On vacation

I’m on vacation, beginning today (Thursday, September 15). I return on the 25th.

Comments on PYM Annual Sessions

Part Two — Budget Cuts, Reactions and the Future of PYM

In a period of open worship after Philadelphia Yearly Meeting approved the budget for the fiscal year ending 2012 on Friday morning, Sadie Forsythe, the coordinator for the Young Adult Friends program of the Yearly Meeting spoke passionately about the budget process and how she and staff in general were treated in its course. If I remember correctly, she called that process “abusive”, among other things. Her epistle, published yesterday (Tuesday, August 2) on the PYM site, expresses some of the feelings and the message she brought to us that morning. Add a voice broken up by grief and maybe some rage in your mind, and you have some idea of the moment. Several YAFers also expressed their grief and woundedness, their love for Quakerism and even for the Yearly Meeting, and some prophetic words about their place in the community.

The thing Sadie said that made it into my notebook was that, throughout the discussion of the budget in the annual sessions (an hour and a half or more during two separate sessions), Friends had not once expressed regret about letting faithful staff go or thanks for their service. The Light of her witness exposed a dark shadow among and within us and I felt truly convicted. She was right and I was guilty. Like everyone else, I was all about those numbers, those issues, and never thought about the people involved.

It reminded me of the conservative Republicans in Congress: obsessed with the government’s books and oblivious of the pain their cuts would deliver to the human flesh and the human spirits their pens had targeted. Yes, the cuts have to be made. Apparently, the Yearly Meeting occasionally forgot its compassion. Certainly, we did in those sessions.

I understand that some Friends engaged in outright lobbying on behalf of programs and staff that served their constituencies. I don’t know the details, how far this went or whether Young Adult Friends pursued this course. Some YAFers who spoke that morning, including Sadie, specifically said that they had not, which suggests that others had. Some of this lobbying worked, too, I guess, since the interim budget discussed in April was in fact changed; notably, Burlington Conference Center was saved.

The Yearly Meeting is reducing staff from 40 full-time equivalents (FTEs) to 32. The YM estimates that a staff level of 24 is sustainable, and more staff will almost certainly be let go next year. I suspect that eliminating the YAF coordinator position makes sense from the purely financial perspective. The Yearly Meeting has been forced into triage and they don’t have a lot of room to maneuver.

Several times, Jack Mahon, who brought the budget to the session on behalf of Financial Stewardship Committee, said that just because we were letting staff go in some areas didn’t necessarily mean that the ministry in those areas would end. I suppose. Theoretically, Young Adult Friends can carry the ball themselves. My sense, though, is that they do need an anchor, something at the center to root them to their Quakerism in the reality of their unsettled lives. And right now they feel like the center just cast them adrift.

These sessions delivered a hefty kick to the flywheel connected to the forces of decline in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting as an organization. Morale is terrible. Membership and financial support are declining, staff and programs in the organization are disappearing, and the financial/organizational crisis is nearly apocalyptic. Nominations can’t fill the committees. The structural issues at work are very hard to understand, let alone deal with. And these problems are hardly confined to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.

We need a prophetic inbreaking of the Spirit. I fear that nothing less will save us in the long run. We will hobble along for a while. But at some point, without some revolutionary, systemic change, the system will collapse. A spreadsheet depicting the curves for rising costs and declining income could reasonably predict the date for that collapse (something I plan to do, actually). At that point, PYM will have to figure out how to divest itself of some of the most historically significant buildings in North America, let alone in Quakerism.

I invite Young Adult Friends—and all the other aggrieved constituencies in the Yearly Meeting—to work through their grief for what they have lost and turn toward the Spirit with courage and some faith. Use the heat of the pain to transform yourselves. Turn the impulse to whine or complain into determination. Pray, as individuals—or whatever you do to reclaim your center. Worship, as a group—or whatever you do to reclaim your power to act creatively, prophetically. Turn away from old forms that no longer have that power and wait to see what love will do.

George Fox was in his early twenties when he had his first visions. The programmed, pastoral tradition of Friends began as a movement of young adult Friends. So, largely, did the liberalizing movement at the turn of the 20th century. Young adult Friends brought Right Sharing of World Resources to the Friends World Gathering in Guilford in the 1960s.

Friends have been bandying around the cliche that you are the future of Quakerism. Well, maybe . . .

