Feed aggregator

Under a ceasefire agreement brokered by the United States, Qatar, and Egypt, the Israel–Hamas war that has lasted more than 15 months will end, provided an initial six-week truce holds, The Washington Post reports. The current conflict began when Hamas killed approximately 1,200 people in attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, and took more than 250 Israelis hostage. The Israel Defense Forces killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, as of January 15, in the war that followed the attacks, according to Reuters. Approximately 1.9 million people are internally displaced in Gaza, according to the United Nations.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is weighing South Africa’s allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. A final ruling could take years. The ICJ delivered a preliminary opinion in January 2024 stating that the genocide accusation is “plausible.”

Prior to the announcement of the latest ceasefire agreement, three Friends with personal connections to the conflict discussed their views on the ICJ opinion, the future of the region, and how to foster dialogue about the war. The Quakers interviewed offered insights about the historic underpinnings of the conflict, as well as views on contemporary Friends’ responses.

“In the ’90s it felt like there were a lot of possibilities for peace,” said Marigold Bentley, who previously served as head of peace programs and faith relations for Britain Yearly Meeting. She also worked for the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel.

Beginning in 1993, the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel participated in peace talks that led to them signing the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995, which outlined a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict. The accords delineated restricted Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in exchange for recognition of Israel’s right to exist and for its citizens to live in peace.

The accords provided for electing officials to the Palestinian Authority, which would govern the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The agreement also called for Israeli security forces to move out of six Palestinian cities and more than 400 villages.

During the optimism that followed the Oslo Accords, a Quaker who was an art therapist traveled to the region in 1994 at the request of a Jewish psychotherapist to conduct therapeutic workshops. The Friend requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. The source described an art therapy activity in which people from both sides of the conflict participated.

“Two women, one Palestinian, one Israeli, they were carefully drawing around each other’s pictures so as not to cross anything. Their interpretations afterward were the Palestinian woman said, ‘Well I felt like she was surrounding me just like all these settlements on the hilltops.’ The Israeli woman said, ‘I felt she was surrounding me just like all the Arab nations trying to push Israel into the sea,’” the source said.

Unresolved issues in the Oslo Accords included which side could claim Jerusalem as a capital, and the right of Palestinians displaced by Israeli settlement to return to their homes.

Approximately 5,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis died in the Second Intifada, which lasted from 2000 until the Sharm el Sheikh peace talks ended that conflict in 2005.

British Quakers believed they had something to offer to peacemaking efforts in the region. British Friends felt a deep responsibility because of Britain’s historic role in the creation of the state of Israel, according to Bentley.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration, written by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to a Jewish leader in Britain named Lionel Walter Rothschild called for a Jewish homeland in the Palestinian territory. Under the British Mandate for Palestine, Britain helped European Jews immigrate to the region.

Before the Balfour Declaration, Jews and Palestinians co-existed peacefully, according to the anonymous source. Problems arose due to one piece of land being promised to two groups of people, the source said. The source’s parents survived the Holocaust. The source’s cousin went to Britain on the Kindertransport and lived with Orthodox Jewish foster parents. The Kindertransport relocated children from Poland, Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. The cousin’s country of origin is not being mentioned to protect the source’s anonymity.

After the current war began, Bentley noticed that members of churches in Britain were very nervous about the public response to the violence. Churches Together in Dorchester has run three facilitated meetings about the conflict, according to Bentley. The meetings each lasted 90 minutes and used a consensus-building model that invited participants to publicly articulate the kind of world they wanted. Two such sessions took place with just clergy and one involved both congregants and clergy members, according to Bentley. It is important for participants to speak from their own authentic experience, according to Bentley, who ran a session on the war for Woodbrooke Quaker Study Center in Birmingham, UK.

People in Britain have seen horrifying media images of the war. Watching media accounts and feeling helpless has caused high anxiety, Bentley noted.

“You’re meeting people who have traumatized themselves,” Bentley said of participants in dialogue about the war.

Topics such as the Israel–Hamas war make it hard to practice deep listening, according to Lori Piñeiro Sinitzky, program administrator in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Villanova University and a member of Green Street Meeting in Philadelphia, Pa.

Sometimes people say others are wrong and there is nothing else to listen to, Piñeiro Sinitzky noted. Maintaining somatic awareness, expecting discomfort, and keeping in mind the complex humanity of all participants in the discussion are ways to stay in the conversation, she explained.

