquent evocation of Quakerism at its best: a motley, seemingly haphazard collection of candles of witness, more diverse than we outwardly seem, mainly anonymous and individual, somehow joining together to become more than the sum of the parts.

This time, at the end of 2017, a year which for me has been very heavily shadowed, often deeply gloomy, and yes, dark, the full array became something of an encouraging signal for the year ahead.

New Resistance Reading: “Our Society. Our Future: Resist!”

This new collection (now available in paperback and on Kindle) is for those who have been through “a time to lose” — losses that, as I write, are far from over. Some of these losses will have to be endured for a time, perhaps a long time.

Yet if so, they are not to be endured in passive, compliant silence.

These losses will afflict some more, with the weight of an enslaved history on one side, and official bullets on the other. Yet even among those most advantaged, none will escape: the very air that all breathe, the water necessary for all life, are at risk, as well as justice, and what we have known of freedom.

Likewise the ways of resistance are manifold, and guides and programs and checklists for the new waves of resistance strategy are proliferating.

This collection is not meant to add to that burgeoning strategy shelf. After all, no program can fully encompass the resistance. Its scale can include monumental gatherings of hundreds of thousands — even millions. It is also carried on in quiet, solitary acts of defiance. Often these are no more than calm, insistent truth-telling, now an increasingly radical act as lies are embedded in the heart not only of government, but enshrined in the high seats of what is called religion, especially American white Christianity.

Amid this great variety, there are two resources which the resistance handbooks mention, but cannot turn into a formula, namely creativity and imagination. These are weapons more of the weak than the strong, and buckets of money are not enough to quell or substitute for them.