Tables, Chairs & Oaken Chests

Write to think, think to write

2011-11-19T13:57:00.001-08:00

I know I still have things to say.

More important, I have things to think and I must say or write before I know I think them.

I only know this because I wrote that in my journal the other day!

10th Anniversary of San Francisco Meeting Vigil for Peace

2011-10-11T17:04:00.000-07:00

Well, I left San Francisco Friends Meeting, but it hasn't left me -- thanks to the magic of meeting email lists. This report came through and its author, Markley Morris, agreed that I could post this here.

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10th Anniversary of San Francisco Meeting Vigil for Peace

Last Thursday was the 10th anniversary of our vigil. The first vigil was held on October 11, 2001, the same week U.S. bombing of Afghanistan began.

There was a wonderful turnout. At 12:30 Supervisor John Avalos arrived and presented the attached proclamation to the vigil. Note that it is signed by all eleven San Francisco Supervisors. After this, Episcopal Bishop Marc Andrus gave a blessing and we resumed our vigil.

For photos by Sean McConnell see http://www.flickr.com/photos/diocal/sets/72157627839290668/

The vigil continues. Please join us whenever you can from noon to 1:00 every Thursday (except federal holidays) at the old federal building at the corner of Larkin Street and Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco.

In peace, Markley

Last Day during My Sabbatical

2011-09-25T17:06:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in my last post, I've been blessed to be able to take the summer off of paid work. Well, I had a lot of unpaid work to do, so it's not like I didn't keep busy. I did get to eat a few bonbons -- actually, ice cream and donuts more than bonbons. But I didn't blog as much as I had hoped. So be it.

Today, 9/25/11, was my last day before I go back to full-time work. It was a full day.

I went to Bible study at Green Street Friends Meeting. It was led by Walter Hjelt Sullivan. (It was thanks to Walter that Robin and I found a place to rent in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, close enough to walk to Green Street Meeting. He and his wife Traci live a block away, and he heard about the house where we moved. We knew them from when they were co-directors at Ben Lomond Quaker Center near Santa Cruz, Calif.)

Walter chose Ephesians 6:10-17, about the armor of God. It was offputting to some Friends, but I thought it was a great reminder that God gives us the strength and the tools -- spiritual weapons, even -- to meet challenges and, yes, even evil. "Stand firm," the text says; it sounds just like George Fox. I was reminded of something another parent told me this week at a school soccer game, when he was picking up plastic shopping bags blowing by: "Be an upstander, not a bystander!"

Then meeting for worship, where I was mulling over the armor of God, breastplate of righteousness, and so on in a contemporary context. Perhaps this: Put on the bicycle helmet of carbon footprint reduction, the bulletproof vest of faith, the organic cotton t-shirts and shorts of righteousness, and the sweatshop-free sneakers of peace. (I'm not sure what the sword of the Spirit would be.) This train of thought did not quite rise to the occasion of standing and delivering it as vocal ministry.

Afterwards, Robin & I had a nice chat with a fellow parent of an 8th grader at our sons' school. Then we headed home, where after lunch I helped Robin get to the SEPTA train to connect with Amtrak to a conference on fundraising for Quaker organizations (she tweeted this from the Amtrak train).

At home, Younger Son wanted to watch "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" on DVD (we don't have TV but we have a computer, and we only own a couple of DVDs, so...). Then we went outside to do yard work while Older Son did homework.

Here's what Younger Son found in the grass:

And here are the non-motorized, carbon-footprint-reducing tools we used on the lawn and edges:

And here is Younger Son, still smiling after working:

Scrambled eggs for dinner, followed by washing two nights' worth of dishes, a blog post, and hustling the boys to showers and to bed. A truly satisfying day to end a truly blessed time. I am grateful to my sons, my wife, our new and old friends, and the Spirit for allowing these many blessings to flow.

Last Weekday in My Sabbatical

2011-09-23T18:14:00.001-07:00

I've had the blessing of being able to not work for three months during our move from San Francisco to Philadelphia so Robin could be executive secretary at Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) Section of the Americas.

That changes on Monday, 9/26/11, as I start a new job in Center City doing fund development for the Community Design Collaborative, a community design center that provides pro bono predevelopment design services to nonprofit organizations, offers unique volunteer opportunities for design professionals, and raises awareness about the importance of design in community revitalization.

I am still hoping to post about the cross-country drive I took with our boys this summer. Meanwhile, I have been baking quite a bit, as well as making family dinners. Here is what I did today to mark the end of my free time.

Step 1 doesn't look too great on first glance:

But then, oh then, order appears from chaos:

Cookies in the oven, gonna watch 'em rise! Cookies in the oven, gonna watch 'em rise!

They turned out to be quite tasty, though quite soft. My suspicion is that the oven runs a little cooler than indicated. Robin thinks the extremely high humidity today is responsible.

In any event, I am truly blessed to have had this summer off from paid work. Thank you, God, from whom all blessings flow. Of course, I still had plenty of work to do, it just wasn't paid for with cash. And I certainly had the opportunity to touch "that which is eternal" at times in the process.

Board Binder

2011-08-20T13:58:00.001-07:00

Among the transitions I've made this summer, in moving from San Francisco to Philadelphia, I also took on a new volunteer role: clerk of the Board of Trustees of Friends Publishing Corporation, the publisher of Friends Journal magazine.

I know it's un-Quakerly to say it this way, but here's my new favorite status symbol, which came in the mail today:

I'm excited and honored to be a part of the organization. With Gabe Ehri as the new Executive Director and Martin Kelley as new Editor, the organization is ramping up its online presence.

I hope you already subscribe. If not, click here. Or, choose the new digital subscription and save paper & reduce mailing costs. Also, letters will be going out to Friends meetings about student subscriptions shortly. If you know a student who could benefit, please consider this.

Be sure to look at the recently published list of focus topics for 2012 and 2013.

Finally, there will be an event at the Arch Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia on October 1, 2011, to celebrate and appreciate Susan Corson-Finnerty and Bob Dockhorn, who are both retiring this year after many years of service to the Journal. (Email celebration -at- friendsjournal.org to learn more; replace "-at-" with "@".)

I look forward to serving alongside my fellow Board members and the staff to continue this ministry of Quaker communications and outreach.

Sound of Way Moving, though Stuttering a Bit

2011-08-09T18:58:00.001-07:00

In spare moments, I reflect on many small aspects of our family's move this summer from South San Francisco, Calif., to Philadelphia, Penna.

The first part of the summer was magical. Getting everything packed was a challenge. The boys finished school June 8, we had packed a lot but certainly not everything when we left June 10 for Santa Barbara, where there was a family sendoff. Then Robin flew to Philadelphia to start her job with Friends World Committee for Consultation Section of the Americas (FWCC), while I left the boys at Camp Avocado (aka Camp Grandma & Grandpa -- they have an avocado orchard) and headed back to South San Francisco to finish packing.

Then I went back to Santa Barbara to pick up the boys, and we headed east, stopping first in Las Vegas to see our good Friend Jennifer C. and family. I've posted some photos to Facebook, and that's about as far as I've gotten in processing the trip for myself, let alone others.

It went really well, and was a special and memorable time. I didn't manage to blog as we went, so I've been hoping to summarize it at least for myself now that we've been here a while.

Yet I haven't had the bandwidth -- psychologically or, until recently, technologically -- to take time to compose any kind of coherent reflections, even for myself let alone for my blog. For one thing, there's been all the tasks that go with moving house across country and establishing one's legal identity, finding services, etc., while also making sure 13 Year Old and 9 Year Old have at least their minimum daily requirements met.

Our 8-year-old laptop -- our one and only home computer -- perished on the last day of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, July 31. After a while, I bought a replacement, a much better machine at half the price of what we paid for the old one.

So, the last few days I've been taking time to set things back up on the new machine. Today I got back an external hard drive from the repair shop, where they were at least able to save the data. Yes, we had backups, but they were incomplete and on different media (CDs, online storage), none of which was ample enough to hold it all. So better to get the external drive and use that consistently.

Ironically, when I was in the middle of writing the paragraph about the laptop crashing, our home Internet connection dropped out. So, even now bandwidth is a precious commodity not to be taken for granted. (Especially this week, when Verizon workers are striking to preserve some of their benefits, at a time when, I understand, top execs are very high earners and profits are high.)

Somehow, this is how my life has seemed since we got to Philadelphia -- fragmentary, disjointed, full of (summer) light and heat, few clumsy moments and dropped connections, along with fun trips, cicadas, big trees, historic buildings, and some especially hot weather... Yet it has felt right and good to be here, in support of Robin's post as Quaker diplomat with FWCC Section of the Americas.

And even though I may not notice it as much as I could or should, God has been smoothing the way for us all summer, so far, laying low the hills and filling the valleys that have inevitably arisen. Perhaps it's all the people who have been praying for Robin and also our whole family. Thanks, everyone.

Arthur Larrabee's Quaker Model for Leadership

2011-07-30T04:47:00.000-07:00

I'm at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting summer sessions for the first time. It's comfortingly similar to Pacific Yearly Meeting, though with some striking differences I'm still thinking about. Meanwhile, here is a summary of the talk by Arthur Larrabee, General Secretary for PhYM, on the Yearly Meeting's theme this year, "Powerful Beyond Measure: Trusting the Call to Leadership."

Arthur Larrabee’s Top Six Recommendations for Quaker Leaders

as delivered at evening plenary to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 7/29/2011

1. Think globally about your meeting (or organization).
What is God’s big idea for us? Take time for retreat & reflection. Consider not just the temporal health but also the spiritual health. Consider our diversity and our oneness.

2. Share with us the fruits of your big-picture thinking.
Then release those thoughts back to the meeting. By releasing, we welcome the Spirit to come among us.

3. Take risks.
Be vulnerable in service to the meeting. Ideas and truth will inevitably trigger resistance. We need leaders to be fearless. Don’t fear rejection of ideas. Accept the result either way with equanimity.

4. Be spiritually grounded.
We expect you to be Spirit-led and open to the Spirit.

5. Test and season your ideas with the community.
The community’s temporal and spiritual input is necessary for discernment. The Quaker model is not the “power over” model of leadership.

6. Find primary satisfaction as a leader in the success of your meeting or organization.
We don’t expect you to be egoless or not want recognition of your gifts and skills. However, we expect you to measure your success by the success of the community.
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To conclude, Arthur said, “Quakers have always had leaders… We need to be clear about what we expect of our leaders. With shared expectations, we’ll know what will make for trustworthy leadership."

A San Francisco Elegy

2011-06-17T10:05:00.000-07:00

We're in process on our cross-country move. Robin is in Philadelphia -- in fact, she had her first day on the job at FWCC, also yesterday. And meanwhile, our children are at Camp Grandma & Grandpa while I finish packing.

Yesterday I got to spend some time in San Francisco while waiting for some car maintenance to be completed. It was a beautiful day to explore the southern Mission and lower Bernal Heights. Finally some bright Northern California sunshine, air relatively clean from all the rain, and no fog, yet still pleasantly cool.

First, I went for coffee, snack, and wireless at the Nervous Dog.

Then, I took a walk. It was getting toward lunchtime. Some friends had told us about Phat Philly, a Philadelphia-themed restaurant on 24th Street near Mission, so I decided to wander up there.

I went over to Guerrero Street, the route by which we drove our kids to school every morning. There is a relatively new "parklet" there that was created by closing off part of a little-used, diagonal intersection. It looked interesting from a moving car, so it was nice to actually partake of the walkability of the site by walk.
Along the way, I found Pi.
Open every day at 3:14 PM! And hated on Yelp:
And then, there it was: Phat Philly!
I had a pepper steak. It wasn't perhaps "authentic" in that they had gourmet steak, and they had veggie options available, which is great. They did have lots of ketchup available (as well as Tapatio hot sauce for that California touch), a Pennsylvania baseball team on TV (though it was the Pirates), and Tastykakes!! I used to bring a Tastykake krimpet in my school lunch almost every day when I was in grade school in New Jersey.
Lunch bag in hand, krimpet-less today, I went back to the parklet. The plaza there has some benches as well as a few chairs and a couple of eucalyptus logs.

I ate my lunch and finished reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries. It was fun reading about NYC's bold steps to make the streets more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly while sitting in a San Francisco example of a similar effort.

Across the street is the fabulous Mitchell's Ice Cream. Yum! But not this time.

After lunch I wandered aimlessly along Mission Street for a while. This stretch of street has chain stores (Safeway and Walgreens), Spanish-speaking attorneys, affordable housing, market rate housing, a gas station, car repair shops, a hardware store, little grocery and liquor stores, money-changing places, lots of taquerias of Mexican, Salvadorean, or Guatemalan persuasion, a panaderia (Mexican bakery), yuppie coffee shops (Nervous Dog), a Cambodian restaurant, a Pizza Hut and two Indian restaurants -- one of which is also a pizza joint! In short, a higgledy-piggledy, thriving, mixed-use and mixed-income urban neighborhood.

This was written into the concrete near the Nervous Dog:
An appropriate term for contemporary postindustrial capitalism, in my opinion.

From there, I chose to rise the actual heights of Bernal and walked a block up the hill. To my delight, there was a mini-park on Coleridge.
There was a small playground and a nice walkway with benches and shade:
And it all opened up on a spectacular view west, toward Noe Valley, the Castro, and Twin Peaks:
Twin Peaks has a giant red AIDS-awareness ribbon on it right now. It's hard to see with my lo-rez cell phone photo, but it's there:
Finding my way back downhill, I called the car shop and they had just finished the work. It was time to drive back to South San Francisco (the Industrial City) and resume packing for the move. I'm very much looking forward to exploring to Philadelphia, and yet will also miss San Francisco.

Blog posts that never were...

2011-05-23T21:15:00.000-07:00

I have a list of possible blog posts that I was hoping to write but didn't when they were fresh.

There's a low chance I'll get to many or any of these by now, given that we're gearing up to move to Philadelphia (see Robin's post about it), so I thought that would be an interesting post in itself.

Reflections on reading Pink Dandelion's Introduction to Quakerism
Reflections on reading Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation
Reflections on reading George Lakoff's Whose Freedom? The battle over America's most important idea
SF "Fiends" School t-shirt (limited edition sold to benefit 8th grade class trip--there, that's all I really had to say about that)
Berkeley Meeting had an introduction to Quakerism workshop back in early May
Naomi Klein's appearance on "Democracy Now" back on March 9 -- taking on climate change is and has to be political; one can't rely "merely" on scientific and environmental evidence to make the case by itself.
Isn't Chris Hedges' challenge to liberalism more relevant to most liberal unprogrammed Quakers than Rob Bell's challenge to fundamentalism?
Description the lesson I taught at College Park Quarterly Meeting in mid-May (I still hope to post the outline, at least)

I had also hoped to say more about Quaker Heritage Day, way back in February... Oh, well! Again, here's one of Robin's posts about that.

[Updated: Added the bit about Quarterly Meeting.]

State of San Francisco Friends Meeting 2011

2011-04-30T21:13:00.000-07:00

It's 9:15 pm on Seventhday (Saturday), 4/30/2011. My term as clerk of San Francisco Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) will technically end at midnight.

Our Quaker meeting appoints its clerks on a one-year basis, and I was approved four years in a row. Now, it's time for me to lay down this role. I knew it was time even before we decided to move to Philadelphia for Robin's new job. I leave without feeling particularly burned out, a sense of accomplishment, and a certainty that if I stayed much longer I would burn out. So it's good.

As my last official act, I sent a copy of our annual "state of the meeting" report to College Park Quarterly Meeting and Pacific Yearly Meeting, the two regional and super-regional bodies of Quakers in Northern California and related areas.

The report is pretty long as these things go. For completeness, I'm posting it below.

Thank you to San Francisco Friends for allowing me to be of service this way. It has felt like the right choice, and now it's time for our F/friend Stephen Matchett to take up the clerkship. This will be his second time doing so, and it feels right, too.

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San Francisco Monthly Meeting
State of the Society Report, 4/10/2011

Friends discussed the state of the Society at a regular meeting for business on 3/13/2011, and the meeting clerk subsequently wrote this report.

Spiritual Health
Overall, the spiritual health of the meeting is good. The weekly Firstday meeting for worship is a time of deep waiting. This sense of depth is typically maintained when there is vocal ministry, even when there are several messages. A midweek meeting for worship was moved to Wednesday in the past year, and serves as a small but gathered fellowship for those who attend, often including newcomers.

The meeting for business is held as a spiritual exercise, truly a meeting for worship with a concern for business. This has been commented on both by long-time members and by a couple visiting from Australia for a year. One Friend said, “Sometimes I think meeting for business is more spiritual than meeting for worship.” The clerk has continued to invite a minister among us to report at each meeting. This has led to a greater appreciation of one another’s gifts and callings, as well as offering a grounded start to each business meeting.

Friends have made efforts to share their spiritual lives. Notably, a women’s retreat at Sierra Friends Center accomplished this for nearly 20 women, plus several children. Out of it has come other events, such as an occasional women’s Bible study group, and at least two requests for membership. The Friendly 8s potluck groups have dwindled to just two, and so this spring, Ministry and Oversight called for participants and began matching up new groups for fellowship and conversation.

We still sometimes have trouble processing situations with difficult or challenging people. Ministry and Oversight Committee regularly discusses past situations as well as the possibility of developing guidelines for what to do in general. However, the committee has not found clarity on what to bring to the meeting as a whole. This feels like an area where we are somewhat stuck.

The meeting has been able to find unity on larger undertakings, including the creation of a Fund for Leadings and the first approval of an application to it, and the establishment of a neighborhood food pantry at the meetinghouse.

Spiritual Formation
Our weekly Quaker study group and twice-monthly Bible study group continue to be at the core of our religious education for adults. Both groups serve experienced Friends as well as newcomers to our meeting.

At the rise of meeting most Firstdays, there is a discussion on a “Frequently Asked Quaker Question (FAQQ),” such as, “What do you do in meeting for worship?”, “What do Quakers believe about God?”, or “How do you become a member?” The number of people who participate varies, from just a few to almost a dozen people, but everyone hears the question, which is announced by the clerk at rise of meeting.

The meeting found unity to approve the Children’s Religious Education Committee creating a new paid position of teacher’s aide, in addition to an existing child care provider. With the additional support, Firstday School has become more organized for the children. More people from the meeting at large have been volunteering to help with the children, so that parents have more opportunity to worship.

The meeting retreat at Ben Lomond Quaker Center is a central annual event in the life of our community. It is very family-friendly, and several individuals and families who have moved away often return for it. Its lightly structured format allows time for Friends to both play and worship together for a long weekend under the redwoods.

Our meeting feels the need for more leadership development. Occasional breakfasts for committee clerks and officers have provided mutual support in the past year. While the call to leadership is not always easy for Friends to heed, it is clear that now is the time, as several experienced Friends have moved away from our meeting or passed away in the last few years.

Activities and Witness
Our vigil for peace continues outside the old federal building on Golden Gate Avenue. The billboard at the local tire store paid tribute to the vigil recently.

The larger global situation, with US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and recently Libya, continues to weigh on us. Several Friends continue to labor with a scruple against paying taxes for war, and are sharing opportunities for others to join them in some level of witness. The Meeting endorsed the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and the Campaign for New Priorities, and seeks to participate in an ongoing way.

As mentioned, the meeting acted locally to establish a community food pantry. This is our biggest sustained service project in memory, serving 70-85 households weekly. Volunteers include Quakers, neighbors, clients, people who find the online signup pages including a group of medical students, and families from the San Francisco Friends School.

Welcoming
Our location in a destination city provides a steady flow of visitors. One Midwestern Friend described San Francisco as “the most welcoming urban meeting” he’s been to. We continue to seek ways to encourage newcomers to return and become regular attenders, with mixed success recently.

Fortunately, we have been blessed by a slow but steady stream of new requests for membership.

Engagement
The meeting does modest outreach in the wider local community, including through participating in the PRIDE Festival, outreach cards in business card format, and posting large signs with quotes from Pacific Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice in our front window. The San Francisco Friends School may publicize Quakers more widely than we do. The school’s Quaker Life Committee, with two meeting members on it, published a booklet on Quaker testimonies and values, which they are now sharing with the many applicants to the school. It has also been used in some classrooms.

The meetinghouse is a both a modest source of income from rentals and a location for many community groups to meet. Our part-time Building Manager maintains the property with support from the Property and Finance Committee. After years of discussion, meeting reached unity to approve renovating the meetinghouse kitchen; plans are being developed.

San Francisco Friends are active in the wider Quaker world, including College Park Quarterly Meeting, Pacific Yearly Meeting, Quakers United in Publishing, American Friends Service Committee, Friends General Conference, Friends for Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender and Queer Concerns, Friends Committee on Legislation of California, Friends Committee on National Legislation, and Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC).

In fact, our member, Robin Mohr, was recently selected to serve as Executive Secretary for FWCC – Section of the Americas. She will be moving to Philadelphia this summer with her family, including Chris Mohr, who will have just completed four years of service as meeting clerk.

In sum, San Francisco Monthly Meeting is a vibrant, spiritually alive community that, despite its flaws, provides opportunities for worship, growth, and transformation.

In peace and friendship,

Chris Mohr, Clerk
San Francisco Monthly Meeting
of the Religious Society of Friends

A Public Board Meeting Before I Go

2011-04-29T17:00:00.000-07:00

On Wed. 4/27/2011, I staffed the monthly board meeting of the Housing Endowment And Regional Trust--the HEART of San Mateo County.

As background, HEART is a housing trust fund, and I'm its executive director. It raises funds from public and private sources to meet critical housing needs in the county. Primarily, HEART finances affordable housing development, as well as makes homebuyer assistance loans to families and individuals, in one of the nation's most expensive housing markets.

