Get Thee to the (Meetinghouse) Library!

[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.

It is from self-absorption we must be saved

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. :)

Spring and summer reading

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!

Unexpected delight - Interview with Ben Pink Dandelion

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.

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

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

1. A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren


2. If the Church Were Christian, Phillip Gulley


3. 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.)

Fingerprints of spiritual experience

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.

Vanessa Julye to speak at SF Friends Meeting

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.

Bill McKibben's Deep Economy

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:

1. Politically, growth is distributed unequally.
2. We don't have the energy needed to keep growth going as it has done.
3. 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.

Eileen Flanagan's God Raising Us pamphlet

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.

Compulsive Ministers, Tend Ye the Inward Fire!

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.

Terry Pratchett Overdose

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.

Rebecca Solnit on the current opportunity

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!

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

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.

Geez Magazine cover story

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.

Albert Nolan's Jesus Today

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.

The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition

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.

Thank you, Sister Bernie Galvin

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!

More Free Lunch

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

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.