Last night I co-led a workshop on the Quaker value of equality at San Francisco Friends School. This is part of a series of workshops using the SPICES acronym: the Quaker testimonies or values of Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. (See posts by Liz Opp and me for past blogger thoughts on the SPICE(S) framework.)
This is the third year that John, Patty & I have done the workshops for the parents. In the first two years we did just SPICE. We're adding the second-S of SPICES with a Stewardship workshop this year for the first time, in May. It's generating a lot of interest among other parents who are helping us organize it, which is great.
We were going to call it Sustainability. But then in a committee meeting, a teacher said, "In Faith and Practice it talks about stewardship, not sustainability." Keep in mind that most (all?) of the teachers there are not members of the Society of Friends. However, this teacher has begun attending meeting for worship at San Francisco Meeting frequently in the past year or so. In addition he has meeting for worship in the classroom once a week and with the whole school community once a month. He also did a wonderful job in our Peace workshop as the teacher presenter.
And here he is quoting Faith and Practice to the rest of the folks on the committee!
"Yes, he's on fire!" Patty said.
- - -
Thinking about that teacher, I wanted to lift up just one sentence that spoke to my condition in Doug Gwyn's Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience. This is from page 290 in a section about Isaac Penington:
The Quaker movement was about power -- not human power, but divine power coursing through surrendered human minds and bodies.
- - -
How about you? Have you experienced surrender like that? How did it feel? Was it like fire? Was it like a hot chili, stinging and hot followed by sweat and bliss? Was it like rushing water? Was it a small voice whispering, or the sound of silence after a storm? Was it a still, deep pond? Was it like being fully present at the feet of the Teacher?
4/25/2006
4/11/2006
The Berlin Wall and the Shame of Self Promotion
I've been blessed in my work life with some decent media coverage recently. I gave a television reporter from a station called KRON a tour of several new transit-oriented developments (TODs) in San Mateo County, in preparation for a TOD tour we're giving in May as part of Affordable Housing Week. The piece even featured an image of my hands on the steering wheel of my car as I drove us around.
Anyway, that's the shameful self-promotion.
Appearing on television was a little strange for me, because I don't own a TV. It is a little weird to access images of oneself on TV through the web. (Unfortunately for my self-promotion purposes, the clip on KRON is no longer on their website.)
So, being on TV reminded me of a thought experiment I came up with a while back: First, consider the state of our nation today. In the United States, many people and entire systems of production and consumption are enthralled by a Domination System, as Walter Wink calls it, that values immediate self-interested gain over the well-being of our fellow humans, creatures, and creation.
What would it take to turn the Domination System back to Gospel Order? To the inbreaking Kingdom or Kindom of God?
These are very big questions, and involve a lifetime's work, not something I can blithely prescribe in the course of a blog post.
Consider instead, the state of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. What was the symbol of the old system that was crumbling as people stopped believing in and cooperating with it? The Berlin Wall, of course. Nothing symbolized the shattering of the old totalitarian regimes more than the destruction of the wall by the people of Berlin.
Here's the crux of the thought experiment: What is the Berlin Wall of OUR society?
What is the symbol that helps hold us back -- collectively as a society -- from seeing the truth about ourselves as a society? To me, the answer is television. Of course, it's more than a symbol, it's a way of transmitting messages straight into our brains. But there's something about the very TV-ness of American culture that seems important to me.
I could go on, but would be interested in others' thoughts before I say more.
Anyway, that's the shameful self-promotion.
Appearing on television was a little strange for me, because I don't own a TV. It is a little weird to access images of oneself on TV through the web. (Unfortunately for my self-promotion purposes, the clip on KRON is no longer on their website.)
So, being on TV reminded me of a thought experiment I came up with a while back: First, consider the state of our nation today. In the United States, many people and entire systems of production and consumption are enthralled by a Domination System, as Walter Wink calls it, that values immediate self-interested gain over the well-being of our fellow humans, creatures, and creation.
What would it take to turn the Domination System back to Gospel Order? To the inbreaking Kingdom or Kindom of God?
These are very big questions, and involve a lifetime's work, not something I can blithely prescribe in the course of a blog post.
Consider instead, the state of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. What was the symbol of the old system that was crumbling as people stopped believing in and cooperating with it? The Berlin Wall, of course. Nothing symbolized the shattering of the old totalitarian regimes more than the destruction of the wall by the people of Berlin.
Here's the crux of the thought experiment: What is the Berlin Wall of OUR society?
What is the symbol that helps hold us back -- collectively as a society -- from seeing the truth about ourselves as a society? To me, the answer is television. Of course, it's more than a symbol, it's a way of transmitting messages straight into our brains. But there's something about the very TV-ness of American culture that seems important to me.
I could go on, but would be interested in others' thoughts before I say more.
Recent readings
Some of what I've read so far in 2006:
> The Powers That Be, by Walter Wink: The booklength summary version of his groundbreaking trilogy on the Domination System, known as "The Powers." I hope to blog about this.
> Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience, by Douglas Gwyn. Excellent survey of the Seeker milieu out of which Quakers arose. I typed up a bunch of passages and hope to post them.
> Amazing Grace: A Lexicon of Faith, by Kathleen Norris: I've been listening to this in the car; it's wonderful. It's just soooo inspiring.
> The Jesus Mysteries: Was the original Jesus a pagan god? by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
> A Bible atlas, probably by Reader's Digest (from the library)
> The Trial of Socrates by I. F. Stone
> Race Manners: Navigating the Minefield between Black and White Americas, by Bruce Jacobs
> Robert Griswold, Creeds and Quakers: What's Belief Got to Do with It? (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 377)
> Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild: Highly recommended book about the British abolitionist movement. Many Friends were involved.
Borrowed from library, didn't read:
> The Myth of Jesus, Andrew Greeley
> Christian Yoga by a French Benedictine
> The Powers That Be, by Walter Wink: The booklength summary version of his groundbreaking trilogy on the Domination System, known as "The Powers." I hope to blog about this.
> Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience, by Douglas Gwyn. Excellent survey of the Seeker milieu out of which Quakers arose. I typed up a bunch of passages and hope to post them.
> Amazing Grace: A Lexicon of Faith, by Kathleen Norris: I've been listening to this in the car; it's wonderful. It's just soooo inspiring.
> The Jesus Mysteries: Was the original Jesus a pagan god? by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
> A Bible atlas, probably by Reader's Digest (from the library)
> The Trial of Socrates by I. F. Stone
> Race Manners: Navigating the Minefield between Black and White Americas, by Bruce Jacobs
> Robert Griswold, Creeds and Quakers: What's Belief Got to Do with It? (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 377)
> Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild: Highly recommended book about the British abolitionist movement. Many Friends were involved.
Borrowed from library, didn't read:
> The Myth of Jesus, Andrew Greeley
> Christian Yoga by a French Benedictine
4/03/2006
Interview with a Mennonite Entrepreneur
The San Francisco Chronicle's website, www.sfgate.com, today in the "Finding My Religion" column has a fascinating interview with Shawn Riegsecker, a tech company CEO who was raised as a Mennonite: "In the high-flying world of Internet entrepreneurs, Shawn Riegsecker is an unlikely success story. Born into a strict Mennonite family in a small Ohio farming town, Riegsecker was taught to view technology cautiously."
One highlight:
Q: You've incorporated those same values into your company manifesto, which you give to all new employees and business partners. What was the idea behind that?
A: I think one of the biggest mistakes we ever made as a country was that we took religion out of the schools and didn't replace it with any values and principles. I think the same thing has happened in corporate America. You can't bring up religion inside of a corporate setting, and in staying so far away from it we fail to inject any sense of principle -- right types of living -- into our work.
I've taken the principles that my upbringing and religion taught me and put them into a structured document.
Full post here.
One highlight:
Q: You've incorporated those same values into your company manifesto, which you give to all new employees and business partners. What was the idea behind that?
A: I think one of the biggest mistakes we ever made as a country was that we took religion out of the schools and didn't replace it with any values and principles. I think the same thing has happened in corporate America. You can't bring up religion inside of a corporate setting, and in staying so far away from it we fail to inject any sense of principle -- right types of living -- into our work.
I've taken the principles that my upbringing and religion taught me and put them into a structured document.
Full post here.
3/26/2006
Shining Tree of Life
Adam Gopnik has a nice essay in the 2/13-20/2006 issue of The New Yorker about "what the Shakers did." He writes, "Everything that they touched is breathtaking in its beauty and simplicity.... Their objects show a knowing, creative, shaping simplicity... Shaker objects don't look simple; they look specifically Shaker."
So, while I liked the essay, the point of blogging it here is this quote about Quakers:
"Yet the Shakers made specifically stylish things, where others didn't. ...[T]he Friends, apart from a general tendency toward the plain and suspicion of the fancy, had no real style separate from that of their fellow-Americans. They wore more or less the same clothes and used the same furniture as everyone else. (They just disapproved of their own use of them more than other people did.)"
So, while I liked the essay, the point of blogging it here is this quote about Quakers:
"Yet the Shakers made specifically stylish things, where others didn't. ...[T]he Friends, apart from a general tendency toward the plain and suspicion of the fancy, had no real style separate from that of their fellow-Americans. They wore more or less the same clothes and used the same furniture as everyone else. (They just disapproved of their own use of them more than other people did.)"
Bringing in the Harvest
I had a rewarding experience Saturday: Attending the first official board of directors meeting of the reorganized Quaker lobbying group in California, Friends Committee on Legislation, or FCL. It took several years of laboring in the vineyards to get there.
I first got involved in 1999 or so. Peter Crysdale was then the development coordinator; a student at the General Theological Union in Berkeley; and a fiery vocal minister and sometime attender at SF Meeting. (Today he is the pastor at Allen's Neck Friends Meeting in Dartmouth, Mass. Oh, my goodness, I've just been reading his messages in the meeting newsletter, and they are worth checking out.)