HEART is a public agency--technically, a joint powers authority (JPA) or collaboration among local governments. Unusual if not unique among JPAs, it is governed by a public/private board, with two county supervisors, nine members of individual city councils, and up to ten members of the private sector. So, it's extremely networked and collaborative, and it has a lot of moving parts.

The April 27 meeting was truly a remarkable -- and remarkably productive -- one. The board:

accepted the quarterly financial report;
approved the FY2012 administrative budget;
accepted the FY2010 audited financial report;
approved substantive changes to the QuickStart Revolving Loan Fund;
discussed our May 11 executive briefing and luncheon, and board assignments to get people there;
adopted the HEART business plan, which we've been working on since November.

Whew!

There was a nice blend of humor and seriousness throughout. Committee chairs and the treasurer presented items, not just staff, which increased the board's comfort level with the information tremendously.

The meeting ended about 10 minutes early. The room was just bursting with good energy when it was over, as people caught up with one another and chatted excitedly. I liked that!

(Writing that makes me think of my former boss and mentor, the late Bro. Kelly Cullen. He was all about finding the good energy.)

A few years ago, when HEART started, a meeting with this amount on the agenda would have been painful. We've made such great strides organizationally, both in terms of our external accomplishments -- funding the construction, renovation or purchase of 805 affordable homes! -- and internal systems -- financial reports that are consistent and understandable -- that this meeting was at least partly a joy.

It's a team effort, and I'm grateful for the board, our staff, volunteers, funders, and community partners. Together, we have accomplished something real. I'm grateful for my personal Quaker practice that has helped me maintain a calm center at the middle of all this, which I believe has served the organization well.

Last Meeting for Worship as Clerk of San Francisco Friends Meeting

2011-04-27T20:48:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday (4/24/2011) was my last day to clerk meeting for worship** at San Francisco Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). I didn't even realize it was my last time until a Friend said something about it during refreshments time afterward.

I thought I had one more Sunday to go. Nope!! April has 30 days, so there were just 4 Sundays this month.

It was a pretty amazing meeting. One person counted 9 messages. Here are three that moved me:

Friend 1 spoke about how her elementary schooler and 3-year-old had really wanted to go to a church. They especially wanted to see statues of Jesus and Mary. They went to four churches before they found one that was unlocked. Once there, they stopped to kneel at each statue and look at the candles. On the way out, the elementary schooler said, "That was the most awesome time ever!" The 3-year-old said, "But I wanted to see the talking Jesus." Friend 1 tried to explain that Jesus is still talking, through us and not a statue.

Friend 2 said he had emailed the outgoing clerk [i.e., me] to see if there was anything special for Easter at the Meeting. The clerk wrote back to say, "Yes, meeting for worship. And sometimes there is an egg hunt." He said as an "Episcopalian" Quaker of sorts (using "Episcopalian" as an adjective more than a dual identity), he likes ritual. He went to Grace Cathedral which had a beautiful Easter service involving a darkened sanctuary with a bonfire in the labyrinth, lighting one candle from the bonfire, putting out the bonfire, then passing on the light from the one candle until lots of people had candles. It was beautiful, and yet he found it didn't move him. He thought, the Quaker Meeting is his cathedral.

I spoke near the end to say we teach that the building isn't the church, the people are. That's why we call it a meetinghouse, not a church, and in our case we have a skylight rather than a steeple. So what are our monuments? They are our peace vigil, every week on Thursday from noon to 1; and our food pantry, every Saturday from 10:30 to 1:30. These are concrete acts of love and service, and yet not made of physical concrete.

(Friend 1 thanked me afterward. She said this was just the kind of example of the "talking Jesus" she would share with her 3 year old. "Yes, Jesus is there on the street corner at the vigil, or at the food pantry!")

Friend 3 had simply said, "I am profoundly grateful for this community." I think there were a few more words that implied "this community" meant the wider Quaker community, not our meeting, especially because I think the person was a visitor.

I too am so grateful for my friends and Friends at San Francisco Meeting. I am blessed to be a part of, and a leader in, it. Thank you, God, "for most this amazing community," as e.e. cummings once wrote.

__________
** SF Friends Meeting is at 65 9th Street, between Mission & Market streets, near the Civic Center BART/MUNI station. Join us on Sunday from 11 am to noon for unprogramed, waiting worship in the manner of Friends; on 5th Sundays, you can start at 9:30 for extended worship to noon. Or come on Wednesdays from 6 pm to 6:45 pm. Come on by if you're in town!

Last meeting for business as clerk of San Francisco Monthly Meeting of Friends

2011-04-10T21:16:00.000-07:00

Today I clerked my last meeting for business at San Francisco Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), at least for this go-round.

After four years, it was simply time to stop. I've enjoyed clerking and was the right person during that time, but had let the community know some months ago that I was ready to lay it down. While I felt stretched at times throughout the four years, and was definitely ready to let go at the end, I do not feel burned out. This is a good time to conclude this period of service.

Fortunately, my successor as clerk, Stephen Matchett, was approved today (whew), and so he will become the Meeting's clerk on May 1st.

It was an eventful business meeting on which to end: In addition to approving the slate of nominations, we had two memorial minutes, one membership release, a confession from a Friend that this Friend’s work had felt like a “joyless burden,” a report on our neighborhood food pantry on the occasion of its first birthday, and the annual "state of the Meeting" report.

After the state of the Meeting report, I said a few words as "a minister among us" about my role as clerk, likening it to the parable of the sower: The Meeting had provided fertile ground in which to grow. And however much I had given, I had received more in return.

(I hope to post the state of the Meeting report later. It’s pretty long. We’ve decided that’s okay: We’re doing enough interesting things that we like to report on some of our activities as well as the spiritual health of our meeting, so that perhaps others might learn from or be inspired by our efforts and experiments.)

When I read the draft report to the ministry & oversight committee earlier this week, I could not fully contain my emotions of sadness and loss at moving to Philadelphia. For example, reading the line about how our Meeting retreat at Ben Lomond Quaker Center is a central event in the life of our community, I felt a huge pang that this year’s retreat will be our last one, for a while, anyway. Another member of the committee continued reading for me, for which I was grateful.

Yet when I read the report at business meeting today, I was pretty composed. I had prayed for help to be faithful, and to love God with mind and body and spirit as well as my heart/emotions, and that seemed to keep me focused enough to read it through. It was satisfying to have people breathe out and smile gently when I was done, because it showed that the report appeared to accurately speak to our condition.

During joys and concerns at the close of business meeting, a Friend said, “I don’t know if this is appropriate, but I would like to thank Chris for his four years of service as clerk.” Yes, Charles, it was appropriate, and I’m grateful to be acknowledged, and more grateful to have had the chance to be of service.

Through our combined efforts, may we hear the word of God, encounter the divine presence, sense the eternal. May we love God and love one another.

Retreat at Chico, Calif., Friends Meeting

2011-04-04T21:39:00.000-07:00

I can't imagine too many readers of my blog (and Facebook) page haven't already heard the news, that Robin was chosen to be Executive Secretary of Friends World Committee Section of the Americas. I'm very proud of her -- enough to agree to move to Philadelphia this summer, after the school year is over. Since I grew up in New Jersey, it will seem a bit like coming home, though it's going to be hard to leave San Francisco Meeting as well as the professional friendships & relationships I've developed here over the last 16 years.

Meanwhile, last weekend, Robin and I co-presented at a retreat for a cluster of meetings in northern California, including Davis, Grass Valley, and Chico, hosted by Chico Friends. If we hadn't agreed to this before Robin's job announcement, I don't think we would have accepted. As it was, the weekend gave us a nice time away among Friends, some of whom we knew and many of whom we didn't. (Thanks to Jim A. & Janet L. for hosting us.)

Chico is a college and agricultural town, and the Friends Meeting there is growing. It helps that they purchased a building just a few years ago, a former Church of the Brethren building. Our boys had other children to play with during the weekend, which was nice.

Here is an outline of the weekend.

Building the Quaker Community

Chico Friends Meeting Cluster retreat April 1-3, 2011

Chico Friends Meeting House, 1601 Hemlock Street, Chico, California

Friday:

7 pm welcoming activities at the meeting house

[snacks, conversation, singing]

Saturday:

8:30 coffee, tea, rolls

9:00 worship

9:30 welcome, introductions

Icebreaker: Say your name, what religious tradition (if any) you grew up with, and what your name for the divine is now as an adult

10:00 Robin and Chris Mohr: shared thoughts and activities

A. Robin and Chris present

a. Robin describes image of the church/meeting as a spiritual “midwife” (from Wess Daniels' presentation at Quaker Heritage Day, and Robin's thoughtful blogpost afterward)

b. Some ways Quaker monthly, quarterly & yearly meetings have served as midwives for Robin & Chris

c. Some ways in which Robin & Chris have served as same to others

B. Discussion: Reaction and Q&A: Thoughts? responses? What is the potential strength and power of this image? What are the limitations of this image? [Note: One person mentioned a bad experience with a midwife, so we talked about that. We took time to discuss limits of metaphors, the concept of malpractice can arise in any human endeavor, and the applicability of other metaphors, such as shepherd or gardener.]

C. Worship Sharing: We broke into two smaller groups
2 queries proposed:

a. Who in your life has given you spiritual nurture or acted as a spiritual midwife?

b. Whom have you helped spiritually nurture or served as a spiritual midwife?

D. Closing thoughts

E. Closing worship

12:00 Simple lunch at the meetinghouse

1:00 Building the Quaker Community

[opening exercise, breakout groups, and full group discussion]

Open with a “sociometric exercise.” In this exercise, a statement is read aloud, and Friends align themselves along a continuum of agree/disagree with the statement. (There can also be a second dimension, such as “comfort/discomfort with my level of agreement/disagreement.) We did something similar at College Park's Spring Quarter on the topic of diversity. There, though, we usually aligned along dyads (theist/nontheist, Christian/universalist). Here, the goal is simply to gauge relative placement in response to one topic at a time, and to take a very short time to debrief why people clustered as they did.

· “I publicly identify as a Friend."

· “Growth and change are a good and necessary part of a Quaker meeting.”

· “I expect to be held accountable by Friends for my behavior at meeting.”

· “Membership is a vital part of defining the Quaker community.”

· etc.

The full group then discussed these topics together.

3:00 snack break

3:30 Chico Friends present:

[a series of brief presentations about new developments in our meeting, with

discussion and related experiences from others: topics include outreach, incorporation, membership, winnowing sessions, Quaker structures and levels of Quaker community.

5:00 Closing reflections and worship

5:45 Dinner at local restaurants

[groups of 4-6 will join at recommended local restaurants of choice for fellowship and a taste of the town.]

Sunday:

9:30-10:15 Singing

10:30-11:30 Worship

12:00-1:00 Simple lunch

optional activity:

1:30 CROP walk for world hunger [walk through local park sponsored by area interfaith council.]

Childcare provided on Saturday

Clinic on Quaker Clerking

2011-03-02T22:51:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday, I played hooky from San Francisco Friends Meeting (Quakers) and instead worshiped with Berkeley Friends. I think it may have been the first time I attended Sunday meeting at a Bay Area meeting that was not San Francisco.

Afterwards, I co-facilitated a workshop on clerking for about 20 Friends. It was organized by the meeting's Outreach and Nurture Committee (great name!). It was a good experience, and so I share the outline and talking points here.

Berkeley Friends Meeting:
Clinic on Clerking, 2/26/11

Opening Worship

Introductions

Everyone said her or his name. To begin my remarks, I held up a copy of Elizabeth Boardman's Where Should I Stand? A field guide for monthly meeting clerks. I said Elizabeth was my predecessor but one as clerk of San Francisco Monthly Meeting. When she left, she wrote the book about clerking! So she left big shoes to fill, and we were all somewhat in awe of how omnipresent she was in the life of our meeting. Fortunately, the meeting understood I was going to be a different kind of clerk, because I'm a father of two youngish children, husband, and director of a small nonprofit. I was going to have a different manner and style of clerking, and that was okay. As Robin likes to say, "The water tastes of the jug it's poured from." So, each clerk will have her or his own personality and style, just as each committee or meeting will, too.

What is Meeting for Business?

> Purpose of meeting for business: Finding unity

oDefinition of unity from Pacific Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice: “the spiritual oneness and harmony whose realization is a primary objective of a Meeting for Worship for Business; within a gathered group of Friends, the state of finding and recognizing a unified sense (often referred to as God’s will) about a concern or item of business.”

o Friends seek, find, and then follow that spirit of goodness for the organization and the individuals who compose it; God’s will.

o Cf. Michael Sheeran’s book, Beyond Majority Rule: Voteless Decision Making in the Religious Society of Friends

> How do committees work in that structure?

> What is the role of individuals participating?

Committee Clerks

Role of clerks is more active than a meeting clerk

1) Administrative Support: set agenda, find minute-take and ensure there are minutes (at least action minutes),

2) Spiritual Support: create a worshipful space with opening & closing worship, hold silence when needed, make sure everyone gets a chance to talk, name the sense of the committee when needed & if appropriate state an action minute everyone can unite with

3) Active participation in the business of the committee – the “content”

Types of Committee Presentations at Meeting for Business

1) Purely informational: Written reports are helpful

2) Status report: Here’s where we are in our process on an issue

3) Recommendation for action; helpful to bring a proposed action minute

Communication

> Email is good for scheduling and logistics, and clarifying questions

> It is NOT a good medium for discernment.

> Phone calls and in person discussions are good for one-on-one communication.

> Decisions ordinarily need to be made by the committee in real time in person (or, sometimes, over phone/Skype)

> It is important not to second-guess unity found at a gathering where I was not present. If you want to be heard, you need to show up.

“Clerk Thyself!” Thoughts on Discipline

> Address the clerk, speak from your own experience, leave your ego or attachment to outcome aside as much as possible,

> Speak once; hold back if your point’s already been made, and trust it’s been heard.

> Wait to speak; see if your point is going to be made by someone else; if not, then speak if you feel clear to do so.

> “Weight” is shorthand for the respect earned by a Friend over time for her or his consistency, care, knowledge, compassion, insight, and the like. People usually have more or less “weight” on different issues because they may have more experience or wisdom to contribute in one area than in another.

What is Your Experience?

Each person said what committee and clerking experience, if any, she or he had.

There was time for questions, answers, and discussion.

Closing worship

Get Thee to the (Meetinghouse) Library!

2011-02-21T22:34:00.000-08:00

[Note: I wrote this for the newsletter of San Francisco Friends Meeting, so the audience includes many new attenders as well as experienced Friends.]

New books at San Francisco Meetinghouse, including
An Introduction to Quakerism by “Ben” Pink Dandelion

Get thee to the library!

The Meetinghouse library, that is.

Thanks to our faithful library committee, we have several new titles available to borrow, including Ursula Jane O’Shea’s Living the Way: Quaker Spirituality and Community, a short book that is the recent reprint of the 1993 Backhouse Lecture she gave for Australia Yearly Meeting; Philip Gulley’s If the Church Were Christian (the title tells the story; with illustrative real-life anecdotes from Gulley’s experience as a Quaker pastor in Indiana); and Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith, which I found generally compatible with my Quaker understanding of Christianity.

One of my favorite new books in the library is An Introduction to Quakerism by “Ben” Pink Dandelion. (Yes, he chose that name, during his pre-Quaker anarchist days.) Pink Dandelion is the director of the Quaker Studies Programme at Woodbroke, the Quaker study center in Birmingham, UK. He has written a number of books I’ve liked, including The Liturgies of Quakerism; Heaven on Earth: Quakers and the Second Coming, co-authored by Douglas Gwyn and Timothy Peat; The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction; and Celebrating the Quaker Way, a 28-page booklet with a very small trim size and a brilliantly concise style.

At 250 pages, An Introduction to Quakerism is more hefty than those last two brief books mentioned. While scholarly in approach, the book is mostly very readable. Each chapter is broken up into short sections covering many topics of interest.

The book has two parts: first, Quaker history from its beginnings in the late 1640s/early 1650s to the 20th Century; and second, worldwide Quakerism today. In part two, Pink Dandelion gives an overview of theology and worship; Quakers and “the world; and “the worldwide Quaker family.”

(Did you know that there are six branches of Friends today? Depending on how you count, anyway. They are: Liberal, unprogrammed Friends affiliated with Friends General Conference; “Beanites,” also liberal, unprogrammed Friends but not affiliated with FGC--named for Joel and Hannah Bean of San Jose, CA--that’s our branch; Pastoral, usually affiliated with Friends United Meeting; Evangelical, affiliated with Evangelical Friends International; Conservative; and unaffiliated Holiness Friends.)

I would put An Introduction to Quakerism up there with Thomas Hamm’s The Quakers in America and Wilmer Cooper’s A Living Faith: An Historical Study of Quaker Beliefs as important works of Quaker history, theology, and theological history. If you’ve read a basic work such as Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years (or its updated edition Friends for 350 Years) and want something more, I would recommend you read any or all three. I recommend the two short books by Pink Dandelion as well. All of them have a different and valuable perspective; together they present a well-rounded picture of the multifaceted faith community known to the world as the Religious Society of Friends.

A Teaching Meeting

2011-02-14T22:00:00.000-08:00

A former member of San Francisco Friends Meeting transferred his membership to his new meeting last year. In his letter requesting transfer, he wrote very movingly of the importance of the meeting to him, and how it served as a teaching meeting not only for him but for many other Friends.

This Friend had himself truly grown and deepened in the nearly 15 years he had worshiped with us. He had eventually quit his job as a management consultant for a very large corporation, made other work arrangements that reduced his hours substantially, and used the time freed up to make himself useful to Friends in all sorts of ways. He now consults part-time for Quaker organizations.

We miss him, but I'm glad our paths crossed and we became friends as well as Friends.

Because the cost of living in San Francisco is so high, our population is more transitory than in many cities. Add to that the appeal of its culture, its weather, its many startup companies, and its rich array of nonprofit community-based organizations and arts groups, we get a lot of young people cycling through, checking out Quaker meeting for the first time or -- if they grew up Quaker -- for the 1000th time.

Finally, because San Francisco is a popular destination for tourists and for conferences, our meeting also has a regular stream of visitors from other areas.

Suffice it to say, it's not always easy to keep track of any individual who starts attending. We do our best to be welcoming and talk to new people. (For a recent reflection on this topic by Robin M., see "Worship with My Eyes Open".) We also offer a session called "Frequently Asked Quaker Questions (FAQQs)" for 15 minutes after the end of meeting for worship, so that's a chance for people to plug in.

On 2/13, we had a visitor who introduced herself as someone who had attended our meeting for about six months in 1997. She then moved elsewhere, and stayed involved with Friends. She said she is someone who would gladly be involved with Quakerism every hour of the day, or words to that effect. She is now the clerk of Ministry and Counsel for another yearly meeting on the East Coast, as well as a member of their Faith & Practice revision committee. She was enthusiastic to be back where she had started with Quakers.

It was rewarding to know that her experience with us had stuck with her.

Dear God, thank you for the many blessings in my life, including San Francisco Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

Clerk of the Eternal Meeting

2011-02-13T21:28:00.001-08:00

Today at San Francisco Meeting, a Friend gave ministry about his sense of growing up spiritually. He has the sense that God the Father wants his children to move from simple obedience to being co-workers. The idea of being God's co-workers was from Wilmer Cooper, quoted by Wess Daniels at yesterday's Quaker Heritage Day (pdf) at Berkeley Friends Church.

Further, this Friend imagined God as the Clerk of the Eternal Meeting. We are in that Meeting, working to find unity together with God. Occasionally, God may even defer to us, to let us try something ourselves.

I love this image, this new office, for God.

Off and on for the rest of meeting, I meditated on a new wording of the prayer taught by Jesus that this sparked for me: "As it is in the eternal meeting, so may it be in the earthly meeting."

Qwitters or Qweeters?

2011-02-10T22:54:00.000-08:00

I've been using Twitter for work for some time now (@hlc_sanmateo). However, I have not used it personally, and so I haven't followed many Quakers who Tweet.

(That phrase just begs the question: Are Quakers on Twitter "Qwitters" or "Qweeters"?

(Or just your "Qweeps"?)

Until now.

Sparked by the imminent arrival of Quaker Heritage Day with Wess Daniels (@cwdaniels) this Saturday, 2/12, I decided to start a personal Twitter account and follow other Quakers. I'm @chrismsf, naturally.

My first tweet was actually a retweet of Wess's suggestion to use the hashtag #QHD2011 to follow Quaker Heritage Day on Twitter.

Back in the old days, in 2007, I organized the QuakerQuaker Blog Carnival (remember blog carnivals? does anyone still have them any more?).

Now, given today's social media environment, I'm thinking we need a Qwestival -- a Twestival for Quakers, naturally. If you're not that ambitious, you could just have a QweetUp -- a Quaker meetup.

Until then, you can find Qwitters or Qweeters through the QuakerQuaker list at @quakerquaker/quakers.

Temptation

2011-02-08T09:22:00.000-08:00

Temptation takes many forms.

Here's one form it takes for me:

The latest issue of Friends Journal has a display ad saying you can get a PhD from Woodbrooke/University of Birmingham through online study with 'Ben,' Pink Dandelion.

Here's the link to the program:

Postgraduate: Quaker Studies.

Gratitude for Grace

2011-01-19T16:14:00.001-08:00

As I wrote in a 2008 post about another family mealtime grace, "Our family usually has mealtime grace at dinner. Each member of the family gets a turn to choose how to pray: silence, sing a song from a prescribed list, or speak a prayer. (Six Year Old [now 9] sometimes chooses laughter, but that's another story.)"

