Quakers and the RNC in St. Paul: God is in the midst of the city

It's been a sleepy August, but the arrival of the Republican National Convention here next week has gotten things jumping.

Beginning on Friday, word was spreading about several police preemptive raids and arrests of protesters intending to demonstrate at the RNC. That night, a "convergence center" that was to serve as a rallying and welcoming spot for out-of-town protesters was raided pursuant to a search warrant and certain materials allegedly intended for use in disrupting the convention were seized. About 50-60 people were cuffed and detained at gunpoint while the search was being conducted.

Saturday morning, several homes in Minneapolis and St. Paul were raided. Again, allegedly dangerous materials (warrant here) were seized, but this time at least five people were arrested on conspiracy to riot warrants. (Story here.) There were also reports of police harassment of alternative media organizations over the past few days -- equipment confiscated, reporters detained briefly but not arrested or charged. (Story here.)

Then last evening (Saturday), I got a call informing me that a well-respected member of our meeting feared that she might be liable to be arrested for her work with the RNC Welcoming Committee, a self-described anarchists /anti-authoritarians organizing committee. She wanted to take sanctuary in our meetinghouse in St. Paul in order to be free to carry out her logistical work in arranging housing, medical care, and legal assistance to visiting demonstrators. But given our lack of strong central executive decision-making capacity it was difficult even for a long-time member like her to know how to ask. So she started calling Friends who she thought were most likely to object, no one said "no" outright, one thing led to another and I got a call too.

I spoke with the clerk of the meeting, and we agreed that when in doubt, we should worship, so at about 6:30 we started getting the word out via telephone and e-mail, and by the time the meeting started about 8 pm we had more than thirty people, and more came in as they got the word. We had a very deep worship, very centered, very present. At 9 or so, our Friend spoke, described her situation, and answered many questions.

We were, of course, a body of uncertain status -- it was (just) a large group of Friends who had gotten together ad hoc on a moment's notice, looking to what God was calling for us to do here and now. By the end of the meeting, we were clear that our Friend (and two colleagues) could spend the night in our meetinghouse and that a few of us would also stay over to provide support and to witness anything that might occur. One family said they'd come back to make breakfast the next morning.

I was one who slept over. After going home to get my stuff, I slept in a First Day School room on the busy Grand Ave. side of the building. While I went to bed believing that it was extremely unlikely that the police would show up and expecting an easy sleep, I found that I was startled by every slamming car door, firecracker, helicopter fly-over, group of male voices (who all turned out to be college students walking home from parties), and other noises that might have signaled a raid; the last time I ran to the window was 3:30 am.

At about 7:30, I was startled with a rap on the door and a voice that I thought said, "Arrest is imminent." So I pulled on my clothes and ran out, only to find that it was breakfast that was imminent. I was relieved, and happy for the good food.

Worship continued at the regular 8:30 time, followed by another discussion that ran right up until the 11 o'clock worship meeting. This discussion was very interesting; a lot of support for our Friend was expressed, as well as concern that that support not be misinterpreted as agreement with or complicity with some of the more forceful tactics the RNC Welcoming Committee had in mind. But there was a pretty clear sense that we needed to support our sister, and we set up a small committee to coordinate and oversee that. She has since left the meetinghouse and may or may not return tonight. If she does, we will be there with her.

Tomorrow, there is a protest march "planned" (the quotes are to indicate that there seems to be a lot of loose ends involved with it), and we Quakers will meet at the Floyd B. Olson statute on the Capitol grounds and are planning to march together. If the 50,000 announced number of people show up, it will be a logistical nightmare to move them through the approved parade route during the three hours that has been allocated -- the route has to double back on itself when it reaches the convention hall to return to the state capitol starting point. No one knows what will happen, but I and many others will be there to witness to it and to help as we can.

I don't mean for this to be a news report so much as a comment on how well our meeting has responded to this crisis (if that's the word). It feels that we have kept our focus on responding to our Friend in need and have mostly resisted using this episode to make larger ideological statements. Even those who have had serious political and moral reservations about the Welcoming Committee's strategy and (more importantly) its tactics were able to differentiate between that opinion and the need to support our Friend. There is a lot of uncertainty remaining, of course, but I am confident that we will take each step as it is shown us.

For my part, I was led to offer two pieces of vocal ministry. This morning, I mediated on the two times (that I remember) Jesus rebuked his disciples during his passion. First was when Peter, James and John could not keep awake with him for an hour while he went off to pray in Gethsemane -- here he was about to die and they couldn't even be with him for an hour? Second was when Jesus told Peter to put his sword away after Peter cut off the ear of the high priest's servant and Jesus says, in effect, "Put away your sword. Do you think I need your help? Or your puny sword's? You're more likely to end up cutting yourself." This tells us something about how Jesus wants us to respond in times of crisis.