Many clergy members do not feel comfortable giving sermons on the war but do offer prayers about peace and care for people suffering in wars, according to Bentley. She noted that many members of the British public are unfamiliar with the language of human rights.

Quakers were involved in the Kindertransport, which evacuated Jewish children to England from Nazi-occupied Europe. In response to present-day Quakers’ participation in the ecumenical accompaniment program, some Jews in Britain felt betrayed, according to Bentley.

“They said, ‘You used to love us and now you hate us,’” Bentley said.

The October 7, 2023 attacks terrorized and traumatized Jews, reminding them of the Holocaust, the anonymous source observed. Israel’s military response to the October 7 attacks was “disproportionate and stupid,” the anonymous source said.

There is a significant difference between Jews seeking a land of safety and the aggressive Israeli settlers expanding ever deeper into Palestinian territory, according to the anonymous source.

“I grew up understanding what happened during the Holocaust on a very visceral level and also understanding that the world could be a dangerous place for Jewish people,” said Lori Piñeiro Sinitzky. Piñeiro Sinitzky’s father is a Holocaust survivor. Her mother converted to Judaism.

Growing up, she saw televised images of Israeli tanks and Palestinians throwing rocks at the vehicles. She noticed a power imbalance. She viewed Israel as a safe place for Jewish refugees, but she also came to believe that the Israeli government has practiced apartheid and oppression of Palestinians. The current Israeli administration has exacerbated the problem, according to Piñeiro Sinitzky.

“The ongoing expansion of settlers into Palestinian territory has made things worse,” said Piñeiro Sinitzky.

She traveled to Israel before October 7 and saw apartheid and oppression. Currently she notes destruction of life, culture, homes, and communities that members of the international community should interrupt.

Asked about the International Court of Justice’s finding that South Africa’s accusation that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians is “plausible,” she said, “I believe that ‘plausible’ is probably the right word. I know it feels like genocide to me. I know that there are semantic disagreements and I think that’s a distraction,” Piñeiro Sinitzky said.

The post With Peace in Sight, Friends Reflect on the Israel–Hamas War appeared first on Friends Journal.

New England Friends Make Use of a Million-Dollar Windfall

The 2012 sale of the New England Friends Home in Hingham, Massachusetts, provided New England Yearly Meeting (NEYM) with an abundance of $1,100,000 net proceeds—and the challenge of discerning what God was calling us to do with it. We spent two years seeking input and proposals via meetings and surveys. Once clarity was reached to use the bulk of the funds to support ministry and witness among us, the financial questions arose. In 2014, Cuban Friends visiting yearly meeting sessions asked: “How can we be a Church with money in our pocket?” “How can we use all our resources to be God’s people in the world?”

In response, some Friends advocated giving it all away, while others encouraged using a small percentage each year while preserving the principal for the future. Friends came to unity to do both, creating two funds as part of an overall Legacy Gift Fund. One of these specific funds, the NEYM Witness and Ministry Fund, was started with $750,000 as a quasi-endowment to draw four percent each year to provide grants. The remaining balance (and accumulated earnings) of $470,975 became the NEYM Future Fund, available to distribute until it was all put to use. Applications, guidelines, priorities and procedures were developed and the Legacy Gift Committee was created to implement the two new funds. This experiment was to be reviewed in 2024 after the initial 10 years to see if it still had life.

In 2015 NEYM approved the following statement of purpose:

Guided by our living testimonies, we seek to strengthen our Witness through the funding of public and released ministry, with attention to Racism and Climate Change, and to nurture our beloved community through the support of education, outreach, released ministry and meetinghouse projects. Our hope is that the Legacy Funds will serve as potent seeds to help Friends answer God’s call in our time and to strengthen the new life that is already rising up in our yearly meeting.

For 10 years now, the Legacy Gift Committee has engaged in this experiment of holy abundance, inviting funding requests for up to $10,000 via two annual application review cycles. Since inception, the Future Fund awarded grants totaling $541,953. It was completely spent down, as intended, in 2020, having grown even while it was being used. As of June 2024, the Witness and Ministry fund has awarded grants totaling $202,999, drawn from annual investment income.