Yesterday evening at dinner, I noticed that we hadn't had our usual family grace. I decided not to say anything, but to wait and see what happened.

Midway through the meal, Twelve Year Old said, "We didn't have grace. It's Nine Year Old's turn."

Who promptly chose a moment of silence, concluded by quietly saying, "Amen."

I am grateful that this practice is sticking!

Class Meeting for Business

2010-12-25T19:44:00.001-08:00

This was the 3rd grade newsletter for my son's class recently.

Some of you have heard the terms “Class Meeting” or “Meeting for Business” being used to describe meetings wherein the class discusses issues. We would like to use today’s newsletter to detail what these Meetings for Business look like.

When a student has a conflict with another student (or a group of students), the initial student first tries to solve the problem by being assertive. We have given the students explicit language and tools to try, e.g., “I feel (feeling) when you (specific action). I want you to stop (or other desired behavior).” With this language, the students learn that each of them has a responsibility to solve their problems.

However, sometimes the problems are more complex or difficult to resolve. In this situation, after the initial student has put forth significant effort, he/she tells the other parties involved, “I don’t think we can solve this problem on our own. I’m going to write it down in the Class Meeting Notebook.”

We don’t introduce the Class Meeting Notebook until we have developed a safe classroom environment, in which students have developed a strong sense of trust and support with one another. Our roles as teachers, during the Meeting for Business, are to make sure the discussion stays on topic, remains productive, and that no one ever feels like he/she is being attacked. We achieve this by asking thought-provoking questions, which help students find their own solutions to various problems. We also facilitate the discussion by making sure only one student speaks at a time, and providing the opportunity for all voices to be heard.

Then, during our next Meeting for Business, with the teachers guiding the conversation, the child brings the issue to the class. First we hear from all parties involved, followed by those who witnessed the event, and finally other students can share their thoughts, following the Quaker idea that the collective wisdom is greater than the individual. We hear from both the alleged “victim” and “perpetrator”, but by the end of the discussion, it comes to light that we all share responsibility for our actions during any given conflict.

The purposes of our Meetings are as follows:

The students learn how to resolve their conflicts independently.
They listen to one another, while controlling their behavior.
They grow to be appreciative of one another’s perspectives (learn to empathize).
They learn how to live and work together as a community.

We hope this clarifies our Meetings for Business for you. If you should have any more questions, please email your teacher.

-- Rich, Amabelle & Sarah

I'm impressed with the ways in which the SF Friends School tries to incorporate vital Friends practices into the classroom.

Hardly Strictly Doc Watson

2010-10-10T20:23:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was the 10th annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, the free, three-day extravaganza in Golden Gate Park (www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com).

For a couple of years now, Robin has held a Sunday morning meeting for worship on the grounds of the festival. However, as clerk of the meeting, I felt called to stay and clerk worship at the meetinghouse. (It was an especially small meeting last week, as many women from our meeting were participating in a retreat at the Sierra Friends Center, but that's another story.)

I think we've been going to the bluegrass festival since the 3rd year, but I'm not sure. We didn't go to the festival on Saturday this year, the first time in a while. This year's festival felt like it should have been called "Hardly Bluegrass," as so many of the acts were rock musicians, most of them perfectly fine musicians with stellar name recognition, but hardly folk let alone bluegrass.

We stayed at the "Banjo Stage" and heard the old-timers and classic players, like Earl Scruggs, Del McCoury, and Doc Watson, and caught the Anderson Family Bluegrass Band at another stage on the way out. (They were good, with players ranging from 9 and up!)

Here's (most of) what 87-year-old Doc Watson and David Holt played:
- Downtown
- (instrumental fiddle tune)
- Little Sadie
- Nine Pound Hammer (Roll On Buddy)
- Freight Train
- Black Mountain Rag
- Wabash Cannonball
- Deep River Blues
- Little Log Cabin in the Lane
- The Train That Carried My Girl from Town
- T for Texas
- I Am a Pilgrim and a Stranger
- Working Man Blues
- Keep on the Sunny Side

He ended with a blues tune that included the lines, "I've got the blues, and I can't waste any time." A search of those lyrics doesn't turn up any obviously relevant titles, so I'm not sure what that song was.

Anyway, it will be quite something if Doc can make it back next year at age 88!

It is from self-absorption we must be saved

2010-10-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I read If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person by Philip Gulley and James Mulholland. I wrote out a passage I liked at that time, and it's been sitting on my dresser since then. So it's time to put it out there.

This is from page 151; copyright 2003 (I think) by the authors; emphasis added:

Salvation comes with believing God loves you unconditionally. It is abandoning the misconception that you are rejected because of your bad behavior or accepted because of your goodnewss. Only when we repent of this self-absorption and focus on God’s love can this love alter us. Then and only then can God transform hearts darkened by sin and soften hearts hardened by self-righteousness.

It is from this self-absorption that we must be saved. Often, when I speak of my belief in the salvation of every person, someone will object that without the threat of hell, people would sin wantonly. They consider the possibility of eternal punishment as the only deterrent to human selfishness. Unfortunately, if this is true, even serving God and loving our neighbor become acts of selfishness. Self-absorbed choices, by their very nature, separate us from God and from others.

I learned this from Jesus.

I read Gulley's most recent book, If the Church Were Christian, a few months ago, and noted several sections for me to come back to later, so maybe you can look forward to my thoughts on that in about three or four years. :)

Phone call with an 11 year old

2010-10-02T16:28:00.000-07:00

(This is a more or less verbatim transcript of a phone call I had about eight months ago. H. was then 11 years old.)

*ring*

H: What happened?

C: You need to say hello first.

H: Oh. Hello. This is H.

C: Hi H., it's Daddy. I just need you to ask Mommy about whether or not I need to put a cover on the apple crisp in the oven.

H: Ok, I'll ask her. Bye.

C: No! Don't hang up! I need you to tell me her answer.

H: Oh, ok. [asks Robin about the cover]

H: No, you don't.

C: Ok, thanks.

H: Bye!

C: Bye.

20 years of Quaker meetings

2010-09-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

Today at meeting for worship I realized this week marks 20 years since I attended my first meeting, at 15th Street Meeting in Manhattan. It was either 9/16 or 9/23/1990.

I went because I didn't like the buildup of US military forces in Saudi Arabia, following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The Quakers were speaking out against it, so I thought I'd check it out.

Months before, a friend of mine from where I worked, a major publishing house, had encouraged me to attend. She thought I would like it.

I found the meeting incredibly powerful, at a gut and heart level. It was just so profound to see this group of people sit in silence together, in the middle of the biggest US city.

At the rise of meeting, I introduced myself, and gave credit to my friend for encouraging me to attend.

She came up to me afterwards and said, "Chris, I don't think anyone here even knows me! I attend the meeting in Flushing, Queens. I just happened to come here today because we were running late and didn't have time to get out there."

Ah, synchronicity. It's been a consistent theme in my experience of Quakerism.

For those with ears to hear, let them hear.

Spring and summer reading

2010-07-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

For the last many months, I’ve largely taken a break from reading and writing blogs. It’s been a busy season at work and at meeting, so I’ve needed to relax in ways other than through screentime. Instead, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time reading books. Oh, and doing crossword puzzles.

Thank goodness--and our tax system--for the Peninsula Library System, my source of several of these books.

Religion and faith:

Karen Armstrong, The case for God

Diana Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity

Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith

Phillip Gulley, If the Church Were Christian: Rediscovering the Values of Jesus

Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Fingerprints of God: the Search for the Science of Spirituality

Chris Hedges, I Don't Believe in Atheists

Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity

Ben Pink Dandelion, Celebrating the Quaker Way

Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

Kristin Swenson, Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked about Book of All Time

Noteworthy Pendle Hill Pamphlets (PHPs):

Jack Kirk, Kindling a Life of Concern: Spirit-Led Quaker Action (PHP 404)
Tom Head, Envisioning a Moral Economy (PHP 405)
William Taber, The Mind of Christ: Bill Taber on Meeting for Business (PHP 406)

Fiction:

Orson Scott Card, Prentice Alvin etc. - all 5 books in the Alvin Maker series

Michael Chabon, Summerland

Jeanne DuPrau, The Prophet of Yonwood

Madeleine L'Engle, Many waters

Tamora Pierce, Circle of Magic quartet; Circle Opens quartet; The Will of the Empress; Trickster’s Choice; Trickster’s Queen; Melting Stones (12 books all together by her)

Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

Nonfiction:

Robert Frank, The Economic Naturalist’s Field Guide: Common Sense Principles for Troubled Times (I just finished this and really liked it)

David Owen, The Green Metropolis: why living smaller, living closer, and driving less are the keys to sustainability (I really liked this one, too; a little repetitive but important content)

John Perkins, The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth about Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World

Will Shortz, Will Shortz's Greatest Hits: 150 NY Times Crossword Puzzles Picked by the Puzzlemaster (as mentioned, one of the real reasons I haven't been blogging lately!)

Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes

Finally, there's this one, in which a British music journalist obsessively follows my favorite group, The Fall, so I don't have to:
Dave Simpson, The Fallen: Life in and out of Britain's Most Insane Group

Books on the shelf I’ve yet to read:

Enlivened by The Mystery: Quakers and God, edited by Kathy Hyzy (published by Western Friend)
Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices, edited by Angelina Conti, Cara Curtis, Wess Daniels, John Epur Lomuria, Emma Condori Mamani, Harriet Hart, Sarah Katreen Hoggett, Evelyn Jadin, Katrina MacQuail, Rachel Anne Miller
Margery Post Abbott, To Be Broken and Tender
Carole Dean Spencer, Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism
Robert T. Wright, The Evolution of God
The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change by Beth Kanter, Allison Fine, and Randi Zuckerberg

...and many more!

SF Meeting's new Fund for Leadings

2010-07-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

In July 2010, San Francisco Monthly Meeting approved the following guidelines for our new Fund for Leadings. I share them here because I think this is an exciting effort that Quaker meetings and even other congregations should know about. They were drafted by an ad hoc budget committee, and edited by me following two periods of discernment at monthly meeting for business.

San Francisco Friends Meeting
Fund for Leadings

In May 2010, San Francisco Friends Meeting created a Fund for Leadings (Minute 2010-05-09). The purpose of this fund is to encourage Friends who feel “a sense of being called by God to undertake a specific course of action” to pursue their leadings. We hope members and regular attenders will feel inspired to apply for ministry support money to help manifest spiritual leadings. Friends will submit a written request and funds will be approved by the meeting for business to ensure fairness and transparency.

The meeting approved creating the Fund for Leadings with $30,000 from the General Fund. In First month 2011, the meeting will review and evaluate this program and the fund. Based on this review, the meeting would decide to continue the fund, apply additional funding, or lay down the fund. If the funds are not expended at that time, Friends will review the Fund again later.

We are excited this financial resource is being put to use for good works, spiritual leadings, and ministry as an expression of witness to our faith and practice as Friends. We look forward to education and conversation around the topic of our leadings in the coming months.

Guidelines for Requests for Support from the Fund

The intention of the Fund for Leadings is to support members and regular attenders of the San Francisco Friends meeting to pursue a new leading or a new phase of an existing leading, which would otherwise not be possible without corporate discernment and financial support. Ideally the Fund for Leadings would assist an individual (rather than an organization) who does not have access to or support from other funding sources.

Support from the Fund for Leadings will help Friends bring their ministry into action. Our hope is that the Fund for Leadings will stimulate dialogue and discernment of how Spirit is moving us to act in the world. From this deep listening, we encourage Friends to step forward, seek support, and consider submission of a proposal. All requests will be considered with the following guidelines in mind. To nurture this process, Ministry & Oversight will offer a series of workshops on discerning leadings and ideas for how to bring a leading into acts of ministry in the world. (Note: Funding is already available for scholarships and travel assistance to Quaker gatherings and conferences through the meeting’s Gatherings Fund.)

Clarification on “Leadings”

In Pacific Yearly Meeting's Faith & Practice, a “Leading” is defined (p. 135) as “a sense of being called by God to undertake a specific course of action. A Friend may submit a leading to the Meeting for testing by corporate wisdom. A leading often arises from a concern.” (A “concern” is defined as “a quickening sense of the need to do something about a situation or issue in response to what is felt to be a direct intimation of God’s will.”)

It is Friends practice to test a leading through prayerful individual and corporate discernment. (Discernment is “the process of seeking and discovering that which is deeply true.”) Friends seeking support through the Fund for Leadings should request a “Clearness Committee” from Ministry & Oversight for further discernment of their leadings. The report from the clearness committee should be included in the written request for support.

Unexpected delight - Interview with Ben Pink Dandelion

2010-07-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

I am compiling a list of recent books I've read, and in the process googled Ben Pink Dandelion's new, very small book Celebrating the Quaker Way. He calls it a Quaker devotional, and it's a lovely little book.

The search results turned up an interview with him from 2008, in the UK Church Times. Here's a quote I liked:

I pray that other people will feel God in their life, and I often pray for people who are suffering from illness or who are having a difficult time financially. I pray that they will be wrapped in God’s love — not so much about fixing the problem. Life should be praying.

Here's a link to the full article:

www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=64503

It's worth reading. So is the book! I ordered my copy from Quaker Books.

SF Friends School Patch

2010-06-06T20:11:00.001-07:00

This patch was designed by middle-school students at San Francisco Friends School. I quite like it.
The school also has enormous banners with one of each of these words hanging in the 3rd floor gym. It's quite something to see.

(This is a bit of an experiment. If you're seeing this on Facebook and it doesn't show an image, you can go to the original blog at http://chrismsf.blogspot.com.)

State of San Francisco Friends Meeting

2010-05-09T20:13:00.000-07:00

Here is the annual "state of the meeting report" for 2010, as approved today by San Francisco Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

State of the Meeting Report 2010:
San Francisco Monthly Meeting

Approved at monthly meeting for business, 5/9/2010

Meeting for Worship

The weekly meeting for worship seems grounded and full as we wait upon the Holy Spirit. Vocal ministry varies widely in quantity, and yet the quality seems generally at a good level. One recent week we had no vocal ministry and a week or two later we had ten different pieces of vocal ministry.

The Tuesday evening meeting is small but centered; it recently moved to Wednesday evenings, to be closer to midweek.

We continue to hold an extended meeting for worship from 9:30 to noon on the fifth Sundays of a month. The longer times often lead to a greater depth of worship for Friends.

Meeting for Business

Visitors have remarked that our meeting for business seems grounded and spiritual. In a major piece of business, we took several months to discern at some length about a service project – opening a neighborhood food pantry at the meetinghouse. The time seemed right, given the recession and the increased need, and unity was reached in March. At our first pantry in April, a lot of outreach was done in the neighborhood, and we served more than our goal of 50 households the very first time. We are engaging with the SF Friends School community in finding volunteers; other people have found us through our volunteer management signup page on the internet.

A new feature at business meeting in the past year has been brief reports from ministers among us. These have uplifted us as we realize the depth and breadth of ministry among the members of our meeting, ranging from an art gallery internship program for at-risk teens, to republishing classic Quaker works, to convening the Quaker study and Bible study groups at our meeting for 20 years.

Witness

We welcomed Rolene Walker home from her Walk with Earth. It was wonderful to have her back among us, as we learned more about the lessons and learnings she gained from her time between California and Chile. Meanwhile, Rolene likes to remind us that people who have leadings to go out into the world also need people to stay home to “tend the fires.”

Several Friends have been following a leading to resist the payment of taxes to fund wars. Two of our members have spent many weekends traveling to other meetings in College Park Quarterly Meeting to raise awareness of this issue. A distant member visited and spoke of his own path, including a federal lawsuit he has filed. A minute was approved by the meeting that recognized the variety of ways people have followed this leading, and affirmed our support for this witness.

Our vigil for peace outside the federal office building continues into its ninth year. Fortunately, we have support from American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Episcopals, Buddhists, and many others, as our meeting’s presence at the vigil is often fairly small.

Comings and Goings

Our large urban meeting is blessed with many visitors, and many newcomers, and many people who move on to other places or other activities. Efforts to welcome newcomers a few years ago have paid off in the last year as several new members joined the meeting. We still have to remind ourselves from time to time to welcome newcomers, and repeat visitors, and help them feel included. We strive to be a teaching meeting, whereby people who sojourn with us for a spell may feel refreshed or inspired or willing to experiment. We have had a number of convincements in the past year.

Other long-time members have moved away, or had their memberships transferred, and we are glad to support them in their new meetings.

Children

Our community truly feels intergenerational. We have a lively group of young children at the meeting these days, and the children’s religious education committee strives to serve children at the nursery, young elementary, and older elementary levels. It is our hope to continue to engage the older children as they mature; we will need help to do that. We are blessed to have a dedicated and talented childcare worker who grew up in La Jolla Meeting.

Finances and Building

We dealt with a budget deficit in 2009, as donations were down significantly. Our building continues to receive significant use, through tenants AFSC and Institute for Public Accuracy, and through building rentals by community groups. Our building manager has kept the usage of the building high even with the recession, and has managed several improvement projects in the past year.

As part of an ongoing effort, the Treasurer identified a baseline of funds needed for operation of the meeting and for prudent building reserves. An ad hoc committee is looking at possible uses for the funds in excess of that baseline. We hope to examine this prayerfully in the coming months.

The possibility of renovating our kitchen remains a topic of discussion. In the past year an ad hoc subcommittee wrote queries for all to consider, and convened a worship sharing session. In the coming year we will discern what our calling, if any, might be around improving the kitchen.

Community

Our sense of community is sustained by our fellowship hour; study groups; the annual meeting retreat; and other activities, such as Friendly 8’s potluck groups. Many San Francisco Friends participate in the wider world of Friends, often in leadership roles, including through organizations such as Quarterly Meeting, Pacific Yearly Meeting, Friends General Conference, Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Transgender and Queer Concerns, Friends World Committee for Consultation, Quakers Uniting In Publications, AFSC, and Alternatives to Violence Project (not officially Quaker but started by Friends).

We are not at all perfect, but we are usually able to communicate clearly with one another when our feelings are hurt or our expectations are not met. This is helpful in creating a sense of trust, and giving us a glimpse of the Beloved Community among us.

Summary

The spiritual state of San Francisco Monthly Meeting appears to be healthy and vibrant. We pray for the Spirit’s continued blessing and guidance, that it may truly be so and that it may remain so.

Respectfully submitted,

Chris Mohr, Clerk

Three good books and a query: Is it SPIJE not SPICE?

2010-04-09T23:02:00.000-07:00

I've recently read three interesting books in a row:

A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren

If the Church Were Christian, Phillip Gulley

The Case for God, Karen Armstrong

I'd recommend reading all three of them, at least for my Quaker friends and anyone who identifies as "spiritual but not religious." All three authors are doing their best to come up with or describe religion that encompasses the spirituality of compassion, love, and grace as foremost.

The McLaren and Gulley books are about praxis, how to form a new kind of church that would actually embody the values of Jesus, instead of just talking about him. Armstrong's is about history—understanding how we got "here," a world where many people identify religion with fundamentalism and dismiss it altogether, and where many others identify their religious truth as the only true truth and dismiss everyone else.

I hope to take time to write more, especially about the praxis books. However, my nightstand now has on it Diana Butler Bass's A People's History of Christianity, and it's beckoning to me, more than three months after Robin M. gave it to me. (In between the food pantry debut, a baseball game, Quaker Heritage Day tomorrow, and meeting for business on Sunday, it's simply going to have to wait just a little bit longer for my attention.)

One brief note from Gulley's book: He lists the desirable testimonies of a congregation as being simplicity, peace, integrity, justice, and equality—which you can abbreviate as SPIJE. I like this as an alternative to the mnemonic of "the" Quaker testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and equality, which are an extension of something Howard Brinton originally synthesized in Quakers for 300 Years. (Here's an old post I wrote in 2006 about doing a workshop on the "SPICES" testimonies—the extra S is for Stewardship.)

News: Food Pantry and an Op Ed in the Merc

2010-04-07T22:46:00.001-07:00

First news item: The neighborhood food pantry starts this Saturday, 4/10/2010, at the San Francisco Friends Meetinghouse, 65 9th Street, between Mission & Market Streets, San Francisco. Volunteers will arrive at 11 to sort food and set it on tables in a farmers market style. This is the SF Food Bank's preferred form of distribution, so that participants can select the items they want rather than take whatever is in a bag or a box. Distribution begins at 12:30 and is open to the first 50 people who arrive.

Second news item: The 4/8/2010 issue of the San Jose Mercury News is carrying an op ed piece I wrote about a housing issue here in the SF Bay Area -- the issue being the lack thereof. Despite the economic downturn, there is a real need for more affordable homes, especially for working families.

One newly built development, Trestle Glen at the Colma BART station, had 1,500 applicants for 119 affordable apartments. (Trestle Glen's grand opening will be a featured event during Affordable Housing Week in San Mateo County, May 8-15.)

Here is the link to the Mercury News article: Court ruling points up Bay Area's housing challenge

Neighborhood Food Pantry Coming to the Meetinghouse

2010-03-14T20:48:00.001-07:00

Today San Francisco Monthly Meeting came to unity to create a neighborhood food pantry at the meetinghouse for the San Francisco Food Bank. The process officially began in November, when the proposal was first made to business meeting. The second month, we found unity to apply to the Food Bank to become a site, but not to actually be a site. They said yes, told us what day and time it would be, and then we had more questions.

So last month we invited a Food Bank staffer to be on hand to answer questions -- lots of questions -- and then we discussed logistics among ourselves for a while after she left. After that, I was kind of exhausted. I had hoped we might actually get to discerning about whether this was a leading or not. Well, discernment goes better if you have more energy, and you don't begin when you're already exhausted, so it was wisely suggested we had done enough that day.