I then noted the parallel with our own history in 1661 when the historic declaration from "the harmless and innocent people of God called Quakers" was presented to Charles Stuart, king of England. That document was mainly intended to disassociate Quakers from the revolutionary Fifth Monarchy Men and other secret conspiracies that were (in fact) threatening the King's government. But far from being a call to complicity with the Powers that Were, it stated a revolutionary purpose as well that was far more threatening than a small group of armed men:

We earnestly desire and wait that by the Word of God's power and its effectual operation in the hearts of men, the kingdoms of this world may become the kingdoms of the Lord, and of his Christ, that he may rule and reign in men by his spirit and truth, that thereby all people . . . . And our weapons are spiritual and not carnal, yet mighty through God to the plucking down of the strongholds of Satan, who is author of wars, fighting, murder, and plots.

Thus, they declared, they were neither collaborators with the king, nor his enemy, but were beholden to a more sovereign authority who would in his own time and his own way put the government in its place. This was what made them dangerous, and what should make us no less so.

Last night, because there was a veil of fear and apprehension over our city and our meeting, I was moved to read Psalm 46 (NRSV):

1 God is our refuge and strength,
an very present help in trouble.

2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea,

3 though its waters roar and foam
though the mountains tremble with their tumult.

4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.

5 God is in the midst of the city, it shall not be moved;
God will help when the morning dawns.

6 Nations are in uproar, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.

7 The LORD of Hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge.

8 Come behold the works of the LORD,
the what desolation he has brought on the earth.

9 He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear,
he burns the shields with fire.

10 "Be still, and know that I am God;
I am exalted among the nations,
I am exalted in the earth."

11 The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge.

I was also reminded of a verse from Pete Seeger's song, Old Devil Time:

Old devil fear, you with your icy hands
Old devil fear, you'd like to freeze me cold
When I'm afraid, my lovers gather round
And help me rise to fight you one more time.

More later as it develops.

In the beginning: Genesis on my mind

Genesis has been on my mind a lot recently.

First, there are at least two excellent discussions of Genesis going on on right now in Quaker-related blogs.

Peter Bishop at Quaker Pagan Reflections has just concluded a 5-part (pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5) series of very thoughtful posts (plus one post-script) on his recent reading of Genesis and has generated many equally thoughtful (and provocative) responses. I especially appreciated Peter's approach, which is, in his words:

I’m not reading the Bible for poetry. I want to know what it says. I think I’m a pretty unusual reader of the Bible in that I find myself reading it as a writer, and what I want most to understand in the Bible is the mindset and the experiences of its writers. I’m not reading it to understand G*d, I’m reading it to understand the writers’ experiences of G*d. That distinction is important, because so many readers of the Bible bring to it a crushing burden of pious preconceptions. Modern Christian (and Jewish) understandings of G*d grew out of traditions that changed and developed over time, and these traditions left Biblical texts like breadcrumbs along the path. But those texts have been interpreted and reinterpreted since, so thoroughly and so often, that it’s very hard for a modern reader even to hear the writers’ original words over the heckling of later critics from St. Paul through Thomas Aquinas and right on up through Jerry Falwell and his ilk.

As a writer, my prejudice is: Let the writers say what they meant to say. Agree with it or disagree, but don’t try to warp it or twist it or rewrite it to your own liking, because that, let me tell you, is the most violent, the most discouraging thing you can do to a writer.

And I’ve got to say, reading Genesis on its own terms, it’s a freaky little book.

Yes it is. (This isn't the only approach, of course. I read Genesis and the rest of the Bible precisely for the purpose of understanding God, or more precisely to understand what God wants to understand about Himself. But Peter's approach is also an honest and productive one, as long as one is willing to be open to the possibility that the Living God does, in fact, speak through the Scriptures, as well as in other ways, and you don't cheat the game by refusing to accept the possibility that you will be changed.)

A less active, but equally interesting, discussion of Genesis is happening over at Kwaker Skripture Study, a group blog with, alas, only two active participants at the moment. (Actually, the Genesis discussion has only begun; I base my evaluation of the quality of the discussion on their previous trips through other books, most recently Revelation.) They've been looking for more Friends to participate more actively on the blog, and I encourage you to do so. I've been impressed with their past discussions in how well they reflect the Quaker way of approaching Scripture.

Though not a Quaker, David Plotz's series Blogging the Bible at Slate.com should be of interest to anyone interested in a fresh and positive look at the Good Book. He blogged the entire Old Testament over the course of a year or so, but his initial eight posts on Genesis can be found here. Among his many virtues, Plotz's posts are as funny as they are informative. (Plotz is also the new editor of Slate.com.)