Several years ago, wanting to be able to respond to opportunities and short term leadings that arose between the two annual funding cycles, we added time-sensitive grants of up to $1,000 that are available on a rolling basis. Time-sensitive grants have funded things like helping Friends participate in Beyond Diversity 101 workshops or traveling to a border march organized by the American Friends Service Committee.

Our applicants are young adult Friends, retirees, and all ages in between from across NEYM. Many have never written a funding application or calculated a project budget before. They come from large urban meetings and from very small rural meetings with varying levels of experience or capacity for supporting witness and ministry. Sometimes more seasoning is needed. Sometimes the leading changes along the way. Legacy Gift Committee works with the applicants and their meetings as needed, through the process of applying, reviewing, and ensuring spiritual and fiscal support during the Legacy-funded life of the leading.

As of June 2024, 41 of NEYM’s 62 Friends meetings have benefitted from Legacy Gift funds (either as a meeting or in supporting the witness or ministry of individuals). Over half of them have received more than one grant. Meetings in all of NEYM’s quarters have been touched by Legacy Gift funding, including a majority of the meetings in six of the eight quarters. Approximately 25 other Friends-related groups and organizations, including Friend schools; Friends Camp in South China, Maine; Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston, Massachusetts; Woolman Hill Quaker Retreat Center in Deerfield, Massachusetts; Quaker Voluntary Service; and NEYM committees have also received funding, many of them more than once.

Financially, our goal is to help release Friends to respond to God’s call so that spiritual faithfulness is not dependent on personal financial means. We also ask about and let applicants know of other potential funding sources—especially to help support longer, continuing leadings. The committee’s application review process begins with the Legacy Gift Committee meeting as a whole to let questions for each applicant rise. After that, a two-person review team meets directly with each applicant, along with members of their oversight, anchor, or support committee. Following the visits, review teams bring funding recommendations to the whole committee for discernment. At the end of the funding period, grantees submit reports about where the Spirit took them, how the funds were used, what they learned, and any challenges they encountered and if the ministry or project is continuing. Legacy Gift Committee shares summary reports with NEYM through the newsletter, website, and at the yearly meeting annual sessions.

Clockwise: Ministry on Racial Bias in Policing/Sarah Walton sojourning in Atlanta, Ga., 2016; Maine Poor People’s Campaign, Diane Diccranian (Winthop Center), 2018; Wabanaki Program (Cobscook Meeting & AFSC) 2016; Haven’s Harvest food rescue and recovery program of New Haven, Conn.

During this experiment in holy abundance, we’ve heard about Friends’ experience of these funds prompting and nurturing a deeper understanding and practice of noticing, discerning, holding accountable, and supporting leadings of the Spirit and ministry.

Meetings have shared with us that their understanding of ministry and how to support ministry has grown as a result of engaging with the Legacy Gift program and workshops.

Because engaging in Spirit-led ministry and witness benefits from more than basic financial support, we require meetings to provide oversight, support, or anchor committees for grantees as they engage in the work to which they are called. We also require meetings to serve as fiscal sponsors, and send the grant award checks to them to disperse to the grantee (and to provide any tax forms that may be needed). Ten years ago, many meetings did not have experience in supporting ministry, so we also offer workshops with titles like “Leadings, Meetings, and Money.” We have all learned and grown as a wider Quaker body in our understanding and practice of noticing, nurturing, and supporting witness and ministry among us.

We have planted many seeds that have borne fruit. Over the years the funds have supported a wide variety of ministries and witness activities, starting with the initial priorities of addressing racism and climate change and expanding to encompass further concerns that Spirit has since called us to. Legacy Gift funds have helped send young adult Friends to antiracism workshops, provided racial inclusion and equity training for staff at Friends Camp, funded the Black Quaker Project, and supported Friends in developing racial justice courses. This all contributed to increased awareness and influenced changes in individual meetings and across the yearly meeting as a whole.

Support of climate ministry has helped Friends work with students to document climate solutions in their community. Legacy Gift funds have converted a farm tractor to run on solar energy, created a carbon footprint calculator, and engaged in nonviolent prophetic acts of climate witness. Legacy funding has also helped many meetings, Friends schools, and conference centers install solar panels, energy efficient windows, increased insulation, and sustainable heating systems, thus significantly reducing their dependence on fossil fuels. Adaptations for accessibility, helping small meetings repair roofs, bringing a meeting up to code to provide sanctuary for refugees, peaceful mitigation of beavers who were flooding a meeting’s driveway, and addressing the challenges during COVID were made possible thanks to these funds.