As meeting clerk, I tried to reduce this month's agenda to a minimum to keep our energy level high enough for the work we had to do, but of course other things crept onto it nonetheless.

Still, we got through the other business fairly efficiently, and so came time for the food pantry discernment.

I laid out the history of this proposal, as well as the activities that had preceded it.

(I meant to mention that a person in our meeting had, as a staffer for the AFSC at the time, founded the lovely and successful Heart of the City Farmers Market in the low-income Tenderloin neighborhood, but I forgot. Robin and I used to shop there often when we lived nearby. The same person went on to found a regional food co-op called SHARE, and our meeting hosted one site for the co-op. Other people organized monthly dinners at a homeless shelter for several years in the 90s. So there is a long history of food activism in our meeting.)

I laid out the opportunities and the challenges, which had all been raised in the previous few business meetings.

I then read a section from Pacific Yearly Meeting's Faith and Practice:

The Meeting’s work of discernment is a corporate search. The Clerk does not direct the communication toward certain predetermined goals, but keeps dialogue open, promoting free and full exploration of the matter under consideration, while fostering a sense of the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Clerk is responsible for discerning and stating the sense of the Meeting and presenting a minute when unity has been reached.Members of the Meeting may sometimes assist the Clerk in this. If a member believes that the Clerk has incorrectly discerned the sense of the Meeting, it is appropriate to speak up. Similarly, someone may propose that unity actually has been reached and suggest that a minute should be recorded.

I then asked Friends to settle into worship, to clerk ourselves, and to speak from the silence as led without waiting to be recognized, which is otherwise our usual practice.

The first period of silence was extremely long for me. What would be said? Eventually a Friend spoke, an elder of the meeting (though he's not that old!), to say he felt it is a calling of the Spirit to our meeting. He went on to list a number of practical and logistical concerns our Property and Finance Committee had identified, but they were about implementation, not any stops for having the food pantry itself.

The discussion continued along similar lines in quite a deep way, with many Friends rising to speak. Eventually, as I was about to suggest we had found unity, another Friend did it for me, just as Faith and Practice said could be done. So that felt like a good sign to me -- that I was sensing the same things others were.

One thing I appreciated was that what I had to say as an individual had been said, so there was no need for me to rise, step to the side of the clerks' table, and speak as an individual. (Yay, I clerked myself!)

I asked if Friends had a sense of unity, and there was assent in the form of nods and a few spoken yeses.

Having had numerous conversations about this topic with people in the meeting in the last month, I had already had a sense of unity emerging before this business meeting. So my last bit of preparation had been to compose a draft minute for testing if it seemed appropriate.

I read the draft, and indeed, it was pretty close to what the meeting approved, with a few substantive things added about the charge to the committee organizing the food pantry.

I asked if Friends approved the minute as amended, and they said yes.

A Friend who is visiting San Francisco from Australia for the year said, "May I do a little dance?" She then stood up, raised her hands, and did a little circle dance in place. It was in keeping with the joyous spirit of the moment.

There is undoubtedly a lot of work to do, and a lot of volunteers to recruit. But I think with God's help, and each other's, we can do it.

Our minute ended with a sentence to the effect of: "Above all, we pray for the Spirit's guidance in helping us faithfully maintain this work." May it be so.

Fingerprints of spiritual experience

2010-02-03T21:29:00.000-08:00

Once when I was teenager, I recall thinking about religion, and realizing I was definitely agnostic if not atheist. After all, I was good at science, and especially interested in physics and astronomy. (In fact, I went on to major in physics in college.) The old images in paintings of an old man in the sky didn’t make sense to me as a true image of whatever the divine might be.

At the same time, I had the insight that religious experience is real — after all, it has been happening to humans consistently for thousands of years. So I decided that I believed in religious experience, even if I didn’t believe in religion per se.

Fast forward many years, and now I consider myself a Christian and a Quaker, though not particularly orthodox (nor Orthodox, in the Quaker sense) in my beliefs. Nonetheless, I have a deep and abiding faith and trust that there is a deeper layer of meaning and value to the universe, to all of creation. The types, figures, and forms of the Christian narrative hold great meaning for me, and when I spend time with them, they help me find a real spiritual depth within myself, and to observe and appreciate a similar depth outside of me as well.

As a side effect of my practice of both science and religion, I have a fondness for books on the science of spirituality. The advent of brain scanners has enabled researchers to study what is happening in the brains of people who meditate, who practice charismatic prayer, or the like. Of course, the question remains unresolved whether the experiences are happening solely due to brain activity, or if the brain activity is somehow "plugged in" to a spiritual dimension that remains, for now, unmeasurable by science. I find this fascinating.

I just finished a truly fine example of the genre: Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality by Barbara Bradley Hagerty. Bradley Hagerty is a reporter on faith issues with NPR. Raised a Christian Scientist, she now practices with a mainline Protestant denomination. She intertwines her personal story and viewpoint with reports about different scientists — both believers and skeptics — who are studying brain function as it relates to spiritual experience.

The final chapter of the book summarizes some of her personal findings after the reporting she undertook for the book. Frankly, she sounds like a liberal Quaker ! Below are some excerpts from pages 181-183, which spoke to my condition:

As I delved into science, I realized I need not discard my faith. Rather, I must distinguish [faith] from spiritual experience…. Unlike spiritual experience, religious belief can never be tested by a brain scanner or even by historical record. No one can prove that Jesus is the Son of God. What religious belief does is attempt to explain in a compelling narrative the unseen reality that lies at the heart of spiritual experience…. [emphasis added]

Genesis is not, and never was intended to be, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Scripture is metaphorical, explaining the world in a way that humans could understand at the time it was written….

Embracing a particular faith is a little like hopping in a car. You can drive wherever you like [Rome, Mecca, Jerusalem…] What makes it run is under the hood. Spiritual experience is the engine that transports you from one place to another—and I believe the ability to perceive and engage God is written in each person’s genetic code and brain wiring. Religion is the overlay that allows people to navigate the world, and I came to believe that no one religion has an exclusive franchise on God, or truth….

It seems to me that Jesus’ words [“I am the way, the truth, and the life”] suggest what we do, and not what we proclaim. When Jesus says that the way to eternal life is to follow Him, that means trying to live as He did…. Can I prove that Jesus is the Son of God? Of course not. Does my instinct tell me that he is the Son of God, and that I should try to emulate Him? It does, and that instinct makes me better.

I would definitely recommend Fingerprints of God to anyone who is interested in the intersection of science and spirituality.

Guest Post: Amy Baker on What Really Happens at a Quaker Meeting for Worship?

2010-01-24T20:40:00.000-08:00

My 300th post is a guest post by Amy Baker. This was published in the San Francisco Friends School newsletter, Circle Back, and is reprinted here with Amy's permission. Besides it being a good article, I'm tickled that she picked up my “FAQQ” meme! -- Chris Mohr

FAQQ: Frequently Asked Quaker Question:
What Really Happens at a Meeting for Worship?

By Amy Baker, San Francisco Monthly Meeting & Quaker Life Committee member

“What do you mean, there’s no priest?” my mother said, baffled, as I explained how the Meeting for Worship would proceed at my wedding. She had been unfailingly supportive as I adopted this faith, but for someone steeped in pre-Vatican II Catholic traditions, the concept of silent worship (unguided!) was a stretch.

There aren’t many places where we sit in silence, in our world. You might see an audience sitting in silence during a performance, and you might see a random collection of individuals sitting in silence in a library or a park, but how often do you experience a deliberate, collective silence? It’s hard to explain how different it is, and how powerful it can be, to sit in silence together with others.

The Quaker faith was founded on the principal that every person can have a direct relationship with God, without the intercession and interpretation of clergy. The Meeting for Worship is designed not just as a gathering of like minded worshipers, but as a place to meet with God in your mind. Each one of us can experience that “still, inner voice” that guides us, if only we set aside the time to reflect in silence. Even then, Meeting for Worship is different from solitary prayer. Friends seek connection to one another as they collectively discern the path forward.

I once heard ministry that described the silence like a painter’s canvas--even if the whole meeting is silent, it’s got boundaries and a certain richness to it. And when those present spontaneously stand and deliver a personal message, grounded in their own experience but related to some spiritual issue they have been working through in their mind, more color and depth is added to the canvas.

I have not found a service of worship where so much is left to the worshiper as it is in a Friends meeting. There are none of the usual cues, and it is up to the individual to tune in, quiet their mind, and direct their own spiritual experience. Some meetings I go through the entire time without ever clearing my mind of clutter I came in with. Other times I feel completely open, both to insights that percolate up and to messages I hear from fellow worshipers.

One aspect of Meeting for Worship I particularly like is its inclusiveness, in that it respects a wide diversity of religious backgrounds in a way that affirms the importance of all faiths. As foreign as it must have been for my mother to experience a Quaker Meeting, it didn’t detract from her own religion and I find that even the biggest religious skeptics I encounter can see the appeal in it.

If you have ever been curious to join a Meeting for Worship, as practiced by the San Francisco Monthly Meeting, please join other members of the SF Friends School community on Sunday, February 7th at 11am. Meeting for Worship lasts an hour, and afterward there will be a potluck meal to share, whether you bring a pot or not. The Meeting House is at 65 9th Street, between Mission & Market.

There is a short intro session at 10:40 if you want to learn more about the underpinnings of this form of worship, and there is supervision for children who choose not to stay in the Meeting after the first 15 minutes. There is also a caregiver in the nursery for babies and toddlers.

