A Friendly Letter

My Quaker 50th Anniversary (Already?)

This month, December 2015, marks the 50th anniversary of my coming among Friends. And much of that whole ongoing adventure can, for this purpose, be boiled down to four things:

A knock on the door;
Getting “The Letter”;
Riding the bus; and
Getting on with it.

The knock on my door came (as best I can recall) in early December, 1965, on Lapsley Street in Selma, Alabama.
Alabama in general, and Selma in particular, were extremely unlikely places for this to happen, among the least likely in the U.S. But it did, reflecting the recurrent tendency for Quakers to turn up where they are least expected.
My wife Tish, answered the knock, and then recoiled in fright. A young white woman stood there — and looked as scared as Tish did.
We were living in the black part of Selma, had been working with Dr. King’s staff in the voting rights movement for almost a year. There had been some violence, plus ominous, heavy-breathing phone calls to the house, that sort of thing. So we were cautious.
But as soon as the young woman spoke, her accent showed she was not a local, and Tish relaxed. In fact, she was a student with a group from a new Quaker educational experiment, Friends World Institute (later College).

At the school they studied problems (like racism) rather than conventional courses; and did this with a lot of “study travel,” trekking off in VW Microbuses to places far away from the school’s initial base on Long Island, New York. Places like Selma, where Dr. King’s office staff sent them out to canvass in black neighborhoods to find people of color who still needed to register. Which brought her to our door.

Survival & Revival: The Day The Smiles Are Well-Earned

This commemoration, while very personal, was not only about closure in Christine’s life. The fact that many women unknown to Christine or any of us showed up to join in as part of their own survival and revival, and underlining the fact of domestic violence as an ongoing issue in U.S. military culture.
And the 2007 event was not the end. Many more awful cases of domestic violence surfaced at and around Fort Bragg in my remaining years there (til November 2012). And the members of the Fayetteville NOW chapter, who had worked on this issue for man-years, and were powerfully moved by Christine’s witness, decided to make an annual event of laying a wreath at Beryl; Mitchell’s grave. They settled on early December, on or close to the day she was murdered.

And so they have. Each year since, in rain, in sleet, or cloudy and chill wind, they have gathered, sometimes few, sometimes more, and laid a wreath and taken both comfort and strength from this quiet ritual.

Quaker Exorcisms II: No Magic Wands

He strode right down the center aisle, between the long full benches, as if confident a space had been reserved just for him.
And so it was, it seemed, at the end of the bench just to the right of the fireplace.
He sat down, crossed his legs, and leaned forward. He seemed to be peering into the fireplace with intense concentration. As if there were something revelatory about the bushy ficus, or the struggling peace lily.
And there must have been, because after a few moments he stood up.
He was tall, slender, wearing a well-used brown suit. Standing right by the fireplace, he might as well have been at a pulpit.
His dark eyes seemed to burn. After surveying us for a moment, as if to be sure all were listening, he spoke, clearly and firmly:
“You cannot give, what you have not got.”
He let this seem to echo, then abruptly sat down. Legs crossed again, leaning, gaze fixed on the plants.
I looked to my left, then to the right. The signs were obvious to the regular attender: a knitted brow here, a slight shifting on the bench there, a hand moved to the breastbone: passive aggressives now on guard. The air of faint dismay communicated the message: the hope is that this would be all; and the fear that it was not.
The fear was right. In about five minutes, the Stranger was up, again, shot from his seat as if pushed by hands we couldn’t see:
The same visual buildup, and this time the tone was more ominous, his voice louder:
“There will be, women rulers.”

A Quaker Exorcism: An Eyewitness Report

He began showing up on First Days (Quakerese for Sunday), sat unobtrusively in the silent group for some minutes, then rose to speak.
The opening thoughts varied, and sounded coherent enough, if perhaps a bit disjointed. But then they veered, every time, onto his favorite subject, or rather obsession: Dwight D. Eisenhower.
As obsessions go, one could do worse. After all, Eisenhower had had a distinguished military career, then was president, and a benign elder statesman until his death in 1969. His reputation hadn’t been scarred by major or lurid scandal.
Of course, Ike wasn’t a Quaker, or even notably religious, but other non-Friends were frequently mentioned in spoken messages in these open meetings. ThecOhiladelphia Quakers leaned on the Spirit for leadership rather than on appointed ministers; and it was not uncommon for the Spirit to produce musings on current public affairs.
So mentioning Eisenhower was not necessarily a faux pas. But Ben Smith didn’t just mention him. He launched into extended effusions of praise: Ike had been not merely a successful wartime commander, but the very greatest. His was not merely a successful presidency, but the acme of public governance and statesmanship.
And so forth, with many repetitions, and evermore exalted encomiums. Was Smith trying to make Ike into a new savior, supplanting Jesus? Was he deifying the man?
When he finally sat down, the meeting struggled to regain its equilibrium. This was not impossible. Such distracted and distracting intrusions on their silence were not unknown, and a meeting’s first line of defense is to surround and enfold them in the silence, into which many sink like a stone after having made its moment’s splash on the surface.
That could work once. Or maybe twice. But Ben Smith had returned to this meeting week after week, with long variants on the same message. And soon enough, even as avuncular a figure as Dwight Eisenhower had soon become both bizarre and the mention of his name incendiary.
So the matter came before the business meeting, Andrew quickly had the group tied up in knots. Speaking to Ben Smith privately, urging that he rein in his messages, did no good. More was needed. Not a few demanded action!
But here the knots drew ever more tangled and tighter: there were those whose recommendation was for more prayer and patience, that friend asking might see the light and join the silence willingly.
No! Insisted others. Such submission would send many longtime attenders fleeing the body, shredding the meeting. A few of these urged that after a final warning, the police be called, to remove this obstruction firmly and finally. But this left others gasping: police, with guns, were to be summoned into a peaceable Friends house of worship, against a visitor who might be difficult but was himself unarmed?
No, the business meeting summary in this homely newsletter was like none I had ever read before. I eagerly turned the page to find out how it all turned out.
But to my chagrin, there was no denouement: the deadlock and dismay was general, and as is usual in such cases, the meeting had agreed only to consider the matter further in the coming month. This could, I knew, go on indefinitely.