Faithful inreach and outreach efforts have been nurtured by Legacy Gift funds. One grantee developed an online Quaker library and adult Quaker education classes. Others traveled in the ministry of intervisitation among meetings. A meeting member created digital outreach videos for their meeting. Funds helped ministry supporting our living testimonies as one meeting set up a peace center, Friends addressed food insecurity and rural poverty in Maine and another produced a book of art by incarcerated men in Vermont.

Initial leadings have rippled out, with some seeds growing into ongoing ventures like the summer food rescue initiative that has become Haven’s Harvest, a nonprofit keeping tons of food out of the climate-impacting waste stream and into hungry bellies in Connecticut. An individual’s exploration of art as a practice of faith grew into an art camp. A ministry grant to create a dinner church led to the establishment of a new open, affirming Christian online Quaker meeting.

The ministry supported by the Legacy Gift funds has been far-ranging and meaningful. A gathering for women in public ministry that was funded brought together Friends from several yearly meetings. Funds have helped Friends travel to international gatherings, conferences and to an American Friends Service Committee action at the southern U.S. border. Funds helped develop curricula and Quaker books for use in collaboration with Friends’ schools in Rwanda. Funds supported travel for the Black Quaker Project to present their work to the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva, Switzerland, a health ministry in Mongolia, participation in a Friends Peace Teams training in Poland, a young adult Friend to learn about earth stewardship and responses to climate change in Bolivia, and for a Friend’s ministry of friendship and humanitarian support for the people of Ukraine. Other grant recipients have traveled to Cuba, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and other parts of the US in faithfulness to their leadings.

Clockwise: Traveling ministry with ultimate frisbee to Cuba, Julian Grant (Hanover) 2016; Quaker Dinner Church, Kristina Keefe-Perry (Fresh Pond) 2018; Leadings, Ministry & Money Workshop with Viv Hawkins, Sarah Spencer, Jeremiah Dickinson, Greg WiIliams, and Beth Collea (Wellesley Meeting), October 2016; Faith & Play with African and Latin American Friends, New England Committee of FWCC, 2016.

An emergent priority over the last decade has also been seeking right relationship with Indigenous People. Using some of the funds for reparations was originally proposed during the first years of discernment while setting up the Legacy Gift funding program. The question of reparations was brought to annual sessions several times, in 2012, 2013, and 2014. One minute read that “A Friend noted that the money in this fund comes from the sale of land that ultimately came to us through the Doctrine of Discovery, and asked that we consider the reparations that might be appropriate out of this sale. How does our use of these funds, and indeed of all Yearly Meeting resources, reflect our testimony of integrity?”

These conversations led NEYM to make an apology to Native Americans in 2022. Several Legacy Gift grants have been made in support of nurturing relationships with Indigenous People and doing research into New England Friends’ role in supporting Indian Boarding Schools in the late 1800s. During the 10 year Legacy Gift review process we heard again the call for NEYM to consider reparations. During annual sessions, NEYM approved next steps to initiate a conversation and discernment about restorative actions and future reparations, inviting local meetings to engage in learning and reflection, and report back to annual sessions with yearly updates. If NEYM becomes clear to make financial reparations, a significant draw from the funds gained through the sale of the New England Friends Home may be used for this purpose.

As one Friend shared, “A really important part of the Legacy Gift Funding Program is that it encourages Friends in general and Meetings in particular to live into the life of the Spirit. Witness, Ministry and faithful presence from a perspective of abundance, rather than scarcity, is a necessary shift for all people of faith.”

The fruits of the Legacy Gift funds have been rich, powerful and many. Getting to serve on the Legacy Gift Committee is a blessing and ministry in itself. Meeting Friends across NEYM, glimpsing where Spirit is rising among us, and being able to support faithfulness is a joy! As we journey into continuing the Legacy Gift experience we celebrate the great blessing the funds enable in nurturing the movement of Spirit among us. Perhaps other Friends will be inspired to put funds to use in similar ways to answer God’s call in our time.