Collectively, we would love to see you there!
~~~

“I’ve been to meeting for worship at the SF Meeting House a couple of times over the years. It’s a great chance to learn more about Quakerism and to see if we adults can sit as quietly as our kids do during Meeting at school. The communally contemplative meeting room is a wonderful place to take time out from our ever hectic lives, think about what’s most important in our lives and hear inspired thoughts from others.”
-- SFFS Parent

Affirmation from meeting for business today

2010-01-10T21:41:00.000-08:00

Today San Francisco Meeting's monthly meeting for worship with a concern for business, the first in 2010, went rather smoothly.

We heard about the internship program two members run for at-risk, low-income teens at their art gallery (a fine example of multiracial, cross-class organizing!), approved two new members, approved the 2010 budget, and heard the latest about a possible service project we're discerning whether or not to take up, among other things. The report on the gallery was particularly moving, as another Friend spoke about a recent performance he had attended, where the youth performed monologues they had created. He also talked about how the youth just adore Anne and Tony, the Friends who run the gallery and the program. He was fighting back tears as he said this, and as a former criminal defense attorney, he isn't prone to doing that often.

Business meeting was over in a bit less than two hours, I think, and in any case, it felt relatively short for the amount of business we conducted.

This is in sharp contrast to last month, when we had extensive conversation about the budget and didn't approve it; discussed the service project, and approved submitting an application to work with a service partner but were not ready to approve actually participating if we are accepted; and reviewed whether the minutes from the month before had appropriately recorded a difficult issue that month. It lasted over three hours, closer to three and a half, and was probably the longest one I've clerked in a bit over two and a half years of clerking.

Yet the meeting never descended to argumentation or bitterness. It was just long, and rather draining.

With today's meeting as a frame of reference, it now seems to me that last month we were plowing fertile, if perhaps fallow, ground. We had to break up the clods and ready the soil for the seeds. And so today the sprouts were appearing.

A first-time visitor from a small Friends meeting in Australia, who has moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for the next year or so, stayed for meeting for business. At the end, during "Affirmations, Joys, and Concerns," he said he had found our meeting for business to be spiritually grounded. I was grateful to him for saying so, and to San Francisco Friends for providing the evidence that prompted him to notice.

God, thank you for your many blessings!

Anti-war coffeehouse - this Sunday

2009-11-11T21:52:00.000-08:00

This is a republication of a post originally published on 7/24/2009. The first actual coffeehouse event will take place this Sunday, 11/15/2009, 4:30-7:30 pm, at San Francisco Friends Meeting, 65 9th Street (between Mission & Market, near Civic Center BART).

A vision for an anti-war coffeehouse event

A lot of pro-peace people say, "It's not enough to be against war, you also have to be for peace."

While I agree with that, I can't help but think: "It's not enough to be pro-peace, you also have to be against war."

Simplistic, but true. What have I done lately to make the world a safer place? Not much.

I had a vision of organizing a Sunday evening anti-war coffeehouse at the Quaker meetinghouse, with open mic and open wifi. You could versify, sing, or chant. You could have conversations about the issues. You could weep and moan if you needed, or laugh and dance if you were moved to.

You could email your friends to explain your views. You could write letters to your Representative and Senator. You could write letters to the editors of the local papers, which is arguably more effective because it's more public. (And "papers" is plural because the SF Bay Area still has several papers for now, including many freebies.)

If you're originally from somewhere else in the country or world, you could write to your hometown paper and express your views.

(Even if you're not a pacifist, you could come if you're against the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

And you could feel less alone and more engaged. I'd like that part.

More on the Intro to Quakerism session

2009-10-09T20:21:00.000-07:00

This was posted on the Parents Association page of the SF Friends School today...

Introduction to Quakerism Summary and Handout

The PA's Parent Education Committee hosted An Introduction to Quakerism for some 35 parents this past Tuesday morning. SF Meeting member and SFFS parent Chris Mohr and SF Meeting member Amy Baker gave a wonderful speed history of the Quaker faith and an overview of the SPICES testimonies (simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, stewardship). SFFS librarian Chad Stephenson and SFFS art teacher Caren Andrews spoke about how they incorporate these values into their work with our children.

Chris and Amy asked everyone to briefly mention any faith traditions they were raised with and/or are practicing with their own children. The answers were as diverse as our community, and included: Buddhists raised in Thailand, the U.S., and the Swedish Church in Japan; Catholics raised in the US, Ireland, and Argentina; Jewish; Estonian Lutheran; Catholic-Jewish; athiest; Protestant; Korean Protestant; Korean Presbyterian; "hodge-podge"; Episcopal; mutli-religious; non-denominational spiritual; Episcopal-Muslim; Southern Baptist; Quaker; Quaker-Buddhist; Baptist-Quaker; Quaker-Episcopal!

We passed out a handout with a brief background on Friends and a list of a few resources, including books and websites. Paper versions were included in the students' take-home weekend folders. (I was going to upload a PDF of the document here but can't quite figure it out in blogger.)

Intro to Quakerism at the SF Friends School

2009-10-06T21:07:00.000-07:00

Today Amy Baker & I, representing SF Friends Meeting, and Chad, Caren, and Lisa from the faculty of SF Friends School, reprised Amy's and my "introduction to Quakerism" workshop for parents that we first did a year ago in this format. Amy & I tag-teamed a thumbnail sketch of Quaker theology and history. Chad, Caren, and Lisa talked about how Quakerism and Quaker values are applied in the classroom and in P.E., most notably through weekly meeting for worship, regular applications of silent reflection while doing art or writing, peaceful problem-solving, and so on.

We had one of our biggest turnouts for a Quaker-related parent education event! There were at least 30 people there, probably more. They included parents of new kindergarteners, parents of older children who had transferred to the school in the last year or two, and a few who have been with the school for a few years now. It was a nice mix. We didn't have enough time for Q&A both because we had four presenters and because we ended half an hour before I thought we would. Still, it was a good discussion, and clearly people were engaged.

Here's the outline of the talk.

Introduction to Quakerism
10/6/09

Opening silent worship
Introductions; name, connection to school, what faith community if any have you been or are you part of
Quaker theology: Fox’s revelation about “Christ has come to teach his people himself” and there is “that of God in every one”
Quaker values grow out of that theology: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, stewardship (SPICES)
Some history about how that has played out: truthtelling, equality for women, abolitionism, peace and war relief work, prison reform, etc.
How Friends schools evolved out of this faith tradition and what role do they play today: the search for truth; time for silent reflection; core values of Quakerism; cultivating outer achievement and inner goodness/morality
Q&A leading to sharing
Closing silent worship

The icebreaker (2) is usually one of my favorite parts. We had a large enough group that we had to go fairly briskly through this, but we still gained an appreciation for the variety of experience & identity people brought with them.

What do you do in Quaker meeting for worship?

2009-09-29T20:34:00.001-07:00

Last Sunday -- First Day -- 9/27/09 -- at 1 p.m. San Francisco Friends meeting presented a workshop, "What do you do in meeting for worship?"

The presentation by a long-time memeber of San Francisco meeting was based on Quaker writings and on interviews of current and former participants in San Francisco's meeting for worship. Interviewees ranged in age from approximately late 20s to mid 60s. Years attending Quaker meetings ranged from 12 to over 50.

The presentation was to be followed by a time for practice or discussion or written reflection (your choice).

Young people and people new to Quaker worship were especially encouraged to join us for this event. Interested middle and high school students were welcome, too.

I couldn't be there, though I sorely wanted to participate. I was elsewhere on family business, which was quite rewarding in a different way. The turnout was modest, based in part that the Folsom Street Fair was the same day just a few blocks away.

Perhaps we'll do it again some time!

This workshop was another part of an ongoing effort to welcome new people into our meeting and to talk more clearly with one another about our spiritual practices.

Friday freeway furloughs

2009-09-13T22:04:00.000-07:00

Here in California, because of the disastrous state budget, the state government and many cities are furloughing staff on one, two, or even all Fridays a month.

What if we had a Friday freeway furlough, too?

To save money on repaving asphalt, repouring concrete, replacing road signs, and repainting lane striping. To save money on gas and carbon and particulate matter released into the air. To save lives and the cost of emergency response.

I know, I know, if you aren't furloughed on Fridays and depend on driving to your job, it wouldn't be practical.

It's an interesting thought experiment, though, isn't it?

Interrupting the aggressive cycle

2009-09-12T21:45:00.000-07:00

Months ago I meant to blog about how dogs interrupt the aggressive cycle for wolves.

This came from a conversation at Ben Lomond Quaker Center, during the workshop led by Robin, Wess, and Martin on Primitive Quakerism for a Postmodern Era.

Anyway, Dave was telling us that dogs are "neotonous" wolves -- developmentally, they are like wolf puppies. That's why people keep them around.

The added benefit is that they smell like wolf puppies to wolves. And wolves are instinctively tolerant and encouraging of their puppies.

The wolf's "aggressive cycle" is to hunt, stalk, and then attack the prey (usually in a pack). So when a wolf scents and sees a shepherd dog near the herd, it gets confused. When the dog snarls and barks, the wolf is interrupted in the middle of its aggressive cycle. Is this snarling animal a foe or a little one? That is usually enough to end the threat.

(I don't claim any of the above is strictly, scientifically, and technically accurate. It's a fairly faithful report of the conversation we had, though.)

The parallels with active nonviolence seem clear. The challenge is to find ways to interrupt the human cycle of aggression and violence early enough to stop it from erupting. That takes courage and seemingly endless creativity.

Something I just learned from children's religious education

2009-09-02T21:25:00.000-07:00

I've decided to extend my leave of absence teaching Firstday School at our Quaker meeting past the summer and into the fall. I've been teaching once every month or two for, oh, seven? years now. Since Eleven Year Old was still Four Year Old.

However, I'm still on the group email list for the Children's Religious Education Committee. And tonight I reflected that the committee right now has four key -- nay, critical -- components for successful Quaker program activity:

Enthusiasm: to be enthused is to be infused with the Spirit, after all! They've got that in abundance as we head back into the fall and the school year.
Organization: Just because unprogrammed Friends are volunteers doesn't mean we have to be badly organized. (My #1 complaint about Quakers!) The committee has been coming back together after summer, and putting systems in place and talking about some longer-term goals and needs.
Communication: Keep each other posted! The Children's Religious Ed Committee has a great and very active email list and an online calendar which is slowly gaining in utility. Teachers also have a commitment to writing brief reports about what the lesson was, what worked, and what didn't, and sharing that via the email list. I hope they can keep up this level of diligence.
Too often, people assume others know something just because they do. Use a variety of channels: email, calls, in-person conversations and meetings, posters, flyers, the meeting's print newsletter. Bad communication is probably my #2 complaint about Quakers. (How many times has this happened at a monthly, quarterly, or yearly meeting? "Well, the fact that the children's program was going to be closed early was announced at the end of the business meeting." "Yeah, but I had to leave meeting early to go get my kids at the children's program, so I didn't hear it!")
Distributed leadership: How many times has a committee suffered because the clerk kept too many of the tasks close at hand, and then couldn't get them all done? Well, this committee has a clerk and two assistant clerks, and several active, engaged members who are taking on different tasks.

The above are four fundamental building blocks to organizing successful Quaker activities and programs. I'm sure there are others (staying rooted and grounded in Love and the Spirit, for example), but these are some of important ones too often missing from our work. I think Friends concerned about other aspects of Quaker life -- such as building race or class diversity within the Society of Friends, or helping people integrate the practice of one's faith with faithful activism, for example -- would do well to keep those four principles in mind as they engage in the work they feel called to do.

I'm impressed with the level of all of the above in our committee right now. As mentioned, there is a clerk (a non-parent educator, and a blogger, but I'll leave it up to him if he wants to be linked to in this context), and two assistant clerks, of whom one is a parent and the other is both an active uncle and a childcare provider. And of course there's a nice group of committee members, most of whom are parents.

The committee has some work to do to build up the Quaker curriculum and train new teachers after a few of us laid teaching down for now. The good thing is they're building from a really solid base. Thank you, Children's Religious Education Committee!

(Unspoken) racial subtexts to social issues in the U.S.

2009-08-28T22:19:00.000-07:00

I recently read a book from 1995 called Racial Healing: Confronting the Fear Between Blacks and Whites, by Harlon L. Dalton. He is a professor of law at Yale and a good writer with an accessible voice. It was helpful to remember the context during which the book was written, in the midst of "welfare reform" and not long after then-President Clinton caved to pressure not to nominate Lani Guinier as assistant attorney general.

As an affordable housing advocate, I was struck by Dalton’s simple analysis of the usually unspoken, at times almost subconscious subtext to so much political debate on social issues in the United States:

As a nation we lack a consensus concerning how to deal with the problems that bedevil us most. We seem unable to take sustained action in any direction for very long. And we don’t trust anyone enoughto let them lead. We are, in short, politically paralyzed.

The reasons for this paralysis are several, but chief among them is our failure to engage eaach other openly and honestly around race. Think about the issues which sit atop the American agenda: crime; welfare reform; taxes; government spending; the plight of the middle class; family values; immigration; drug abuse; AIDS. Together they carry enough racial freight to sink a nation.

In the popular imagination, criminals are Black or Brown; crime victims White. Welfare cheats are dark of hue; the “forgotten middle class” is light. Governmental “taxing and spending” favors racial minorities and comes out of the hides of the White majority. Problem immigrants have yellow or brown skin; the citizens who foot the bill do not. Needless to say, I do not endorse these beliefs, or the skewed view of reality they project. My point is simply that our thinking about the nation’s most pressing social problems has become deeply “racialized”—saturated with attitudes, beliefs, and fears about race.

We tend to dance around this fact whenever we publicly debate social policy.

It’s helpful to be reminded of some of the fears underlying these issues. One of Dalton’s main points is that until we address these fears out in the open, they will continue to remain their poisonous, hidden or sometimes only half-hidden power.

Open Letter from Friends of Color to Pacific Yearly Meeting

2009-08-15T21:59:00.000-07:00

An open letter from some Friends of color was published in "The Daily Miracle," the daily newsletter of Pacific Yearly Meeting's annual sessions, on 7/31/09. I reproduce it here in response to a comment from Linda to my post on the Yearly Meeting's epistle.

Open Letter to Pacific Yearly Meeting
from some Friends of Color, 7/31/2009

Dear Friends of Pacific Yearly Meeting,

Some Friend of Color came together during our annual sessions at Walker Creek Ranch on July 29th and 30th in Petaluma, CA. During our time together we identified common experiences from attending annual sessions. We have felt interracial tensions in our community. There have been times when we have felt isolated and not acknowledged in a manner that is consistent with our cultural traditions it is important to us that we are recognized as fully functioning, literate, spiritual persons of equal values as the friends that you already know here.

We request opportunities be provided for people of color to come together and get acquainted with Vanessa [Julye] as a facilitator next year. We would like for the Yearly Meeting’s Ministry and Oversight Committee to request that Friends General Conference have Vanessa Julye attend our annual sessions in 2010.

We would like to suggest that we all become conscious of the way in which new people are greeted in the following ways.

Roll call can incorporate having new people identified so that we can welcome them and know who they are.

We improve the way that we greet one another. Whenever we see someone we don’t know make sure that we look them directly in the eye and greet them with the intention of getting to know them better.

Also we request that a time be scheduled on a daily basis for youth and adults to come together for dialogue on topics of mutual concern. Our intention with this statement is that we seek out each other and affirm our gifts.

Pacific Yearly Meeting Middle School Epistle

2009-08-05T22:32:00.000-07:00

Here is the Pacific Yearly Meeting Middle School 2009 epistle, thanks to Tom and Sandy Farley, who left this as a comment for me on Facebook! Eleven Year Old participated in this group, though I don't know if he had a role in writing this.

Epistle from Pacific Yearly Meeting Middle School Group, 2009

Close your eyes. Feel the energy pulse, spiraling around the circle. Some energy tingles, chaotic and argumentative, some flows calmly, agreeing and joining in a harmony. This is how we have been this week, sometimes flowing together in a simple harmony, sometimes falling into a dissonance which creates arguments and then subsides into a team of energy with one goal: capturing a flag where we invented new strategies to annoy the other team.

Sometimes we calm ourselves, listening to a story, where we find hidden meaning, disguised under layers of words. We have danced and screamed, ridden in canoes over the pond where the lifeguards were kind and helpful. We learned to trust each other. We have woven rough edges into a piece of fabric: ripped in some places, maybe threadbare around the seams, but we now have a small piece of community.

The middle school program had a fun time all in all.

Vanessa Julye's visit to SF Friends Meeting

2009-08-04T22:16:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, 8/2, Vanessa Julye spoke at San Francisco Friends Meeting about the new book she co-authored with Donna McDaniel, Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship.

We had about 25 people from three Bay Area meetings present. There were also a few people who came not because they are Quakers but because of Vanessa, including a cousin of hers.

Besides being an opportunity for us to learn more about the content of the book, and the seven-year process that led to its publication, Vanessa signed copies of the book. We also had a few copies of the study guide available. I got one for our meeting. We're going to start a book group soon, and so it will come in handy. You can order it in looseleaf format or as a PDF download.

Here's the book's homepage: http://www.fgcquaker.org/fit-for-freedom

One person shared that her aging mother wants to become a Quaker, after 80 years as a Baptist. Her mother's friends said she shouldn't do that, because "Quakers don't accept African Americans." This is a sad commentary on the image of Quakers among people of African descent. I mean, it's not literally true, of course, and yet visiting many Quaker meetings you might not know that, depending on which meeting and what day you were there.

We were also blessed to have Helen Bayes visiting from Australia Yearly Meeting. She was on her way to Canada Yearly Meeting, where she will deliver the Sunderland P. Gardner Lecture. According to the CYM website, "the working title of Helen’s talk is ‘Prophetic Community’. Expect to be challenged by the depth of her thinking, knowledge and experience in international Quaker associations."

PacYM wrapup: The Epistle (long)

2009-08-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

Well, Anthony Manousos, Western Friend magazine, and my good friend Robin Mohr all wrote about Pacific Yearly Meeting, so I don't feel the need to go further into great detail here.

I did clerk the epistle committee, which was only possible because Robin did attend the last two days of the session. I am grateful to our friends Erik, Jennifer, and Jason, who as it is watched my kids more than I watched theirs. The nice thing is, though, that all of our boys are getting big enough to wander around without much supervision. In fact, they spent most of their free time up in a big pine tree that was great for climbing.

As I said in my worship sharing group, "Go, primates!"

Anyway, this is what Pacific Yearly Meeting's Faith and Practice has to say about the epistle committee:

epistle committee (ad hoc): The Epistle Committee prepares a statement (epistle) expressing the spirit and concern of the annual session to be sent “To Friends Everywhere” when it has been accepted by the Yearly Meeting.

This committee is appointed by the Ministry and Oversight Committee and consists of three Friends who serve for the duration of the annual session. Their names are publicized at the beginning of the annual session so that Friends can contact them with suggestions. One member, who should have served the prior year, is appointed Clerk. A first draft of the Epistle is read at a plenary session prior to the final day. Then the committee may hold an open meeting for consideration and discussion of proposed changes. The revised Epistle is presented at the plenary session before the closing Meeting for worship.

Well, none of us had been on the epistle committee last year, and I ended up clerk, mostly because they asked me first.

So here is what we wrote:

PACIFIC YEARLY MEETING EPISTLE 2009

Final as Presented to Plenary, 1st 8th Month 2009

To Friends everywhere:

Greetings of all peace and good to you, dear Friends!

We in Pacific Yearly Meeting carry you in our hearts here at our 2009 annual session, held 7/26 to 8/1 at Walker Creek Ranch in rural Marin County, California. We have heard epistles from other Yearly Meetings throughout the week, reminding us we are part of the larger body of the Religious Society of Friends.

Our 2009 annual session has provided us with many opportunities for worship in spirit and truth, as well as for learning, fellowship, and relaxation in the countryside. The setting, hemmed in by rolling, fog-enshrouded hills, reminded us of the musical “Brigadoon,” as we recreate once again this faith community.

This week we deepened our faith together, in community. A major topic before us was a proposal to create a Youth Program Coordinator as the yearly meeting’s only staff position. A year ago, Pacific Yearly Meeting approved the position in concept. An ad hoc subcommittee circulated a detailed proposal and gathered extensive feedback from meetings and individuals, compiled in 110 pages of appendices.

Wrestling with this proposal demanded the best of us. We were reminded to be faithful to our Quaker practice of meeting for worship with attention to business. We needed to step back from results, create space, and leave room for the Spirit to enter. We were not here for a product or goal, but to be faithful and uncover: What does God will for us? After lengthy and difficult discernment, we came to unity to try this three-year experiment. Friends were reminded we remain one community, bonded by love.

Opportunities for nurture and growth of our spiritual lives included extended worship every morning. The children participated for the first 20 minutes, with a lesson, and then retired to their programs. Vocal ministry reflected a grounding in Quaker faith and practice. The lengthened periods of worship created more space for the Spirit to breathe and allowed time to absorb each ministry.

Friends found inspiration through shared reflection and study, including Bible study and a series on transformative Quakers. Worship sharing in smaller groups explored the theme of community and our relationships with our meetings. Meeting for memorials was powerful as usual, offering Friends a chance to remember the departed. The presence of the entire yearly meeting community—babies, children, teens, adults, and elders—showed the full circle of life present among us. An intergenerational dance later that evening provided a vibrant celebration of life.

The clerk’s reminders and steady hand helped conduct business in good order. One notable example of improved process this year was the swift approval of the budget on second reading. Friends often reminded one another of the importance of our testimonies, including equality, integrity, and peace.

We approved a minute from Peace and Social Order Committee against the U.S. war in Afghanistan and supporting peacebuilding. Another minute on healthcare for all in the U.S. was adopted. We were concerned that the American Friends Service Committee reported a 50% budget reduction, a result of the economic recession. Other reports, interest groups, and a tabling fair provided opportunities for Friends to engage with numerous other organizations and concerns.

We engaged on the difficult topic of racism within the Society of Friends. Visitors Vanessa Julye and Janice Domanik, coordinator and former clerk respectively of the Friends General Conference Committee for Ministry on Racism, convened affinity groups and discussions. Vanessa also discussed the new book she co-authored, Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans and the Myth of Racial Justice. Friends of color wrote an open letter to the community, naming a certain level of interracial tension, asked to be greeted, and asked the Yearly Meeting to support Vanessa’s return in 2010.

The natural beauty of Walker Creek Ranch provided encounters with wildlife, as well as opportunities for reflection on the environment. The Unity with Nature Committee has found new energy, fostering a dialogue held in monthly and quarterly meetings about an emergent testimony on harmony with nature.

We also made many efforts to “green” the annual session. In the past year 48 committee meetings were held by conference call, saving on travel impacts. Some Friends bicycled to our site from locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Meals were primarily vegetarian, with as much locally grown food as possible. We also ate one meal of plain rice and beans in solidarity with the many people around the world who eat simply at every meal. A Friend [Rolene Walker] presented her Walk with Earth from San Diego, California, to Santiago, Chile. Over 380 people have walked part of the way, including many from our yearly meeting. She described the miracles that can open up when one faithfully follows one’s leading from God every day.

Children’s programs nurtured the children’s spirituality and their experience of our yearly meeting community through lessons, games, and outdoor activities like canoeing and swimming. Junior Yearly Meeting had a sizable turnout, and the teens created guidelines for participation and their own schedule. Their spirit and energy provided Light for all of us.

We send our loving greetings and our gratitude to you all and the larger world of Friends.

In peace and friendship,

On behalf of Pacific Yearly Meeting
Joe Franko, Clerk

Amended report, plus Unity and Minute on Friday!

2009-07-31T22:46:00.000-07:00

My previous post about the Pacific Yearly Meeting discernment about the youth program coordinator proposal was a bit off. Unity may have been stated by the clerk at the Tuesday plenary on the topic, but it wasn't actually there -- yet.

Today, Friday 7/31, unity was found to create the position for a trial period of three years, though at least one Friend stood aside from the decision.

It was a long and at times painful discussion. Very often Friends reminded one another to speak their truth and in love. I want to nominate a couple of Friends for Minister of the Week! I'll see if I can write a little about it later.

Anyway, that's about all the coherence I can muster right now. I just printed the final draft of the PacYM epistle; I ended up as clerk of the epistle committee. I'll publish it once it's accepted (and possibly edited) at the final plenary on Saturday.

Unity found, minute elusive at Pacific Yearly Meeting

