What do you do in Quaker meeting for worship?

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

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

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!")
4. 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.

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

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.

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


2. 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.