Much of this article was drawn from the initial 10 year review report of the Legacy Gift experience, co-written also by Suzanna Schell in Massachusetts (Beacon Hill and Three Rivers Meetings), who clerked the discernment that led to the establishment of the Legacy Funding Program and was the founding clerk of the committee; and Fritz Weiss from Portland (Maine) Meeting, a prior NEYM presiding clerk who served ex officio on the Legacy Gift Committee. This article is written from our experience, not on behalf of nor representing New England Yearly Meeting as a whole. For more information, guidelines, funding priorities and a slide show of grant recipients, see Legacy Gift’s page on NEYM’s website at neym.org/committees/legacy-gift.

The post An Experiment in Holy Abundance appeared first on Friends Journal.

The post Quakers and Money appeared first on Friends Journal.

I never expected one of the most poignant moments of my year to involve a battered cardboard box. After what had been a long odyssey of travel, canceled flights, and delayed luggage, I was enraptured in a joyous Quaker worship service in South Africa led by Friends from Kenya. Friends sang spirited hymns in Kiswahili. English and Spanish translations were available in a songbook put together especially for the event, which I glanced at as I hummed along to the melodies and swayed in praise. At the World Plenary Meeting, all-together worship services were led each day by Friends from a different part of the world in the manner of their Quaker tradition.

An offering was an integral part of this particular worship. As in many places around the world, housing insecurity is a pressing problem in the Johannesburg area, so the Friends leading worship called for us to participate in an offering to benefit local people experiencing homelessness. That’s when I saw our box.

Before I had left home in Philadelphia for the 48+ hour journey to South Africa, I had stuffed that box with nearly a hundred copies of Friends Journal issues from the past year. Much later, when the box and I were reunited on the ground half a world away, I found no shortage of takers for these magazines, which I gave away to those Friends in attendance. And to my delight, our beat-up Friends Journal box had a most useful second life. It came my way, this time, passed from hand to hand and filled with banknotes from all over the world. Dollars, euros, South African Rands, in all colors of the rainbow. I smiled and tossed in a red 200-rand note with Nelson Mandela’s visage on the front and a pair of leopards on the back.

Photo by Gabriel Ehri

It was evident to me that morning that sharing what we have, when we can, in accordance with our beliefs, must be a Quaker Testimony, with a capital T. In this issue of Friends Journal, we further explore how Friends see money and community, from perspectives nearly as diverse as we Friends are, ourselves. Henri Nouwen, inspired by Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, wrote that God’s beloved community “is the place of abundance where every generous act overflows its original bounds and becomes part of the unbounded grace of God at work in the world.”

Blessings to you, dear reader, in this new year, one sure to be full of challenging moments. May we all join together in that unbounded grace of God at work in the world.

The post Where Our Treasure Is appeared first on Friends Journal.

Conversations about money have gotten more interesting lately at Red Cedar Meeting here in Lansing, Michigan. They used to feel perfunctory: an annual budget proposal, monthly reports on how our actual activity matched our plans, updates on the pace of contributions, and safe storage of funds at a local credit union. But a shift began four years ago when we united in a minute in which we committed ourselves to become an antiracist faith community. Since we had no solid definition or road map, we acknowledged that we would have to conjure up what that meant as we lived into it. Still, a number of us had spent several years educating ourselves about systemic racism, and a conviction had grown among us that it was time to stop learning from others and start acting in conscience, even if we stumbled along the way. The minute reads: 

We affirm that embracing anti-racism means making a deliberate effort to appreciate the pernicious effects of racist policies and racial biases on people of color and indigenous people. Further, being committed to anti-racism means identifying harmful social practices, past and present, and how they are perpetuated—so that we might put energy and effort into dismantling them and making the repairs that are possible. This is the work to which we are committed.

As one of our starting steps, we asked each committee to reflect on what actions might fall within its purview that could address some of the harm of racism’s never-ending toll on Black people’s bodies and minds, and on all of our souls. We did not intentionally aim to use money as a vehicle for action, but in retrospect three financial initiatives have developed from our exploration.

We don’t always agree about what responsibility we feel for the broad systemic dynamics beyond our control. But most of us resonate with opting for integrity when we can find a place to do so, even though our actions cannot change whole systems.