Then, by serendipity, I read Madeline l'Engle's Genesis Trilogy a few months ago. It is an anthology of her three shorter works: And it was good, A stone for a pillow, and Sold into Egypt. Her work is notable in how she relates her meditations on the texts to her own personal life. Her husband, Hugh, died during the writing of the latter book, and the way in which she works out her grief and finds sympathy in some of the characters in Genesis is beautifully done. I also enjoyed her ability to consider the various fascinating characters in Genesis, especially the women, as full-bodied human beings, imagining their feelings, motives, and conversations as if they were characters in a novel. (I also was surprised [but shouldn't have been] to find the Walter Wink acknowledged Madeline as an inspiration for his book, The Powers that Be.)

And then I myself read Genesis again after my workshop at FGC Gathering ("User's Guide to the Bible"). That re-reading has in turn led me to buy a used copy of the Anchor Bible translation and commentary on e-bay.

I have no idea whether this means anything, but I am aware of the convergence of Genesis in my life recently. I think it's part of a renewed determination to more systematically study the Bible that I've wanted and intended to do for years but never felt I had the proper framework within which to carry it out. I think I now have enough from my workshop, Michael Birkel's Engaging Scripture, Paul Buckley & Stephen Angell's (ed.) The Quaker Bible Reader, and Walter Wink's Transforming Bible Study to get me started more productively.

I'm reminded of an image from Nikos Kazantzakis's masterpiece, The Last Temptation of Christ. In it, he has Jesus at one point express exasperation while reading the Scripture as if the letters on the page were bars on a window keeping the Truth from shining through. That's a power image and one that I know well.

But I also have often felt as if the words on the page of the Bible were the windows through which I could see into another world, windows through which I could slip through if only I kept at it diligently and with the right attitude.

Joy in the morning

If there's any better way to start a Saturday morning then to hear that you're going to be the grandfather to twins come January, I don't know what it would be.

My face is frozen in a semi-permanent grin, and my brain is famished for words at the moment.

A radiant indifference to words

From "Personal History: Altered State -- Pennsylvania, blackness, and the art of being foreign" by Andrea Lee in the June 30, 2008 issue of The New Yorker. The author is describing her experience as a fifth-grade student at Lansdowne Friends School when she and her classmates were called on to recite Psalm 19 at Thursday morning meeting for worship to the elders of the meeting and the rest of the school:

For a long time, things go without a hitch, but on the morning of Psalm 19 our class fails. First, the short, deep-voiced boy who is our bellwether stumbles over his verse and, purple-faced, shudders to a halt. And I, with gold ready to pour from my lips*, simply freeze. At Teacher's frenzied prompting, we burst into the chorus, about errors and secret faults.** But the words are a tripwire: somebody's helpless giggle becomes a rout. We double over, choking with uncontrollable laughter.

The beams of the meetinghouse ring with the echo of our debacle, and we wither under the sidelong smirks of the sixth grade. Still, after a minute, a curious transformation occurs. One by one, we are able to look up at the faces of the elders, which are not severe and condemning, nor yet smiling with the kind of amused indulgence with which grownups greet endearing childish mishaps. Nor do they display any desire to make this a character-building experience. Those old faces are simply present: alert; regarding us and the rest of the hall with a boundless, patient comprehension that raises us to their own dignified level. We let the silence flow back. And, gradually, something becomes clear: a kind of radiant indifference to words, mistaken or correct. What the elders, the Friends, pass on to us this morning is an inkling of how strong silence is. Essential; eternal. But common, in the best sense. Always there, if we can only listen for it. Inside or outside meeting.

* v 9-10: The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

** v 12Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.

The Joy of Living

Immediately after the Gathering, our family of four drove to Colorado to join the rest of Lovely Wife's family -- two brothers, sister, spouses, nieces & nephews [except one] and partners: a total of 18 people. This reunion was planned last fall when we all gathered in Minneapolis for Lovely Wife's mother Barbara's memorial meeting at Twin Cities Friends Meeting. We so enjoyed being together that we planned to meet again in the summer, at which time we would attend to distributing Barbara's ashes in the mountains.

Both Barbara and her husband, Bruce, were born in Iowa but fell in love with Colorado and the Rocky Mountains when Bruce performed civilian public service in Denver during the Second World War. Later, after retirement, they bought a house next door to their eldest daughter and her husband, the Inventor, in Gold Hill, Colorado, a little mountain town about 3000 feet and 30 minutes above Boulder. The house was spacious and beautiful, facing east and south overlooking the cities of Boulder and Denver and the plains beyond. There they helped raise Sister Holly's three sons and hosted many family get-togethers.

