A Friendly Letter

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.

A Continuing Quaker Thumbprint on Japanese (& World) History

She had done teaching and library work when, in 1946, she was selected to be an American tutor to crown prince Akihito of the Japanese imperial family; one of the stated requirements for the position was that the tutor be “a Christian, but not a fanatic.” When Vining quotes this description later, one can see the sly grin; she spent nearly four years in this assignment. . . . Why her? A scholar says: “the religious denomination of the new tutor was, in fact, one of the major factors that led to the imperial household’s decision to hire Vining. According to Maeda Yōichi, son of Maeda Tamon and the crown prince’s French tutor, a Quaker woman was considered most ideal because Quakers are pacifistic but not self-righteous or preachy.” (Well, maybe not ALL of them.)

Radical Wisdom vs Conventional Wisdom

Astonishingly, in Ecclesiastes we have an all-out, fundamental challenge to the view of life, Wisdom, and even revelation presented in Proverbs, the book immediately preceding it. Nor is it a polite debate; as the TEV’s renderings show, it is more like a brawl. You could sum up much of this book in the words of a vulgar slogan I’ve seen on more than a few bumpers: “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

This assault on the confidence of Proverbs is deepened by the text that many Bible students consider to be the crown of the Hebrew scriptures, if not the entire Bible, the Book of Job.

The Book of Job deserves its own post. Here I’ll stick with Proverbs ad Ecclesiastes (or rather, one versus the other).

One reason to highlight this siege is that, as gloomy as these parts of the Wisdom writings may seem to some, I find them tremendously refreshing, even uplifting. In fact, I’m not sure I could believe that the Bible was really a special, “revealing” book, if the clash of Proverbs vs. Ecclesiastes weren’t part of it.

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.