Pacifism Goes Mainstream

The current issue of Harper’s Magazine has a long and excellent article on Pacifism titled “Why I’m a Pacifist: The dangerous myth of the Good War” by Nicholson Baker. He focuses particularly on World War II as the permier example of a “good war” and Nazism as the kind of evil that must be stopped, even at the high cost of many human lives. He especially is convinced that early negotiation with Hitler could have saved many of the Jews killed in the Holocaust, as the Third Reich had repeatedly referred to them hostages and only ramped up the killing immediately after the US entered the war.

Very worth hunting down in a good newsstand.

Thanksgiving

In the early 1980s, I had a lot of contact with the First Nations of Turtle Island, especially Mohawks and other folks from the traditional Iroquois. They opened every gathering with a prayer of thanksgiving. The prayer was always an extemporaneous rambling affair that was never the same, but always covered the same ground, in varying degrees of detail. Once it lasted nearly three quarters of an hour. Everything those people did was grounded in thanksgiving. It was the dominant emotion in their gatherings, the dominant idea in their thought, the first and last thing they did as individuals and as a community.

I have always felt that this is the greatest weakness of the Christian tradition, that it gives only lip service to thanksgiving. There is no holy day dedicated to it, it plays no central role in church services, Christian scriptures do not emphasize it. Jesus gave thanks before breaking bread so we do usually give thanks before eating; that’s good. But if it were not for the secular holiday of Thanksgiving in America, when would we stop and say thanks to God as a people for what we have? And, of course, Thanksgiving is uniquely American—what about the rest of Christendom?

The dominant emotion in traditional Christian gatherings is triumphalism, the conquest of Satan, death and sin through Christ. We don’t even think of this central tenet of Christian faith in terms of thanks. Church music tends to be triumphalist, Christmas music especially (“Glory to the newborn King”). This triumphalism nurtures a completely different kind of collective behavior than the humility that comes from thanksgiving. Triumphalism is almost inherently male in its orientation, it celebrates conflict and victory, it naturally tends to condone if not encourage hierarchy, dominance and even force.

The dominant idea in Christian thought is sin and salvation. Again, this engenders really different corporate behavior than the idea of gifts and thanksgiving. Thanksgiving tends to foster gift-giving, sharing and feasting. Native American events are really big on food and dancing. And, at least among the traditional Iroquois, which is one of the few real matriarchies in the world, it is oriented toward the Mother, Mother Earth, and providence.

Jesus himself was big on providence. He proclaimed the Jubilee in Luke chapter four and the Jubilee did four things: it cancelled all debts, it set free all debt slaves, it returned families to their ancestral landholdings, if they had lost them to foreclosure, and it required utter reliance on God’s providence, by requiring not just one but two years of fallow for your fields. This demanded that the community plan ahead, lay food aside, and maintain social forms that guaranteed mutual support when provisions got thin.

Of course, Israel apparently never actually practiced the Jubilee, until Jesus came along. But his followers did. The difference was that they were virtually all of them landless and therefore had no fields to set aside. But they practiced the Jubilee—utter dependence on God for providence: “Do not worry about what you will eat”. And God delivered: the feeding of the thousands being the most famous examples.

My point is that Jesus understood thanksgiving and practiced it. Why has the church built in his name abandoned it?

 

Welcome to Through the Flaming Sword

Welcome to Through the Flaming Sword, an online conversation about the history and future of Quaker culture, hosted by Steven Davison, member of Yardley Meeting, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Thank you for joining me.

I have started this blog to share some of my ideas with interested Friends and to join the lively online conversation about Quaker life more directly. The brief introduction below also appears on the “About this blog” page, whose link is on the left.

I’ve been a Friend since the mid-1980s and I’ve always had a passion for the study of Quakerism—its history, its ‘theology’, its approach to the life of the spirit, both personal and corporate, its community dynamics and governance, and its distinctive language and practices.

A writer by both vocation and avocation, I’ve written a lot about Quakerism, the vast majority of which is unpublished, though some essays have appeared in Friends Journal and Quaker Life. I currently am deep into a book on Quakers and Capitalism, which is both an economic history of Friends and a history and commentary on Quaker contributions to capitalist culture. This is not about Quakers and money, but about Quakers and the history and structure of capitalist economy. The history part of the book is more or less complete up to the turn of the 20th century, and roughly sketched out to the present. I have done a number of presentations on this material and I’ve found that Friends are universally amazed at the significance of Quaker economic contributions, a history that is almost completely unknown to most Friends. I am a trained and seasoned public speaker and I welcome opportunities to share this incredible story more widely. Please contact me if you are interested.

I also am a serious student of the Bible and I invite you to visit my other blog, BibleMonster.com, which explores contemporary issues under the light of a radical Bible.

Again, thank you for joining me. I look forward to our conversation.

Steven Davison