When Bruce died in 1995, we all met in Gold Hill and buried most of his ashes in the town cemetery where we had a sweet and spontaneous family ceremony at the graveside. It was a beautiful, sunny April morning and we stood in a circle as we said a few words and sang a few songs after which Lovely Wife played her fiddle and led us in a procession down the hill and to the road. We then went to the Boulder Meeting's memorial meeting later that afternoon.

Later that summer, five of us (one son, Sister Holly's husband and two of their teenage sons, and me) took most of the rest of Bruce's ashes to the top of Gannett Peak, the tallest mountain in Wyoming, in the Wind River Range, which Bruce had never made it to the top of despite several attempts.

For Barbara, we originally intended to take her ashes to Mount Audubon, a 13,233 foot mountain that can be walked up in 3-4 hours without technical assistance (ropes, ice axes, etc.). But on Wednesday, the entire group walked up two other nearby 14,000 foot peaks -- Gray's and Torrey's -- and we realized that a 13,000 peak is a challenge to climb, even as a walk-up, especially for us flatlanders who hadn't gotten used to the altitude yet. All but two of the 18 made it to the top of one of either Gray's or Torrey's (one climbed both), but afterwards none of us were sure that we had it in us to climb Audubon just a few days later. (Photo on left is from the top of Gray's.)

So we changed our plans and decided to release some of Barbara's and some of Bruce's remaining ashes at Loveland Pass, on the Continental Divide that we would pass on our drive to Gold Hill. We arrived at Loveland Pass at about 11 o'clock and walked from the road up about 100 feet to the top of a nearby ridge.

As we had done before, we set the two boxes with ashes on a rock and stood in a circle around them and held what amounted to a brief meeting for worship. Everyone had the opportunity to say some words, and when that was done we each took a handful of the ashes of each and released them to the wind, which was very strong and immediately scattered them in the air along both sides of the Divide. (The family at Loveland Pass is on the right.)

Lovely Wife then led the procession down from the ridge playing "She'll be Coming 'Round the Mountain" on her fiddle. I brought up the rear of the line. As I got to the parking lot, there was a family there sitting on some rocks, and one of the little girls was singing "She'll be coming 'round the mountain" to herself as I walked by.

On Friday, after arriving in Gold Hill, we planned another ceremony in the cemetery. Lovely Wife wanted there to be a bench at the gravesite, which is at the upper end of the hillside cemetery, so that visitors can rest and contemplate after making the climb.

The plan was then made to go out and find a large flat rock plus two smaller ones to make a simple, rustic bench. The Inventor and I scouted for the rocks about 10 miles from town at a place where he had scavenged some flat rocks years ago, and he identified the right one for the seat -- but it weighed upwards of 300 pounds and the two of us couldn't carry it the 200 yards to the road. So we went home and brought back a crew of six or seven men and a wheelbarrow, and together we carried it (and two smaller but heavy granite stones for the upright supports) to the car and brought them to the graveyard.

While we got the stones up the steep hill, we dug and found the box that contained the urn that held Bruce's ashes and pulled it out of the ground. The rest of the family joined us and once again we had a spontaneous ceremony. We poured most of Barbara's remaining ashes into the urn to be mixed with her husband's, and then we poured out tears and words of remembrance, gratitude, and love. After a while, we closed the urn, put it back into the ground, closed the box, and filled in the hole. One again, Lovely Wife played her fiddle as she led everyone down the hill back to the road.

Some of us men then re-climbed the hill and dug the holes and assembled the stone bench. As it happened, one end of the stone has two small, natural depressions exactly the size of the average human buttocks making it amazingly comfortable to sit on. By the end of the day, it was done and was deemed satisfactory by all.

Here's the view from the bench:

There was something very blessed and sweet about these two ceremonies. The pattern was set spontaneously thirteen years ago after Bruce's death, which Lovely Wife found surprising at the time because neither parent talked much about death (each had lost their same-sex parent while teenagers) and they were never "taught" what to do when a loved one dies. But somehow -- mainly through deep and abiding love -- they taught their children just what to do, and how to do it themselves without professional assistance. It was a blessing to be part of it.

Thirteen years ago, I sang a favorite song by Ewan McColl, "The Joy of Living", at Bruce's graveside and at the memorial meeting. Bruce, like Ewan, was a large, hearty man, and the song perfectly matched his spirit. This year, I just sang the fourth and final verse for Barbara on Loveland Pass:

Take me to some high place of heather, rock, and ling,
Scatter my dust and ashes, feed me to the wind.
There where I will be part of all you see,
The air you are breathing.
I'll be part of the curlew's cry and the soaring hawk,
The blue milk-wort and the sundew hung with diamonds.
I'll be riding the gentle breeze as it blows through your hair,
Reminding you how we shared,
In the joy of living.

(Listen to Ewan and Peggy Seeger sing the whole song here. Better get a hanky first.)