Peter was an experienced fundraiser with AFSC, but he had a really hard time at FCL. He had the nerve to ask for an updated computer database to track donors' giving history. He had a hard time even getting the information he needed from the desktop computer of someone else, which worked on DOS, not Windows. While successful in the individual donor work he did, he was frustrated at each step. On leaving for Allen's Neck, he called for FCL to invest more in the work of raising the resources needed.
I heard the call, and clerked the first development and outreach committee. We developed a mission statement: Guided by Quaker values, FCL advocates for California state laws that are just, compassionate, and respectful of the inherent worth of every person.
We set fundraising goals, and got the coordinator after Peter out in the field. A Friend produced a video for FCL's 50th anniversary, which she took on the road to numerous meetings.
Sidebar My favorite part of the video was an interview with State Sen. John Burton, a legendary and curmudgeonly politician from San Francisco, who praised FCL between licks of his ice cream cone! Forced out by term limits in 2004, Burton in his final term introduced the resolution creating the California Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice, to study the extent to which "wrongful executions or the wrongful conviction of innocent persons" has happened. Go, John!! endSidebar
The fundraising plans never quite jelled, though. The number of meetings at which slightly different constellations of pretty much the same people said the same old things was inordinate.
The big problem was simply an unwieldy structure that was not serving the organization given the current, lower number of people now active. I drifted away from the endless meetings, but continued to have conversations with Friends about how we might improve things. The result was an outstanding session at the annual statewide meeting in 12/2004 at which we agreed things weren't working well, we resolved to try to change them, and we scheduled a called meeting for 3/2005.
In 3/2005, we further agreed to restructure the committees, to emulate pretty closely the model of FCNL: keep the statewide meeting, now renamed the General Committee, but create a new board of directors tasked with administrative oversight and power to make decisions on an interim basis between annual meetings. Several working committees would work statewide, rather than split into northern and southern groups. In addition, Friends in Northern and Southern California were encouraged to continue to organize in regional groups to spur grassroots advocacy, raise awareness, and raise funds.
In 12/2005, the General Committee united to approve the changes, and adopted bylaws. It took hours to go over it all, but the result was satisfying.
So on Saturday, when we gathered as the new Board of Directors, it felt like harvesting the fruit of long labor. Blessed be!
I first got involved in 1999 or so. Peter Crysdale was then the development coordinator; a student at the General Theological Union in Berkeley; and a fiery vocal minister and sometime attender at SF Meeting. (Today he is the pastor at Allen's Neck Friends Meeting in Dartmouth, Mass. Oh, my goodness, I've just been reading his messages in the meeting newsletter, and they are worth checking out.)
Peter was an experienced fundraiser with AFSC, but he had a really hard time at FCL. He had the nerve to ask for an updated computer database to track donors' giving history. He had a hard time even getting the information he needed from the desktop computer of someone else, which worked on DOS, not Windows. While successful in the individual donor work he did, he was frustrated at each step. On leaving for Allen's Neck, he called for FCL to invest more in the work of raising the resources needed.
I heard the call, and clerked the first development and outreach committee. We developed a mission statement: Guided by Quaker values, FCL advocates for California state laws that are just, compassionate, and respectful of the inherent worth of every person.
We set fundraising goals, and got the coordinator after Peter out in the field. A Friend produced a video for FCL's 50th anniversary, which she took on the road to numerous meetings.
Sidebar My favorite part of the video was an interview with State Sen. John Burton, a legendary and curmudgeonly politician from San Francisco, who praised FCL between licks of his ice cream cone! Forced out by term limits in 2004, Burton in his final term introduced the resolution creating the California Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice, to study the extent to which "wrongful executions or the wrongful conviction of innocent persons" has happened. Go, John!! endSidebar
The fundraising plans never quite jelled, though. The number of meetings at which slightly different constellations of pretty much the same people said the same old things was inordinate.
The big problem was simply an unwieldy structure that was not serving the organization given the current, lower number of people now active. I drifted away from the endless meetings, but continued to have conversations with Friends about how we might improve things. The result was an outstanding session at the annual statewide meeting in 12/2004 at which we agreed things weren't working well, we resolved to try to change them, and we scheduled a called meeting for 3/2005.
In 3/2005, we further agreed to restructure the committees, to emulate pretty closely the model of FCNL: keep the statewide meeting, now renamed the General Committee, but create a new board of directors tasked with administrative oversight and power to make decisions on an interim basis between annual meetings. Several working committees would work statewide, rather than split into northern and southern groups. In addition, Friends in Northern and Southern California were encouraged to continue to organize in regional groups to spur grassroots advocacy, raise awareness, and raise funds.
In 12/2005, the General Committee united to approve the changes, and adopted bylaws. It took hours to go over it all, but the result was satisfying.
So on Saturday, when we gathered as the new Board of Directors, it felt like harvesting the fruit of long labor. Blessed be!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