2009-07-28T18:55:00.000-07:00

This afternoon the plenary session reached unity on creating a youth coordinator position for three years.

However, agreeing on the minute had to wait. The parents of children had to leave to sign their children out of the children's program. There wasn't time to wordsmith the minute, and there may have even been some Friends who wished to stand aside. Without being able to keep the full group together, the presiding clerk said he would write out the proposed minute, post it, and we'll come back to it later.

(For background, see my previous post; and see pacificyearlymeeting.org for the 28-page proposal and 110-page appendices!)

Okay, now I have to go listen to Rolene Walker talk about her Walk with Earth.

First full day at Pacific Yearly Meeting

2009-07-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

Today, Tues. 7/28, is the first full day of Pacific Yearly Meeting's annual session.

Last night, presiding clerk Joe Franko welcomed us (if I had more time I'd link to his blog). He said PacYM was even more like Brigadoon that evening, because the fog was in, we were meeting in a tent not a building, and a Friend was practicing his bagpipes in the distance.

Joe said we are here as a community of faith. Yet the Spirit blows where it will. Friends need to present their ideas or proposals, then step back and make space for the Spirit to enter. We don't have a product to create or a goal. We have a process we know works, our Quaker process, and we need to give it space to work.

The plenary to discuss creation of a youth coordinator position -- which would be the yearly meeting's sole staffer -- is supposed to start in 25 minutes. I skipped the first hour of regular business, I'm afraid. (I had an urgent work matter I'm monitoring, so, here I am....)

For the first time in several years I'm neither on the Children's Program Committee nor a teacher. Nonetheless, I ended up volunteering for the first part of the morning with the elementary group. It was fun, and I think Seven Year Old was happy to have me there, without being particularly attached. Then I went to worship sharing, where the community was, "What does community mean to me?"

I'm here without Robin until the end of the week, so I'm parenting solo. Fortunately, our boys are old enough, and experienced enough with yearly meeting, to hang out with their friends with much looser boundaries, and our various families hang out together, too. It reminds me of something Bill McKibben wrote in Deep Economy, about the way humans are supposed to live in community.

I brought my camera but not the cord to connect it to the computer, so I can't upload the photos from last night of Joe Franko, and of the boys on top of a big rock. Walker Creek Ranch is beautiful.

A vision for an anti-war coffeehouse event

2009-07-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

A lot of pro-peace people say, "It's not enough to be against war, you also have to be for peace."

While I agree with that, I can't help but think: "It's not enough to be pro-peace, you also have to be against war."

Simplistic, but true. What have I done lately to make the world a safer place? Not much.

I had a vision of organizing a Friday or Saturday evening anti-war coffeehouse at the Quaker meetinghouse, with open mic and open wifi. You could versify, sing, or chant. You could have conversations about the issues. You could weep and moan if you needed, or laugh and dance if you were moved to.

You could email your friends to explain your views. You could write letters to your Representative and Senator. You could write letters to the editors of the local papers, which is arguably more effective because it's more public. (And "papers" is plural because the SF Bay Area still has several papers for now, including many freebies.)

If you're originally from somewhere else in the country or world, you could write to your hometown paper and express your views.

(Even if you're not a pacifist, you could come if you're against the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

And you could feel less alone and more engaged. I'd like that part.

Vanessa Julye to speak at SF Friends Meeting

2009-07-16T20:17:00.000-07:00

You're invited to hear Vanessa Julye, author of the new book Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice, co-authored by Donna McDaniel, at San Francisco Friends Meeting on Sunday, August 2nd. The meeting is in S.F. at 65 9th Street, between Mission & Market, near the Civic Center BART station.

Vanessa will discuss the book and sign copies. We expect to start around 12:45 or 1:00 pm. (Please join us for worship at 11 am and our monthly potluck at 12:15 if you can!) Vanessa is the program coordinator for the committee for ministry on racism of Friends General Conference. Vanessa will also be attending Pacific Yearly Meeting sessions at the end of July.

If you're interested in purchasing a book or the study guide, let me know. (Cover price is $28.) We will probably pre-order some copies to have on hand for the signing.

You can also order your own copy from Quaker Books of FGC.

Two Gems from Quaker Business Meeting

2009-07-12T22:16:00.001-07:00

Today at San Francisco Monthly Meeting, the following two gems were offered, and I wanted to capture them here.

The first person said his two communities in San Francisco are the Friends meeting and the S.F. Gay/Lesbian Freedom Band (they do the "Dance-Along Nutcracker" every December). He compared making music with the band to a Friends meeting:

Silence is our canvas. We seek harmony. Dissonance is not always a bad thing. And when the dissonance resolves into harmony, it makes the harmony that much sweeter.

The second person described the possibility of some renovations in our building, the extent of which we don't have unity on yet:

I hope we'll do the things we need to do and not do the things we don't need to do.

I thought that was a really good guide, actually—a reminder that we shouldn't do something just because we can or because "everyone" does, but only because it's needed and we hear the call of the Spirit to do it.

Bill McKibben's Deep Economy

2009-06-18T22:00:00.000-07:00

I read Bill McKibben's Deep Economy several weeks ago with great enjoyment and renewed sense of optimism about the future.

I liked the book because he presented many examples of communities that are doing real things to make changes in the way they live, farm, eat, or build community, so that they can help sustain the earth and the ecosphere. He also had some great data about trends, such as the explosive growth in farmers' markets over the last 20 years, and the productivity of small, intensively farmed agricultural land compared to huge tracts of industrially farmed land. And in places his analysis seems so obvious, I wondered why I hadn't thought of it before; such as the decline in number of U.S. farmers is because they have been replaced with machines running on (heretofore) cheap oil.

Here are some passages I found interesting:

Page 2: Shifting our focus to local economies will not mean abandoning Adam Smith or doing away with markets. Markets, obviously, work. Building a local economy will mean, however, ceasing to worship markets as infallible and consciously setting limits on their scope. We will need to downplay efficiency and pay attention to other goals. We will have to make the biggest changes to our daily habits in generations—and the biggest change, as well, to our worldview, our sense of what constitutes progress.

… The key questions will change from whether the economy produces an ever larger pile of stuff to whether it builds or undermines community—for community, it turns out, is the key to physical survival in our environmental predicament and also to human satisfaction. Our exaltation of the individual, which was the key to More [as in, the pursuit of More More More], has passed the point of diminishing returns. It now masks a deeper economy that we should no longer ignore.

[Like “deep ecology,”] we need a similar shift in our thinking about economics—we need it to take human satisfaction and society durability more seriously; we need economics to mature as a discipline.

Concluding his introduction, McKibben mentions a trip to China, where he met a 12-year-old girl named Zhao Lin Tao, who lives in a poor rural village: “about the most statistically average person on earth.” She was proud of her English; yet her mother left the family to work in a factory, and Zhao has a hard life. "In Zhao’s world, in other words, it’s perfectly plausible that More and Better still share a nest. Any solution we consider has to contain some answer for her tears. Her story hovers over this whole enterprise. She’s a potent reality check."

McKibben highlights three challenges to growth:

Politically, growth is distributed unequally.
We don't have the energy needed to keep growth going as it has done.
The third argument is both less obvious and even more basic: growth is no longer making us happy. [his emphasis]

Striking language on page 17:

If fossil fuel is a slave at our beck and call, renewable power is more like a partner…. It seems likely that fossil fuel was an exception to the rule, a onetime gift that underwrote a onetime binge of growth. In any event, we seem to be on track to find out.

As mentioned he says that small farms are more productive, and large farms are built on cheap energy:

Page 64: Because of its reliance on cheap energy, the efficiency of our vast farms and the food system they underwrite is in one sense an illusion, and perhaps a very temporary one. The number of American farmers has fallen from half the American population to about 1 percent, and in essence those missing farmers have been replaced with oil. We might see fossil fuel as playing the same role that slaves played in early American agriculture—a “natural resource” that comes cheap…. There aren’t many people on that farm, but there’s all kinds of machinery, and every bit of it is burning fuel. Here’s the math: between 1910 and 1983, U.S. corn yields grew 346 percent. Energy consumption for agriculture increased 810 percent. [my emphasis]

The section on page 108 on the "declining marginal returns" of both income and companionship are really worth reading, so I won't quote it here. He continues:

Every measure of psychological health points to the same conclusion: people who “are married, who have good friends, and who are close to their families are happier than those who are not,” says the Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz. “People who participate in religious communities are happier than those who are not.” Which is striking, Schwartz adds, because social ties “actually decrease freedom of choice.” To be a good friend is hard work.

So, f/Friends, take heart!

PS A final Quaker note: There's a nice quote from Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding on page 24.

Busy Season

2009-06-18T21:53:00.000-07:00

I haven't had a chance to post much lately. It's been a mite busy around here. There was Affordable Housing Week in May as well as some staff transitions and budget issues at work, plus Quarterly Meeting and our monthly meeting's retreat also in May, and then the end of the school year came this month with presentation night and portfolio day and school plays, on Tuesday the big end-of-school meeting for worship and celebration in Golden Gate Park, sleepaway Quaker camp at Ben Lomond Quaker Center for 11 Year Old this week, and no camp for Seven Year Old this week. Whew!)

Anyway, I read a great book several weeks ago, and today I had a chance to capture the good bits, which I'll post separately.

Here's a photo immediately after the end of the all-school meeting for worship, 6/16/2009:

Here's a photo of the boys before they left for the last day of school:
And for comparison, this is what they looked like on the first day of school in September 2008:

Wildflower Hike 5/28/09

2009-05-28T21:16:00.000-07:00

Today I went on the first grade wildflower hike with the first grade from San Francisco Friends School.

Seven Year Old was SOOO excited. Last night before he went to sleep, he grinned repeatedly, and said, "Daddy, Daddy, you're going on the field trip tomorrow!"

I went on the same hike when now-Eleven Year Old was in first grade. That time I had to leave a little early; this time I got to stay the whole time and carpool with another parent and child, which was nice.

The hike was in the Marin Headlands, in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, specifically on the trails above Rodeo Lagoon. I love Rodeo Lagoon, and hadn't been there in either a year or two years.

The day was overcast with fog -- known 'round these parts as the marine layer -- which was thick enough to hide the sun and keep it quite cool but thin enough to let plenty of UV rays through. I got a bit sunburned because I put only a little bit of lotion on.

The best part of the hike came at the beginning. One of the two first grade teachers called the children around him, calmly, quietly, without yelling. They were quiet and rapt as he explained about the trail, where we were going, and just a few guidelines.

Then a few hands went up. "Don't step on plants." "Don't pick the flowers." "Don't touch poison oak." And so on. The children were so quiet and attentive, it was beautiful. The result of practicing learning together as a community with a respect for one another and with an ability to be together in silence. It was truly rewarding to see.

We walked about a mile and a half up the hall, to where some remains of the former military batteries are. On a flat piece of concrete we ate lunch, and the children were instructed to find three types of wildflowers to sketch. The rocks and the ruins were more interesting than the flowers for many of the children.

I was disappointed that we didn't walk back down the hill after lunch in silence, which the teacher had said we would do. Oh, well. I would have liked a brief moment of silence in a circle to close the hike, too, but we didn't. I wasn't one of the people in charge, so I was okay with that.

Overall, I am so glad that I carved out the time from work to go. I enjoyed talking to the other parents, and seeing Seven Year Old in one of his "native environments" outside the home, interacting with his friends. He had a good time, and though he didn't feel the need to stay by my side most of the time, he was really glad I went. So was I!

Traveling Friends

2009-05-18T21:19:00.000-07:00

This weekend we went to College Park Quarterly Meeting's spring session at Ben Lomond Quaker Center. The theme was caring for our youth. The invited guest was Emily Stewart, Youth Ministries Coordinator at Friends General Conference. Her traveling companion was Betsy Blake from North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Friends United Meeting).

The weekend was full and rich and I'm too tired to blog about it now. I stayed up too late visiting with Friends last night!

Betsy and Emily came to our house afterwards. It turned out that C. Wess Daniels and his friend James were stopping at Chad's house on their way to Wess's new home in Camas, Washington. So we invited Chad and his wife Da to come with Wess and James to our house to hang out with us and our guests.

We're not used to late nights like that -- they left around 11. Fortunately, we had fair trade hot chocolate to drink together.

Thoughts on the Quaker Way

2009-05-10T20:58:00.000-07:00

The test of Quakerism does not come only on Sundays.

The test of Quakerism is not even or not only what you believe.

The test of Quakerism lies in keeping that faith and trust all week long.

When you encounter someone in trouble on the street.

When you face competitive or hurtful behavior at work.

When you see self-destructive behavior in friends or family.

How do you respond?

Can you tap into that lifespring of living energy

that we find here in waiting worship?

Eileen Flanagan's God Raising Us pamphlet

2009-05-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

Last summer I bought Eileen Flanagan's pamphlet God Raising Us: Parenting as a Spiritual Practice (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 396). I've been meaning to post about it ever since. Well, I just re-read it, really liked it, and would recommend it to other Quakers, whether they are parents or aunts or uncles or might like to be any of the above one day.

Eileen writes the blog Imperfect Serenity. I met Eileen and her children at the Friends General Conference Gathering in Johnstown, Penna., and we got to spend a little time together. Her son and my older son even played instruments onstage together during a participatory moment in one of the evening performance times. It's always neat to know an author. Actually, by reading Eileen's blog, I already have a sense of knowing her in a way that is much deeper than if we just spent that little amount of time together. That's one of the magical things about blogging for me.

Here's a sample from the beginning of the pamphlet:

God has continually used my two children to raise me out of selfishness and make me more self-aware. Through them, God has taught me about patience, surrender, and self-control, as well as the testimonies of peace, simplicity, and integrity. They have helped me find God, not just in silence and solitude, but in the midst of chaos and crying. While I still have much to learn, I have found that naming parenting as a spiritual practice helps me follow this path more consciously.

I enjoyed her description of family practices, such as evening prayers, or extended silence as part of their evening routine during Advent and Lent. I was also inspired by how, when her daughter was very young, she prayed to God to find another mother as a friend. Soon after, by talking to someone in a grocery store, she connected with a person who was just the kind of person she was looking for. An atheist, the other mother laughed to hear she was the "answer to a prayer."

Eileen addresses an important issue in the final section, "Supporting the Spiritual Lives of Parents." She cites the FGC Gathering as a place where parents can "deepen their own spiritual lives without cutting themselves off from their children." She names the challenge of finding and creating that kind of wholeness "closer to home and at less expense, so that all families can experience it."

For myself, I find Pacific Yearly Meeting to be another place where that wholeness can very often be found. Yet it's still a week away and not cheap. And besides, that wholeness is challenged mightily on an almost daily basis, as Friends fill up the business meetings with more and more discussion. Parents have to choose between being on time to pick up their children, and respecting the teachers (I was one last year myself), or staying in the meeting for worship with a concern for business. This is an especially painful choice when the business topic is staffing the youth programs, which it was at PacYM last summer.

In sum, I recommend the pamphlet God Raising Us. For me, it was even better the second time I read it.

In addition, Eileen's new book The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make A Change–and When to Let Go will be published this fall. You can read more about it on her author website, www.eileenflanagan.com.

Quaker meetings I have attended

2009-04-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

I was trying to learn about customizing maps on Google Maps today, so I experimented by creating this map:

Quaker Meetings I have attended

Locations are in three colors: blue for meetings or Friends Churches, yellow for Friends General Conference Gathering, and green for Pacific Yearly Meeting annual sessions.

I'm definitely a coastal Quaker!

Updated 4/29/09: fixed hyperlink

Eyes Wide Open at Stanford 4/30/09

2009-04-27T13:35:00.000-07:00

Just found out this is happening this week. Original announcement at http://events.stanford.edu/events/188/18875/:

Eyes Wide Open: An Exhibition of the Human Cost of War

The exhibit includes over 400 pairs boots that will be on display in White Plaza, as a reminder of the fact that our country is still at war. Each pair of boots represents the death of a soldier from California in the current Iraq war.
Date and Time: Thursday, April 30, 2009. 8:00 AM. Approximate duration of 10 hour(s).
Location: White Plaza [Map]
URL: http://www.afsc.org/eyes/ht/d/sp/i/38782/pid/38782
Audience: Faculty/Staff, Alumni/Friends, General Public, Students, Members
Sponsor: Quakers at Stanford
Contact: 650-644-5130 / quakerfriends -at- lists.stanford.edu
Admission: Free to all
Download: Email event
Print: Use this permalink

Happy earth day with Tom Chapin

2009-04-22T23:00:00.001-07:00

Today I had to take the children to school, as Robin was heading out early for a work meeting.

I decided to grab a Tom Chapin CD, as that had served me well recently on a day when I picked up the boys. In particular, Seven Year Old has been quoting the song, "Dog Rules," so I wanted to find the one with that on it. I couldn't. (It's actually a tape in our collection, which wouldn't work in the car I was driving. But I digress.)

Instead, I grabbed a CD with various songs about recycling and the environment. Good enough. We made it to the car and got going. Meanwhile, Robin had left the car radio on KFOG, the classic/contemporary rock station. Their on-air guest was talking about Earth Day.

Oh, right! I forgot it was Earth Day.

That's when I realized I had grabbed Chapin's CD, "This Pretty Planet." And song 12 is "Happy Earth Day"! It felt as if I had been guided to it. It was nice to listen to it, even during part of my day when the children weren't in the car.

At the end of the day, when I asked the boys how their Earth Days had been, Ten Year Old said he had gone to the Eco-Kids club meeting in the after-school program and wrote two letters. One was to Pres. Obama about pesticides and another to Pres. Obama by way of Greenpeace. So we can expect to get mail from GP now. (He carefully pointed out that he didn't put his school email address on it, and he doesn't check his email anyway.)

Finally, here's a link to Robin's post, Further Appreciation of Tom Chapin.

Affirmation circle: Story of a 5th grade basketball team

2009-03-21T21:51:00.001-07:00

Ten Year Old played on the 5th grade basketball team this year, with other students from the Friends School in a league at a city rec center.

Following the last game of the season a couple of weeks ago, the team gathered for a pizza party in a room at the rec center.

Once most of the team was there, along with a hefty chunk of the parental population, the boys gathered in a large circle, mostly rather quiet and calm. In fact, I was struck by just how quiet and calm they were. No doubt part of it was they were tired after a day at school and then a game on the court. Yet clearly, they were simply used to drawing together, without anyone asking them or directing them.

Coach Chris, one of three coaches for the team and the lead PE teacher at the school, asked for a moment of silence. Whatever chatter remained disappeared. There was some rustling, but still an air of calm and quiet fell about the place.

A few minutes later, Coach Chris asked the team to share an affirmation of something or someone from the season. He said that once the first person said something, then it would go around the circle in order from him. Students could contribute their own affirmation, echo what someone else had said, or pass.

After a less than half a minute of waiting, the first student spoke up. He thanked the three coaches for their help and the parents for their support. Many of the students echoed his remarks. Another boy thanked the parents of another student for giving him rides to practice. When my own son's turn came, he said that boy had spoken for him -- the same parents had given my son rides, too.

One of the last affirmations came from a boy who thanked a teammate for his efforts, saying that he hadn't started out as the best player but he had really worked hard and been a leader and inspiration for the others. This coming from a 10 or 11 year old boy about another one -- wow!

The final affirmation came from the staff coach at the rec center. I believe this was his second year working with teams from the Friends School. He was warm and full of praise for the team and they way they supported each other. I couldn't help but think that this team must be a bit different from most he works with. They sure didn't win many games, or even score that many points, but they had a spiritual maturity that was awesome to behold.

Another Day, Another Tooth

2009-03-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

The day after I wrote that last post, Seven Year Old lost his other top front tooth. Once again, a basketball to the face hastened the inevitable. Two days in a row he gets a basketball to the face! Poor kid.

Pretty charming though.

Stop to smell the trees

2009-03-10T22:21:00.000-07:00

Seven Year Old and I had a nice trip to school today. (Ten Year Old is on his fifth grade camping trip, two nights at Ben Lomond Quaker Center [yay!] and one night backpacking in to Big Basin State Park.)

We brought a mix CD along that a parents of a preschool friend made of kid-friendly pop songs, so we bopped to that in the car into the city.

I parked near 14th & Guerrero, and he asked, "Why do we always park here?" Making it sound so far away. All of one block and half of another!

As we walked down 14th, we passed a mock orange in bloom, and it smelled heavenly. I pointed it out, and the smaller tree next to the first one had blossoms at nose level for both of us. Silas really liked the scent, and he stopped for a bit to sniff. (You can see the tree on Google maps' street views, at about 460 14th Street...)

As we continued walking, he pointed out the next tree, but it didn't seem to have any blossoms. I kept walking, but he stayed where he was, then called me back. A few of the branches out over the street did have flowers, and he had spotted them. Then we noticed that almost every tree on the block was in bloom.

By the time we got to Valencia, he was skipping along he was so happy, and then he reached out to hold my hand as we went around the corner.

Lord, thank you for the many blessings in my life. Here are two of the bigger ones!

Compulsive Ministers, Tend Ye the Inward Fire!

2009-03-05T21:47:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Henry Nouwen's book The Way of the Heart. It's ostensibly aimed at "compulsive ministers" who are busy busy busy, and lose their spiritual way in the process. It's reprinted in a small, semi-gloss-covered trade paperback, though, so it's clearly got a much larger audience. People like me, for example, an unprogrammed Friend; though as the volunteer clerk of my Quaker meeting, I can certainly relate to some of the bits about professional ministers.

Really, the larger thrust of the book is about finding time for solitude, silence, and prayer as a way of refreshment. That's useful for anyone, not just those called to the ministry. (Except perhaps the theophobic, as one Facebook friend of mine describes his religious views; they can call it reflection instead of prayer.)

I liked this passage quite well, from page 47 of the recent Ballantine paperback (emphasis added):

What needs to be guarded is the life of the Spirit within us. Especially we who want to witness to the presence of God's Spirit in the world need to tend the fire within with utmost care. It is not so strange that many ministers have become burnt-out cases, people who say many words and share many experiences, but in whom the first of God's Spirit has died and from whom not much more comes forth than their own boring, petty ideas and feelings. Sometimes it seems that our many words are more an expression of our doubt than of our faith. It is as if we are not sure that God's Spirit can touch the hearts of people: we have to help him out, and, with many words, convince others of his power. But it is precisely this wordy unbelief that quenches the fire.

Our first and foremost task is faithfully to care for the inward fire so that when it is really needed it can offer warmth and light to lost travelers.

Lord, help me offer warmth and light to others.

An invitation of Friends School parents to a Friends Meeting

2009-02-28T19:27:00.000-08:00

Text of a flyer sent home to families at San Francisco Friends School, 2/27/09:

Imagine a Sunday morning spent in silence, in contemplation, among a community of Quakers and fellow San Francisco Friends School (SFFS) families, capped off by home-cooked hotcakes, coffee and conversation….

When: Sunday, March 1st is the date to mark in your calendars for the next Meeting for Worship/Pancake Brunch at the San Francisco Meetinghouse, co-sponsored by our friends at the SF Friends Meeting and your SFFS Quaker Life Committee.

"Going to the SF Friends Meeting let me see a 'family' version of Meeting for Worship, with adults and kids sitting together for the first 15 minutes. When my kids left for their activities upstairs, I was left with my own experience of Meeting. Not getting much time on my own -- let alone in quiet –- I relished it. It also allowed me to witness those speaking from the spirit, into the silence. I was touched by every contribution.” -- Mother of 1st, 4th and 6th graders

What: An opportunity for SFFS families to experience together Meeting for Worship at 11:00, and then gather for a casual pancake meal with SF Meeting members at noon.

Newcomers are also invited to attend an optional Orientation to Meeting for Worship at 10:40, with nursery care for children (under K) starting at that time. Children K and older are encouraged to take part in the first fifteen minutes of Meeting for Worship, followed by an optional program at 11:15.

“There is something very healing just sitting in silence with other people. No advice given, no judgments made (at least not often out loud), nothing but waiting and listening to what spirit or self or others' experiences have to say. When a meeting unifies, or gathers, it is a very personal and humbling experience... to witness others' inner work, what their lives bring them, how we are so, so similar despite and because we are all so different.” -- Mother of 1st grader

Where: The San Francisco Friends Meetinghouse is located at 65 Ninth Street, a half-block off Market. Use Civic Center BART or Muni or any Market Street bus line. Parking is generally available on the street.

What else?
Want to carpool with other SFFS folks? Have further questions? Care to volunteer with clean-up? Contact [Quaker Life Committee member], who is looking forward to attending her first SF Friends Meeting for Worship on March 1st in the company of other SFFS newcomers!

“The Ninth Street Meeting is a must-attend event in that it reflects the diversity and inquisitiveness of the Quaker tradition as it lives in this city and on the West coast. It's simplicity with a complex history! (And the food is excellent...)” -- Father of 2nd and 4th graders

If you can't come on March 1st, please know that you and your children are welcome at Meeting any Sunday!

Reclaiming the Power of Primitive Quakerism - photos

2009-02-23T22:20:00.000-08:00

The workshop "Reclaiming the Power of Primitive Quakerism for the 21st Century" was good - Wess, Robin, and Martin have all written about it already. I was hoping to do so, too, but spent my available time trying to remember my Flickr signin credentials. Martin kindly emailed me to say that I could always post the photos directly to QuakerQuaker, so I did.

You can find his and my photos, and eventually more from other Friends, too, by clicking here.

Or just go to the photos page of quakerquaker.org and search for the tag "quakerreclaiming2009." Martin is uploading his video interviews at a mad pace, so check those out, too. I was pretty wiped out when he interviewed me, so it's not one for the ages. It was fun showing the interview with 10 Year Old to him and his younger brother tonight before bedtime.

Here's a pic of Chad explaining the Quaker schism chart (aka "The Religious Society Of Friends In North America Chart") to 7 Year Old.

Update, 2/24/09: added the tag "quakerreclaiming2009" in case it wasn't supposed to have a period in it.

Frequently Asked Quaker Questions: FAQQs

2009-02-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

By the time this is published, I'll be packing for the Ben Lomond Quaker Center workshop called "Reclaiming the Power of Primitive Quakerism for the 21st Century." I'm going because I know some of the organizers. :) I'm looking forward to it.

Before that, though, the draft minutes from our February business meeting are in, and I wanted to share the questions we collected at the meeting to use in our Frequently Asked Quaker Questions (FAQQ) series at San Francisco Meeting:

Why do Friends worship in silence?
What is meant by “testing” leadings?
What does it mean to “let our lives speak”?
What is the connection between spirituality and action?
Is there a political “litmus test” for being a Quaker? Do all Friends have the same political beliefs?
What about all the other Quakers? What other kinds are there besides – and even within – unprogrammed Friends?
What's the difference between meditation in our private lives, and meditation together as a group?
Why do children come for 15 minutes?
Who’s in charge?
Do you have to be a Christian?
What do Quakers think about paying taxes that support war?
What is the role of civil disobedience among Friends?
How do we make the peace testimony active and valuable?
How do Quakers make decisions?
Is there a spiritual “litmus test” for Quakers?
Why don’t Quakers wear all grey anymore? Am I allowed to wear fancy clothes to meeting?
How do Quakers hold marriages and memorials?
How do Quakers invest?
What do we mean by equality?
What is the Quaker view of the Bible?
How do Quakers feel about the sacraments?
How do Quakers feel about sex? art? music? alcohol? gossip? hell? sin? capitalism? joy? dancing? queerness?
What do Quakers mean by “clearness”?
Do Quakers have a sense of humor?
Why do Quakers ask so many questions? And queries?

We'll sort through these and make them available to our Ministry and Oversight Committee members, who are signing up to lead these approximately 15-minute discussions at the rise of meeting for anyone who wants to participate, whether a new or long-time participant.

Terry Pratchett Overdose

2009-02-18T17:00:00.000-08:00

So I had been told I would probably like Terry Pratchett's novels, particularly the Discworld novels. (Whoa, I almost wrote "Discoworld" -- that would really be too much!)

Anyway, Ten Year Old brought home one of Pratchett's teen/young adult novels from the school library, Wee Free Men, and I decided to read it. So then I had to read its sequel, again featuring the Tiffany Aching character, A Hat Full of Sky.

Since then I've also read Only You Can Save the World, Johnny and the Dead, Thief of Time, Night Watch, Thud!, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, The Truth, Hogfather, and Going Postal. And a copy of Making Money is sitting on the living room floor, waiting for me to be done writing this post. And Small Gods is on my nightstand for when I'm done with that.

This is a bit much to have read in six weeks! I am behind in reading blogs I subscribe to. I don't post to this blog very often. I'm not reading thin but spiritually heavy books of biblical scholarship or social critique that are all the rage for me usually. However, I have taken this as a wonderfully relaxing opportunity to read for pleasure and amusement, with a heaping dollop of social commentary mixed in.

(I admit to also spending more time than I like to admit trying to come up with clever and meaning-free status updates on Facebook.)

Anyway, I enjoy reading Pratchett's books. His penchant for silly yet relevant names is longer-running than J.K. Rowling's. His silly situations are more reminiscent of a Fawlty Towers more than Monty Python, but there are echoes of the latter at times. And his ability to create "thrilling" plots in the parallel universe of Discworld are marvelous.

I'm late to the party but enjoying it.

Agenda for an introduction to Quakerism

2009-02-16T21:42:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday at San Francisco Meeting, a member of our Ministry and Oversight Committee and I led a two-hour session, "An Introduction to Quakerism." We decided to take a hint from Quaker Quest and lead with the faith not the history.

Twelve people participated. Not huge, but significant. Three people were at our meeting for the first time that day, and two of them had never been to a Friends meeting before. I thought it was brave of them to stay for the whole two hours.

It seemed to go well. We got a nice email afterwards from a longtime member of our meeting, thanking us for doing the session and saying he learned something from both of us.

Here is the agenda we worked from, though what we actually said was of course different from what we wrote ahead of time:

1. Silent Worship

2. Introductions and Icebreaker:
Say your name, when you first attended a Friends meeting, and share something you remember from that first time (or, if you can’t recall, then say something about a meeting that was special for you in some way)

3. Faith: Blake

Foundational points from early Friends, based on Wilmer Cooper’s A Living Faith
Encounter with the divine in silence, unmediated, etc.
Inner Light/That of God in all humans

4. Practice: Blake

The encounter with the divine leads us to work this out in our lives
Aspects include various testimonies: how do our lives testify to our experience of truth?

5. History: Chris

Religious ferment in 17th Century England; Puritans, revolution, Seekers.
Fox: Great people to be gathered. One, Christ Jesus, who can speak to your condition.
Fell: ally who provided base of operations in North of England
Integrity, truthtelling, no oaths, no tithe, interrupting church services => oppression
No tithe = no access to state schools, so they set up their own Friends Schools.
Quakers and rise of capitalism: Gwyn, Covenant Crucified
Success of Penn’s holy experiment w/religious tolerance.
Social witness: abolitionism, penitentiaries and prison reform, peace;
Growing awareness of racism among Friends past and present, despite history of abolitionism
Environment growing more important for many Friends today

6. Queries

How do our Quaker roots guide us today?
Where do we find inspiration from our Quaker roots?
Where do we want to branch out from those roots?
How do we “let our lives speak” as Friends? What are our lives saying?

7. Silent Worship

Rebecca Solnit on the current opportunity

2009-02-13T15:16:00.000-08:00

I really like Rebecca Solnit's writing. I've got Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism, and I filed a copy of an essay she wrote about the future of bio-regionalism in the U.S. And I would still like to read her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. It came out around the time when I had less time for walking the streets of San Francisco, which I did for years when we didn't have a car and I could walk to work.

Anyway, today Common Dreams carried an essay she wrote for Orion Magazine, "Elegy for a Toxic Logic: And carpe diem for what comes next." I highly recommend it!
» Click for Common Dreams link
» Click for Orion Magazine link

Sample quote:

A decline in snowmobile purchases, overseas vacations, new construction, and so forth is very good news for the environment. The madness of postwar affluence is fading, and Americans are beginning to make very different choices about debt, consumption, and other acts of economic overconfidence-though of course desperation remains unevenly distributed...

And a second one:

[We have] an opportunity to supply a different logic, one of modesty, prudence, long-term vision, solidarity-and pleasure: all the pleasures that were not being brought to us by a system whose highest achievement was represented by endless aisles of shoddy goods made in countless sweatshops on the other side of the world.

Read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine!

2009-01-28T18:00:00.000-08:00

Naomi Klein explains it all for you in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. I highly recommend it.

The offenses committed at the highest levels of the United States during the past eight years were no accident, nor the result of bumbling idiots, nor a mere individual venality.

They were the logical, policy-based outcomes of the past 28 years of "free market" policy in the United States, and of the last 43 years (since Indonesia's 1965 coup) as practiced by the U.S. abroad.

The book helped tie together the last several decades of U.S. policy in a way that had simmered in my brain, but had never quite cohered so clearly. I learned a lot about what really happened in South America in the 1970s, for example, as well as in Russia in the 1990s.

Klein begins the book with an excruciating illustration of the effects of "brainwashing" experiments conducted at McGill University in the early 1960s. These were in fact regression techniques designed to break down personalities. The same tactics relabeled as "harsh interrogation techniques" and used throughout the world by the U.S. in the last seven years, in a way that previously only U.S. clients had carried out directly.

These techniques affirm the importance of narrative in our lives: "Without a story, we are, as many of us were after September 11, [2001,] intensely vulnerable to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their ow ends. As soon as we have a new narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented and the world begins to make sense once again. Prison interrogators intent on inducing shock and regression understand this process well.... The same is true for wider societies. Once the mechanics of the shock doctrine are deeply and collectively understood, whole communities become harder to take by surprise, more difficult to confuse -- shock resistant." (pp. 458-9)

It reminds me of the days on Quaker blogs, circa 2005 or 2006, when several of us were talking about "personal narrative theology" as a 21st century approach to theology.

This was a great line, too: "The only prospect that threatens the booming disaster economy on which so much wealth depends -- from weapons to oil to engineering to surveillance to patented drugs -- is the possibility of achieving some measure of climatic stability and geopolitical peace." (pp. 427-8)

Finally, there was a section in which she compares the concept of "The Rapture," when the saved are swept up into Heaven, with the understanding that wealthy people have that they will be swept up and away from their gated communities by helicopter in any big disaster, so they don't need to worry.

On earth as it is in heaven, indeed.

Challenging ourselves to discover life's greatest answers

2009-01-24T21:31:00.000-08:00

The new book by John Dear, SJ, is called The Questions of Jesus, and the subtitle is, "Challenging ourselves to discover life's greatest answers."

The book is literally arranged around the questions that Jesus asks in the Gospels, grouped thematically. I have been reading a question or three a day from the book for the last month, and it has been helpful.

Richard Rohr says in the foreword of the book, "I am told that Jesus only directly answers 3 of the 183 questions that he himself is asked! This is totally surprising to people who have grown up assuming that the very job description of religion is to give people answers and to solve people's dilemmas. Apparently this is not Jesus' understanding of the function of religion because he operates very differently."

Dear is a long-time peace activist and teacher of the gospel of nonviolence. He spent time in prison with Philip Berrigan, SJ, after they participated in a Plowshares anti-nuclear-weapons action together. I read his autobiography recently, too, called A Persistent Peace: One Man's Struggle for a Nonviolent World. It was interesting, in a voyeuristic way because of all the well-known people he has worked with. The most interesting stories, though, had more to do with the ordinary individuals or communities he has worked with, as a teacher, and later as a parish priest in New Mexico.

Overall, I find The Questions of Jesus a much deeper book. It has such a gentle and loving tone to it, too. I just finished this passage about this question: "Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life span? If even the smallest things are beyond your control, why are you anxious about the rest?" (Matthew 6:27; Luke 12:26).

Dear concludes the reflection on these questions:

"Every major religion suggests that they key to a peaceful life is the letting go of control and worry and living fully aware in the present moment. If we can live in the freedom of the present moment and center ourselves in the peace of God, we will find life turned upside down. We will no longer worry about the past or the future but will be fully alive to the present. And by being fully present to ourselves, others, and God, we will live our lives to the fullest. When we come to the moment of our death, as Thoreau said, we will not have wasted the gift of life but will have lived it to the full." (p. 102)

May you live your life to the full as well.

Environmental Sabbath

2009-01-18T14:00:00.000-08:00

At the winter session of College park Quarterly Meeting on 1/17, in worship sharing a Friend came up with the idea of having an environmental sabbath. This would be a day without, or with greatly reduced use of, the modern conveniences that result in greenhouse gas emissions -- cars... electricity... email.

If several people in a Friends meeting agreed to do it on the same day of the week or month, it would be a spiritual discipline shared by a community. That would both enable participants to support one another, and it would give one the sense of greater impact because it's not just an individual or single household, but a collection of people making a change.

Kind of like The Compact, or Buy Nothing Day.

This is worth thinking about some more.

Geez Magazine cover story

2009-01-17T20:36:00.000-08:00

The cover of the winter 2008 issue of Geez magazine features a story by Chris Moore-Backman called "Walking with Gandhi." Chris is a member of San Francisco Meeting, sojourning in Arizona.

Hat tip to Darryl Brown, who designed the cover and mentioned it on his blog, Darryl Designs.

Seeking Middle East Peace and Justice (vigil flyer)

2009-01-06T20:53:00.000-08:00

This is the text of the leaflet that will be handed out this week at the San Francisco Friends Meeting's vigil for peace and justice, held every Thursday from noon to 1 pm at the federal office building, 450 Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco. Text subject to last-minute edits depending on the situation.

As bombs financed by our own tax dollars rain down on Gaza and Israeli troops invade, we pray for the people of Israel and Palestine, and seek pardon for our role in the destructive conflict there. We grieve the suffering of all in the region, and the devastating consequences of the reliance on weapons and military strategy to address human conflict. We grieve the disproportionate and retaliatory approach of the Israeli government to the threats to its national security, just as we have grieved our own country's blind and wrongheaded response to the attacks suffered on U.S. soil in 2001. Both serve only to spread despair, to strengthen the cause of extremism and to sow the seeds of heightened future violence.

As some of us have done every week since 2001, we stand here in witness to another way forward: a way of listening, mutual respect and understanding, of reflection, repentance and reconciliation. As people of many organized faiths and none, and as people of the United States, we take this time to focus on our own responsibility and on what we can do to address our complicity in the violent and soul-denying policies our government pursues at home and throughout the world. For some of us it is an opportunity to pray, to examine our lives for the seeds of war and to begin the work of removing them.

The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem must be political. Rather than supporting Israel's assault on Gaza, our government must take prompt action to help bring about an end to the violence. It is not enough to urge Israel to “avoid civilian targets” and urge Hamas to stop the missile attacks. If this spiraling violence continues, both Palestinians and Israelis will suffer and the risk of a broader confrontation increases. The U.S. must demand a halt to the air and ground offensive, and discontinue military support to all parties.

Even absent the ongoing military incursion, the continued closure of Gaza and resulting shortages of vital food, fuel and medicine, has created a tragic humanitarian crisis that must also be addressed quickly. The U.S. together with international partners should seek restoration of the cease-fire, and reopening of the borders under United Nations supervision. Peace is the only lasting security.

PLEASE STAND WITH US

We invite all in agreement to join us. We vigil every Thursday from noon until 1:00 pm here at the old San Francisco federal building on the corner of Larking Street and Golden Gate Avenue.

The vigil was started by two Quaker groups—American Friends Service Committee and San Francisco Friends Meeting, who have now been joined by Buddhist Peace Fellowship and Episcopal Peace Fellowship. Participants come from a range of backgrounds. Some of us are silent, praying or meditating. Others do not keep silence and are happy to speak with you.

CONTACT INFORMATION

American Friends Service Committee
65 Ninth St., San Francisco, CA 94103, 415 565-0201,
http://www.afsc.org/

Buddhist Peace Fellowship
P.O. Box 3470, Berkeley, CA 94703, http://www.bpf.org/
Episcopal Peace Fellowship
415 824-0288, http://www.epfnational.org/

San Francisco Friends Meeting
65 Ninth St., San Francisco, CA 94103, 415 431-7440,
http://sfquakers.org/

To contact the vigil, email: sfvigil -at- mac.com

NONVIOLENT VIGIL FOR PEACE & JUSTICE

Quick Quaker Talks: An Experiment at SF Friends Meeting

2009-01-02T20:39:00.000-08:00

If you'd been to San Francisco Friends Meeting over the holidays, you'd have heard me announce that the meeting's Ministry and Oversight Committee is trying an experiment in January, tentatively entitled "Quick Quaker Talks." These will be brief discussions at the end of meeting for worship.

The plan is that for about 15 or 20 minutes following meeting for worship and announcements, a couple of experienced Quakers will give their take on some frequently asked Quaker questions—FAQQ! Then we'll have time for others to chime in with their experiences—and their questions. All are welcome.

My current plan is to kick off the series this Sunday (1/4) by asking, "How do Quakers know when to speak in meeting for worship?"

Though subject to change, here are the suggested future topics:

1/11: Why do Quakers meet for silent worship rather than meditate alone?
1/18: What do Quakers think of Jesus? Are Quakers Christian?
1/25: What are the Quaker testimonies and what do they "testify" to, anyway?

It's our hope that this experiment will allow us to get to know one another, our spiritual lives, and our faith tradition a little better. Since it's an experiment, we can always change it "as Way opens."

Originally posted to San Francisco Meeting's email group. Essentially, we're doing "inreach" to our own meeting in a miniature version of the Quaker Quest series pioneered by London Friends, and now promoted in the U.S. by Friends General Conference.

Update, 1/6/09: We had seven people participate for the debut event. There was one person there for the first time, a Haverford student home on break in San Francisco who had been to our meeting a time or two, a person who had attended about a dozen meetings elsewhere, an attender from our meeting who's been coming for about two years or so, two members of Ministry and Oversight, and me. It was a good discussion, going far past the fifteen minutes alloted, probably more like 30 or 35. There was opportunity for sharing and discussion as well as questions. The one drawback: The potluck lunch was mostly gone by the time we were finished. Next time, we may plan to get food first, then have a discussion table. Either that or we talk quicker and end sooner.

Albert Nolan's Jesus Today

2008-12-18T22:31:00.000-08:00

A couple months ago I read Albert Nolan's book Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006).

Nolan is a Dominican priest from South Africa, which very much informs his world view, in a positive way, from my experience. His first book, Jesus Before Christianity, is apparently relatively widely read.

I have finally had a chance to type up some of the passages that spoke to my condition, and reproduce a few of them here. The book starts with a review of the current situation in the world, the "signs of the times."

P. 7: In our present circumstances of uncertainty and insecurity, spirituality could be seen as yet another form of escape. While this may be true in some cases, it seems to me that by and large the new search for spirituality, the deep hunger for spirituality, is genuine and sincere. It is one of the signs of our times.
The sign, however, is not the number of people who have found a satisfactory form of spirituality to live by. Some have done so, but the sign is rather the widespread hunger for spirituality, the search for spirituality, the felt need for spirituality. One could argue that all human beings need, and have always needed, spirituality. What is happening today is that many more people are becoming acutely aware of their need for spirituality.

Nolan then reviews what he sees as the core of Jesus's spirituality.

Page 135: Trusting God, as Jesus did, does not mean clinging to God; it means letting go of everything so as to surrender ourselves and our lives to God. There is a difference between attachment and surrender. In the end we must become detached from God, too. We must let go of God in order to jump into the embrace of a loving Father whom we can trust implicitly. We don’t need to hold on tightly, because we will be held—like a child in the arms of its parents.
There are people who cling to God. They make God into a crutch... Clinging, even clinging to God, is the work of a frightened ego. Surrender and trust come from the depths of our true self.

p. 146: For many of us the process of unlearning or unknowing our previous images of God might include a stage of atheism or at least a period of grappling with a de-personalized God. But as our search continues, and especially if we are learning from Jesus, we will come to experience God in personal terms. This will of course be very different from the childish images of a personal God some of us grew up with.

Part III of the book is titled, "Personal Transformation Today." Nolan's goal is to outline a practical spirituality for today. The chapter titles indicate the elements of this: In Silence and Solitude; Getting to Know Oneself; With a Grateful Heart; Like a Little Child; and Letting Go.

Finally, Nolan concludes with Part IV: Jesus and the Experience of Onenes: one with God with ourselves, with other human beings, and with the universe.

p. 191: We are God’s handiwork, a small but unique part of God’s great ongoing work of art. But we are also invited to participate in the process by becoming co-artists and co-creators of the future.
We do this by allowing God to work in and through us. When we are radically free or on the way to radical freedom, divine energy can flow through us unhindered. This divine energy, which is also called the Holy Spirit, infinitely powerful, creative, and healing. We see it at work in the prophets, the mystics, and the saints, but above all in Jesus. The Holy Spirit is Jesus’ spirit....
God’s Work, like God’s Wisdom, is revolutionary. It turns the world upside down. We participate by adding our voices to the many prophetic voices that are speaking out boldly in our day and age. There are countless numbers of people around the world who are doing God’s Work. The challenge we face is to join them, if we have not already done so.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who's interested in what could be likened to an "emergent" or "convergent" view of Jesus, from a religious in the Catholic church.

Stuck in US with the bailout blues again

2008-12-16T19:15:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a piece by David Sirota, "Political establishment trashed consumer protections - and look what we got." They ended with the following links, which I helpfully reproduce here:

Facts and Myths about the Financial Crisis of 2008 (Minneapolis Fed)
Seismic Effects of the Bankruptcy Reform (NY Fed)
TROUBLED ASSET RELIEF PROGRAM: Additional Actions Needed to Better Ensure Integrity, Accountability, and Transparency (Government Accountability Office)

(About that last one, as my Ten Year Old might say, "Well, duh!")

Here's what Sirota said:

"Please, forgive me for saying it. I know it's a tad annoying, but it has to be said to America's ruling class in this humble column space. Because if it's not said here, then you can bet it won't be said anywhere else, and it needs to be said somewhere on behalf of the millions of citizens who were right.

"We told you so."

Firstday School Lesson: The Meeting Community

2008-12-14T22:01:00.000-08:00

Advices and Queries for 12th Month, Pacific Yearly Meeting: The Meeting Community

1. Song: Pat Humphries, "Swimming to the Other Side"
This was an improvisation by the other grownups when I had some extra preparation for my lesson when we walked in. The students at the Friends School have been learning this, so several of the participants in the class already knew it. Whew!

2. Circle/Silence

3. Introductions and Icebreaker
The person who is speaking will get the Talking Feather. (This is like a Talking Stick. It signifies that the holder is the person who is entitled to talk. It gets passed from person to person around the circle.) Say your name, where you were born, and the name of a family member other than parents, siblings, or children. (We had three adults in the room, all of whom were parents, so that last item was relevant.)

4. Pedagogy: Community
a. Teacher describes roots of the word = "com-" with + "unity" as one. The Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, is one type of community.

b. What are some of the communities you are part of? Stand if the following apply to you:

Are a member of a family.
Ever been a member of a team.
Ever been part of a musical or dance group.
Part of humanity.
Part of the mammals.
Part of the earth. Solar system. Milky Way. Universe.

c. Read two passages from Catherine Whitmire's Practicing Peace: A Devotional Walk through the Quaker Tradition: p. 76, Tom Mullen, "Oh God, help us not to cry over spilt milk"; p. 83, Deborah Fisch (quoting a Friend from SF about redwood trees)
Point: One of the places we find God and the Spirit of God is in community – a group of people together

5. Light and Livelies: These are fun group exercises conducted during Alternatives to Violence Project workshops. We did about three: the rain is coming down; "I love you honey, but I just can't smile"; and vampire frogger.

This was very good for the boy energy in the room; we had one girl and six boys (three pairs of brothers, in fact). The girl had fun, too, though!

6. Affirmation: Sing first verse and chorus of "Simple Gifts" (partly because one child asked for it!) Closing silent worship. Thanks for being here, and help me move the table back to the center of the room and distribute the chairs around it.

Update 12/15: added tags.

How much is that bailout in the window?

2008-11-25T22:24:00.000-08:00

Gack:

Bailouts Dwarf Spending on Climate and Poverty Crises
Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh | November 24, 2008
Foreign Policy In Focus

The financial crisis is only one of multiple crises that will affect every country, rich and poor alike. [hat tip to commondreams.org]

Tsk.

The bailout is at well over four trillion and counting. Higher after the new backstops for Citi and credit cards. LOLFed has the best summary I've seen, but it's now a whole week old, which means it's terribly out of date and at LEAST $500 billion too low (=$300B for Citi [not counting the measly direct capital infusion!] and $200B for credit card issuers. Really, really amazing. Not in a good way.

Anyway, here's a link to the LOLFed bailout balance sheet: Why Hijack A Supertanker When You Could Hijack A $4.3 Trillion Dollar Failboat.

Kthxbai.

Update: Okay, I was really out of date myself. Today (11/26) Kathleen Pender in the SF Chronicle says the total bailout is $8.5 trillion so far, though not all of it has been tapped yet. The article includes a good summary chart from Bloomberg and a helpful timeline. And, oh, by the way, the LOLFed graphic came from CNBC originally.

Some of the organizing tasks of a clerk among Friends

2008-11-22T21:41:00.000-08:00

I wrote up the following as a handout for a workshop for staff and board committee clerks that I'm leading on 11/24/08 at the San Francisco Friends School. The board of trustees of this particular school is very well organized and well run, in my experience. They need some time to grapple with the spiritual nature of Friends decision-making, and how to apply it in a school context, so that will be a focus of what I address. Nonetheless, every committee clerk should be mindful of good organizational practices, so I created these two lists.

In my experience, unprogrammed Friends meetings have a great need for lists like this, especially because most of us don't have staff. Does your monthly, quarterly or yearly meeting have anything like this? I assume Philadelphia Yearly Meeting does, because of the work Arthur Larrabee has done through the years on teaching clerking. Feel free to add links to other resources in the comments. It wasn't meant to be comprehensive; rather, I was trying to fit it all onto a one-page handout.

SOME OF THE ORGANIZING TASKS
OF A CLERK AMONG FRIENDS

Set an agenda, preferably in writing; if feasible, distribute in advance.
Begin and end the meeting with a moment of silent reflection or worship.
Facilitate the meeting.
Take minutes, or assign someone else to take minutes.
Check in with committee members between meetings as needed to remind them of assignments and learn about progress.
As needed, consult with the board clerk or other committee clerks who may have relevant information about the matters your committee is addressing.
Find outside resources to help with the work of your committee, or ask for help from the committee to find the resources or to follow up on your leads.
Find or develop queries as needed.
Publicity and communications:

Some Printed Resources for Clerking Among Friends

Beyond Majority Rule, Michael Sheeran. The classic text on Quaker unity decision-making, written by a Jesuit.
Growing into Goodness: Essays on Quaker Education, Paul Lacey. See especially Chapter 3, “Roots and Fruits: Quaker Decision Making.”
Faith and Practice, Pacific Yearly meeting: See www.pacificyearlymeeting.org.
Beyond Consensus by Barry Morley; Pendle Hill Pamphlet. Discussion of the distinction between consensus in decision-making and a “sense of the meeting,” reached through discernment of a greater wisdom or continuing revelation of truth.
Friends Council on Education: See www.friendscouncil.org. Publications for sale include:

Finally, in the context of a Quaker meeting, rather than a school, I would also highly recommend San Francisco Meeting Member Elizabeth Boardman's Where Should I Stand? A Field Guide for Monthly Meeting Clerks, published by Quaker Books of Friends General Conference. Elizabeth also has a blog for it at whereshouldistand.blogspot.com.

Guest post: What really happens at a Meeting for Worship?

2008-11-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

This is a guest post by Amy Baker, San Francisco Monthly Meeting & San Francisco Friends School Quaker Life Committee member. Reprinted with her permission from the "Quaker Question" column in the SF Friends School newsletter.

I remember the first time I went to a Quaker Meeting. The things I didn’t know about the Quaker faith could fill a book, and I was utterly at a loss as to what to DO. There were none of the usual cues- no priest, no prayerful call & response, not even a cross on the wall indicating what direction to face. I fidgeted and felt self conscious and then finally hit an “aha” moment: you mean, this is up to ME? This relationship with God, this form of worship, the ability to find meaning in silence?

It was a radical thought.

I also remember the ministry that was shared. To this day I turn over the words, the messages. At the time I marveled at how accessible the message was -- simply spoken, grounded in personal experience, but related to a worldly outlook and to a spiritual challenge faced by the speaker. Some of the messages related directly to inner struggles of my own, not yet articulated.

It was a revelation that a form of worship that had less structure could be more relevant, and somehow speak to me directly. Back in San Francisco, I sought out the Meeting House and went a few times on my own, before becoming a regular attender. At first I enjoyed the respite, the completely accepting and non judgmental environment. Later, as I understood more of theological underpinnings
that create such a space, I experienced Meeting on a more spiritual level. Soon I noticed that if I didn’t go to Meeting, my week was missing something.

Not all Meetings for Worship are like that first one I went to- sometimes I spend the entire hour trying to quell the mind chatter.

Some are even more powerful. Each one is different and yet I have worshipped this same way in several different US cities and a few foreign countries and they are remarkably similar, right down to the announcements after.

As the Quaker guide Faith & Practice puts it: “The Meeting for Worship is the core of the Quaker practice. There, Friends gather together in expectant silence… without prearranged program. Meeting for Worship is different from solitary prayer... Friends seek connection to one another and to God dwelling among them. In some Meetings, the ministry may have a common theme, each message deepening and enriching the other, and connecting to one’s own thoughts. Some Meetings are entirely silent... Together we can more clearly see Truth; we can better receive and understand continuing revelation.”

If you have ever been curious to join a Meeting for Worship, as practiced by the San Francisco Monthly Meeting, please join other members of the SF Friends School community on Sunday, December 7th at 11am. The Meeting House is at 65 9th Street, between Mission & Market.

There is a short intro session at 10:40 if you want a primer, and there is supervision for children who choose not to stay in the Meeting after the first 15 minutes. There is also a caregiver in the nursery for babies and toddlers. We would love to see you there!

The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition

2008-11-15T13:30:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in my last post, the 11/5/08 issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly has a review of a book about a famous Quaker by a contemporary Quaker.

The book is called The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition.

The title of the alumni magazine article is, "Decoding an early abolitionist: Thomas P. Slaughter *83 pens biography of tailor and preacher John Woolman." You can read it here.

Here's a quote from the book review:

Slaughter, a Quaker himself, delved back into Journal to make sense of this quiet revolutionary. The result is The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition, published by Hill and Wang in September.

From the scant threads in Journal, Slaughter has provided a deeper understanding of Woolman by tracking thinkers who probably influenced him, from John Locke to Ben Franklin. Slaughter examines the source of Woolman’s convictions by employing a type of psychological excavation he learned at Princeton, where mentors such as Lawrence Stone and Natalie Davis were “interested in the workings of people’s heads,” says Slaughter.

By the way, the asterisk next to his name indicates Slaughter received a graduate degree from Princeton in 1983. Undergraduates get an apostrophe.

The publisher's page for the book is right here.

Elegy for an undergraduate

2008-11-14T21:12:00.000-08:00

I was a middle-class to upper-middle-class kid at a decidedly upper class university. Princeton.

I still remember a picnic back home, probably the summer after high school. A friend of mine from middle school was there, who went to high school at the exclusive St. Paul's School. A couple of his friends from St. Pauls' were at the picnic, too. One of them told me, "The smartest kids I know are from public school. I think they have to work harder." That has stayed with me since then. Even as I send my two boys to a relatively elite Friends School, the only one in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I'm a little embarrassed about having gone to Princeton. I do have it listed in my Facebook profile, partly in hopes that friends from college will find me. And I cross-post my Blogspot blog to my Facebook account, so presumably they could read this stuff I write about Quakerism.

My favorite story illustrating how people react to my attending Princeton actually happened the summer before I matriculated. I was working for a temp agency, and I got a one-day assignment to wash dishes at a cafeteria at an AT&T office building. As my supervisor for the day walked me down the hall to the kitchen, she asked what my I was doing other than temp work. I said I was going to college in the fall. She asked where. I said Princeton. She laughed and laughed and laughed. "Oh, a Princeton man washing dishes! I love it!" I thought it was funny, too.

I like to say that I went to Princeton over other choices because of the radio station, WPRB. I spent hours and hours in high school listening to PRB. I wrote fan letters and called the DJs. I visited the studio a couple of times, en route to the Princeton Record Exchange.

When I got my admission letter, I called "Death Ray" Gonzales and asked him to play "New Face in Hell" by the Fall. He obliged, saying, "And a more appropriate song I couldn't think of." I still have a cassette tape of that.

I spent a lot of time at the station when I was in school there. Suffice it to say, I could've received better grades in physics if I hadn't been going to see the Replacements or the Fall or the Ramones or Sonic Youth or the Minutemen or whomever at King Tut's City Gardens in Trenton or Maxwell's in Hoboken.

One of the benefits of being a Princeton alumnus is that they send me a magazine every couple of weeks whether I want them to or not. And I have never had to pay for it! The Princeton Alumni Weekly, more accurately a biweekly, is actually pretty interesting. Robin says it's better than her alumni magazine.

The latest issue features a book about a famous Quaker, by a contemporary Quaker. I think I'll post about that one separately.

Then online, there's Michelle Robinson Obama '85, but I think you know about her already.

Oh, and my classmate Chris Lu is executive director of President-Elect Obama's transition. "Lu, a Harvard Law classmate of Obama who until recently served as the senator’s legislative director, has worked in law and government for the last two decades."

Clearly, I'm an underachiever. And that's okay. Cf. the dishwashing story above.

Thank you, Sister Bernie Galvin

2008-11-02T21:49:00.000-08:00

I've been carrying around the October issue of Street Sheet, the monthly newspaper of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. There's a lovely tribute to Sister Bernie Galvin, who founded Religious Witness with Homeless People in 1993, and retired earlier this year, after 15 years.

Robin and I moved to San Francisco in January 1995. Religious Witness had just wrapped up a series of sleepouts in city parks to protest then-Mayor Frank Jordan's "Matrix" policy of shuffling the homeless along. An elderly attender at our meeting, Pauline, had joined the sleepouts -- at the age of about 80 or so, as I recall. I was a co-signer of a statement that Religious Witness ran as an advertisement in local newspapers. I went to several vigils by City Hall.

One of her best results came in the Presidio National Park, on the site of the former military post. The Presidio Trust had planned to tear down an entire neighborhood of former military family housing out by the beach, and Bernie organized to prevent it from happening. The housing didn't go to the homeless, but it did prevent much-needed rental housing from simply being torn down. Destruction of the housing is still part of the Presidio's long-term management plan to restore parts of the park to more pristine natural areas, but at least in the meantime the housing is still in use, rather than getting torn down well ahead of restoration. The photo on the Religious Witness home page is from a march they held at that housing tract.

I'm afraid I wasn't as involved after my initial participation. My explanation is that I got a job for a nonprofit housing developer in the Tenderloin neighborhood, which was all about creating homes that marginally housed people could afford. For a while, Robin had her office in the same building Sister Bernie did, so they would see each other from time to time.

I was delighted to find that the Coalition now publishes its stories on a wordpress blog, so I can link to it right here.

I particularly liked the closing quote from Sr. Bernie:

“This I know from my life experience,” she offered: “Hearts that beat strong with genuine compassion for the poor find each other. Hearts that beat with a fierce demand for justice find each other. It is as if the human heart has a magnetic element that pulls us so tightly together around our passion for the poor that our hearts begin to beat as one.”

Blessings to you, Sister Bernie, as you take time for rest, reflection, and discernment of what's next. Thank you for your good work!

Convergent October, kind of: Ryan Bolger links Kos and Jesus

2008-10-30T13:35:00.000-07:00

I haven't been maintaining my blog or reading other Quaker blogs much lately because I've been distracting myself with election news. Particularly by reading DailyKos, which critics have derided as "crack for liberals."

Well, imagine my surprise today during a little lunchtime reading to see a link from Kos himself to Ryan Bolger, Associate Professor of Church in Contemporary Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary—and thesis advisor to C. Wess Daniels, Quaker theologian, blogger, and QuakerQuaker contributor.

Here's what Kos wrote (look for the second bullet point in the "midday open thread"): "Theologian Ryan Bolger is mashing up Taking on the System [Kos's book] with the story of Jesus.... My book is obviously forward-thinking, but it's kind of cool seeing it applied to a completely unforseen field like this."

Here are the links to Bolger's posts:

Part 1: Jesus and Kos — A Mashup of Biblical Proportions

Part 2: Kos and Jesus Mashup #2 — Moving Past the Gatekeepers

Part 3: Jesus and Kos #3 — Mobilization

This is from part 2:

"Jesus-following bloggers must change the conventional wisdom of the church and the media through creating an alternative message to the status quo of church and culture. As they connect online, they facilitate conversations that threaten to bypass the gatekeepers of traditional church structures.... In addition, they push the culture to reconsider the practices that do not mesh with the dreams of God for humanity.... These bloggers do not have the power on their own to be the 'church'.... However, they can push both the church and the culture to listen to what they have to say and move the conversation and practices into more inclusive, just, participatory, and egalitarian directions. In turn, this will transform the conventional wisdom on what it means to follow Jesus."

To me, that could sum up what the "convergent Friends" aspire to be about, at least those who aspire to follow Jesus. How can we better see the conventional wisdom of whichever branch of Friends we're part of, and move the conversation?

Quarterly Meeting Fall Session

2008-10-22T21:06:00.001-07:00

So I totally resonate with Liz Opp's recent post about being distracted from God by the events of this world. I think that's going to continue at least until November 5 or 6 for me. If not January 21~!

It doesn't help my ability to center that the work I do has been generously funded by banks. Until the past ten months, that is... It seems like every day for the past two months, when we get to work, we ask each other, "Did any major banks or small European countries fail last night?" If the answer is yes, we distract ourselves with the news. If the answer is no, we try to get back to work but still distract ourselves with the news from time to time. There's just a lot of uncertainty for lots of people right now. (Of course, I recognize there are billions of people who never stopped living with uncertainty in the first place.)

The M. family recently traveled to College Park Quarterly Meeting's fall session. We left the evening following the annual conference I organize at work. In time to be there for my birthday on Saturday. It was lovely to be there for the weekend.

I wrote the following for our monthly meeting's newsletter and decided to share it here.

Clerk's Corner: College Park Quarterly Meeting

Recently, several of us from San Francisco Meeting attended the fall session of College Park Quarterly Meeting. It was apparently the 200th session of our quarterly meeting. What became our quarterly meeting was founded by Joel and Hannah Bean in the College Park neighborhood of San Jose in 1889. You can read more at collegepark.quaker.org, as well as in A Western Quaker Reader, edited by Anthony Manousos.

(Anthony is the former editor of the monthly magazine for Western Quakers, then called Friends Bulletin. The magazine is now called Western Friend. Our member Stephen Matchett is the clerk of the Western Friend board of directors. Our meeting pays for each member to receive a subscription to the magazine, by the way.)

College Park Quarter extends from Humboldt County in the north to San Luis Obispo County in the mid-Coast, and from San Francisco in the west to Reno in the East. Just under 200 people gathered for the weekend in the crisp air of Sierra Friends Center in Grass Valley/Nevada City. The nighttime sky gave us a stunning view of the skies, including the Milky Way. (Ten Year Old loved it!)

The theme for the weekend was our peace witness. A panel of conscientious objectors gave us views from World War II, Vietnam, and the current war and occupation in Iraq. Pablo Paredes was an Iraq war resister while in the Navy. He is now a counter-recruiter with American Friends Service Committee and Bay Peace (www.baypeace.org). If you know a high school in the Bay Area where he could build relationships, please let me know!

During the final plenary (business) session at the quarterly meeting, I reflected on a lesson I recently led in Firstday School, when we explored where the Quaker peace testimony came from. We read several quotes from early Friends and imagined how being in meeting for worship led them to that place of peace.

What stuck with me from that lesson and rose up for me in the plenary was this story about George Fox. He was approached by Army recruiters from Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. They saw he was a good leader, that he was a charismatic speaker, and they wanted him to help them. He refused, saying he “live(d) in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars.”

May we all find that same virtue, and discover there that same life and power.

Lesson on development of Quaker peace testimony

2008-10-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

Recently I taught a Firstday School lesson that aimed to get the group of older elementary students to think about the origins of the Quaker peace testimony.

We specifically read quotes from George Fox ("I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars"), James Nayler ("There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil"), and the declaration to King Charles II in 1661 ("We utterly deny all outward wars...").

It helped that the week before the lesson had been a timeline from George Fox's first journeys through the north of England in the 1640s, through to Margaret Fell Fox's death in 1702. So they had a bit of the historical context.

I asked them to think about where the early Friends had developed this view, and where could we find it today. (I'm hoping to feed this into some preparation to being in meeting for worship for longer periods.) Then we went to change the window signs at our meetinghouse.

As grace would have it, the sign was the declaration of 1661! The children noticed it and made the connection right away. Through a modified business process, they reached unity on picking the sign for equality. It also gave them a chance to explore the meetinghouse basement, where the signs are stored, so that was a bonus for them. All in all, a pretty good lesson.

Here's my outline for the lesson:

Introductions and Check In:

· Tell us your name and about a time when you felt peaceful inside

Objectives:

· Learn about early Friends, the Inner Light and the testimonies in our window

Strategies

1. Hear three passages from early Friends, including the peace testimony of 1661

2. Talk about where that sense of peace comes from

3. Discuss terms Inner Light, Inward Teacher, Christ Within, Seed, Spark

4. Review window signs from News Committee

5. Choose a new sign for October and replace it in the window

Results:

· Discussion happens

· New sign in window

Activity (this was filler, and we didn't have time for it):

Write what would you like to put on a sign in the window of the meetinghouse, your house, or your school

Affirmation:

Shake hands, like at the end of meeting, and say, “Good morning.”

More Free Lunch

2008-10-13T21:00:00.000-07:00

I posted about David Cay Johnston's book Free Lunch a few weeks ago ("Where It Is Easier to Mine Gold"), and now I've finished it. It's a tremendous expose of the costs and results of the unregulated, trickle-up economics of the last eight, if not twenty-eight, years in the U.S.

I can't resist posting a few pointers to some of the articles about the current crisis that I've found most insightful, including an interview with Johnston himself:

Catherine Austin Fitts, "Ten Reasons not to bail out Wall Street" and "Our Next Brainstorm: Let's Bail OUT OF Wall Street"
Noam Chomsky, Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed, Irish Times via www.commondreams.org
David Cay Johnston discussing the second presidential debate the evening before, interview on "Democracy Now" radio show

The Enduring Strength of Quakerism - Douglas Heath

2008-10-12T20:32:00.000-07:00

I fear that many Friends schools and colleges [and meetings? ed.], not guarded by a strong inner certainty about the real strength of their religious tradition, may be too open to such cultural forces that could undermine the power of their tradition to leaven the insistent individualistic and anarchistic demands of the times. As anarchic as Friends may appear to others, Friends are severely, and sometimes too severely, self-disciplined persons who do not countenance a laissez faire morality. What is the enduring psychological strength of Quakerism? Contrary to what many students in Friends schools would like to believe (a belief some adroitly use by which to rationalize their attacks on any communal responsibilities), the strength of Quakerism does not lie in its emphasis on the right—in fact the duty—of each person to search for truth in his own way, to follow his own inner guidance. Meeting for worship, our institutionalized witness to such an experience, is, despite its anarchistic appearance to others, an effort to experience a divine corporateness. Nor does the strength of the Quaker tradition lie in its emphasis on the binding allocentric ties or social responsibility of one person to another—an emphasis we institutionalize, for example, in the American Friends Service Committee.
The enduring strength of Quakerism lies in the reciprocal and integral combination of both its individualistic and communal traditions. One emphasis without the other produces a caricature of Quakerism.

—Douglas Heath, Why a Friends School? To Educate for Today's Needs, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #164 (1969), page 7. Emphasis added.

Tables, chairs and oaken chests... indeed

2008-09-26T20:42:00.001-07:00

From an email to the San Francisco Monthly Meeting list-serve:

Just a reminder that the Young Adult Friends would like to invite you to our next movie night. On September 27, Saturday at 7:00, we're going to talk with Chris Mohr about about how the musical Jesus Christ Superstar was one of his main connections to spirituality for a period of time. The talk will be followed by a viewing of the film, and there will be dessert/snack potluck. I think it can be family friendly, but let me know if that's a need of yours, so that we can plan accordingly.

I hope you can come, I think it will be a really fun time!

~cubbie

I hope he won't mind me quoting him here. :)

Where It Is Easier to Mine Gold

2008-09-22T11:35:00.000-07:00

Because it is so apropos today, this is from David Cay Johnston’s Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill), published by Penguin in 2007, pp. 6-8:

Among the father of capitalism’s [Adam Smith’s] lesser known but equally significant insights is what he wrote about the eagerness of business owners to make even more profits by thwarting the invisible hand. He warned that unchecked self-interest, especially when aided by the government, will spoil the benefits of capitalism….

Thoughout his writings Smith warned of the damage done when government interferes in the market by guaranteeing profits or handing out gifts. This damage can exceed that caused when government taxes unwisely or imposes rules that needlessly obstruct commerce.

It is a universal truth that it is easier to mine gold from the government treasury than the side of a mountain.…

The harsh reality is that for the past quarter century, policies adopted in the name of Adam Smith, policies that supposedly strengthen the invisible hand guiding the market, have weighed down our economy while simultaneously stuffing the pockets of those among the rich and powerful who solicited them or… were just standing in the right place at a lucrative time. This is our story, not of one free lunch, but of the many banquets at which billions and billions of your dollars are being served to the richest among us.

Of course, with the Wall Street bailout, "billions and billions" is now adding up to a trillion or two. Almost as much as the cost of the Iraq war. Hat tip to big sister Debbie for giving me the book.

Reading roundup

2008-09-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

Some items that have been stuck in the "to-read" email basket until now:

Tyranny on Display at the Republican Convention (truthdig): "St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism."

Co-Producers of Our Own Economies "An independent regional economy calls for new regional economic institutions for land, labor, and capital to embody the scale, purpose, and structure of our endeavors. These new institutions cannot be government-driven, and rightly so. They will be shaped by free associations of consumers and producers, working cooperatively, sharing the risk." (From the e-newsletter and blog of the E.F. Schumacher Society, www.smallisbeautiful.org.)

Tolstoy's anarchistic Christian views: Against the Grain radio show

Bay Area Cities Issuing Fewer Building Permits: "Amid the worst housing downturn since the Depression, fewer units are being built, exacerbating the Bay Area's critical need for places to live, a government group said... Cities in the nine Bay Area counties issued 22,843 permits in 2007, down 24%... Particularly striking was that most of the permits were for housing designed for affluent populations."

And in the Piling-On Department, Frank Rich of the NY Times has this to say about "Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage," via this link at commondreams.org: "His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless."

The Grace of a Ten Year Old

2008-09-12T20:29:00.001-07:00

Our family usually has mealtime grace at dinner. Each member of the family gets a turn to choose how to pray: silence, sing a song from a prescribed list, or speak a prayer. (Six Year Old sometimes chooses laughter, but that's another story.)

Tonight, we didn't observe grace. Robin left before dinner to go to a committee meeting at Ben Lomond Quaker Center. She is serving her last meeting as clerk of the board of directors tomorrow.

So tonight at bedtime, Ten Year Old said, "Daddy, if we had had grace tonight, it would have been my turn. I would have spoken a prayer. I would have said how lucky I am. I said that another time on my birthday. Another time, I said silence, but then I thought of a prayer, so I just said it in my mind."

There was another time recently -- not his birthday -- when Ten Year Old shared a vocal prayer at dinner. He gave thanks for the food and our family, and for how blessed we are, and he asked for help for those who need it. He went on to say something like, "Take care of Yourself, so you can be okay and help people."

I wish I had written it down at the time! It was really touching for him to be concerned with God's own Well-Being. Beautiful.

God, how blessed I am. Help me remember that in every moment, and to give thanks to You continually!

Does the military hold the dollar up?

2008-08-31T16:01:00.000-07:00

So claims Catherine Austin Fitts:

The Military Holds the Dollar Up
July 30, 2008 at 12:07 pm

My assessment is that 90% of the value of the U.S. dollar comes from the U.S. military. After we had our satellite systems in place, Cheney said “deficits don’t matter.” The US debt and deficit financing is no longer a debt system. It is a global taxation system....

Global treasuries and sovereign wealth funds, central banks and a variety of large institutions buy Treasury securities or hold dollars not because there is economic value behind them or because these financial assets are sound fiscally or in terms of credit.... If they don’t buy, they and their population will be subject to a wide variety of demonstrations of physical and financial force that will result in loss of life.

Could it be?

Signs of a Healthy Quaker Meeting

2008-08-30T15:23:00.000-07:00

Meetings/congregations are healthy when…

They resolve conflict and tension with attempts at healing and reconciliation.

They have vision, direction, goals, follow-through and implementation.

They have a missions mindset rather than an institutional or maintenance mindset.

They welcome new ideas, creativity, and new leadership.

They tend to elevate “Quaker faith” over “Quaker culture.”

They provide adequate opportunities for people to grow spiritually and they provide a safe place for people to seek and ask questions.

They foster healthy emotional systems and people, creating space for emotionally unhealthy people.

They are solution-focused rather than problem-focused.

They focus on the essentials and forsake the non-essentials.

They have an ability to deal directly with one another in times of disagreement, change, and conflict.

Adapted directly from a post by Paul L. on Showers of Blessings, “Symptoms of a Crippled Meeting” that was inspired by, or perhaps reprinted from, a post on Quaker Renewal Forum. (The QRF post is no longer available.)