Learning about Black Banking

Our Finance Committee was the first to offer a way to use our money in service to our testimonies when they proposed that we move our long-term maintenance fund to Black-owned Liberty Bank in Detroit. The committee members read Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money, which explores the history of Black financial institutions and the structural reasons that have caused many to fail (the committee developed a study guide to encourage others to learn). Committee members were disturbed to learn that the central reason Black banking has been unable to achieve its promise is not regulatory obstacles (although those have also been egregious) but rather perpetual patterns of social and economic segregation in our society. Black banks often succeeded in attracting deposits of Black-owned assets but then, due to the segregated nature of property ownership and industry, ended up lending them out into mostly white markets, thus moving economic growth in the opposite direction they had hoped for. The committee also came to appreciate the additional financial challenge for banks whose main customers make small deposits and frequent withdrawals, which has historically been the case for Black-owned banks. These factors reduce the funds that banks have available for investment and money multiplication. That structural challenge in particular led the committee to propose (and the meeting to approve) moving our long-term maintenance fund—our largest asset after our building—into a Black-owned bank. The committee chose Liberty Bank because of its well-documented and proactive local program encouraging first-time homeowners of Color.

Taking this step together did not actually cost us any resources; the fund was intact and earning interest. But it was a reminder that decisions about the resources we control together can be an arena for shared action. And the discussion really has been more interesting—perhaps more spiritually significant—than our business-as-usual money conversations. We moved beyond the testimony of stewardship of what is ours into talking about what the testimonies of integrity and equality require of us. We noted and reflected about our willingness or our reluctance to step outside conventional money management wisdom . . . and about what fed either of those instincts. We don’t always agree about what responsibility we feel for the broad systemic dynamics beyond our control. But most of us resonate with opting for integrity when we can find a place to do so, even though our actions cannot change whole systems.

Members of Red Cedar Meeting in front of the new tiny pantry in Lansing, Mich. Photo courtesy of the author.Contributing to Reparative Justice

We were mightily gifted with the opening that has flowered into our second financial witness: annual payments that actually do transfer some wealth from our predominantly white meeting to local People of Color as reparations for generations of racialized harm. Though we were indeed lucky with this opening, we had independently laid the groundwork for our choice to step into it. Our Peace and Social Justice Committee had been learning about the case for reparations. Friends had read the work of authors of Color to understand very different life experiences. Learning about our own history in Fit For Freedom, Not for Friendship rocked all who read it. Viewing a locally produced documentary They Even Took the Dirt, which is about local 1970s highway construction, made the notion of harm very personal and local. Pendle Hill’s “Aiming for Justice” workshops used reparations to raise joy and empowerment to replace guilt. From these experiences, we groped for how to begin. Then way opened.

Willye Bryan, a visionary Black leader, was inspired by her work on the national level to return to her local Lansing Presbyterian church and begin to organize a vehicle for white people of faith to shift racial guilt into racial responsibility by transferring some accumulated wealth back to their Black neighbors. The Justice League of Greater Lansing Michigan, which she founded, issued an invitation to predominantly white faith communities, who understood their privilege and accepted some responsibility for tolerating historic inequities, to join in public apology to their neighbors of Color. Then the League asked congregations to see what each could add to their goal of a $1 million endowment under the control of Black leaders for supporting college education, first-time home ownership, and business start-ups for People of Color.

Some congregations held endowments from which they were able to make some large donations. Others owned and sold property, again for large donations. These options were not possible for us, but we were able to unite in a commitment to set aside a substantial portion of our annual operating budget for reparative justice payments.

From annual budgets that now approach $80,000, we have made two annual payments of $7,000 to the endowment, and some members now volunteer their labor and spirits to the League’s ongoing work. These steps have felt responsive to our debt to the descendants of slavery, but we have also acknowledged from the beginning the need for reparative practices with our local Indigenous communities as well. The recipients of our payments may shift, but we retain the intention to tender our conscience, recognize our debt, and claim our agency in movement toward a more just and equitable world.

We have been moved spiritually since this opening emerged. Our relatively small but, for us, substantial annual payments—not contributions—feel like real action that we collectively offer. Our reparations work with other faith communities is more ecumenical than most of our other peace and justice efforts. And we are excited that the Justice League is gaining attention as a model for local reparations efforts elsewhere. But we are not done. What happens when some serious future expense challenges our budget and our unity? Will support remain solid for all decisions made by the League’s Black leadership for using some of “our money”? How does each of us understand responsibility and payments for the legacy of slavery? Still, our annual payments have set the ground for challenge and discernment about money and racial justice that was not possible before.

Becoming a place where neighbors can look for help comes with real tension and discomfort as we practice setting limits. . . . We need to find a way to keep attenders from having to negotiate such limits with anyone who comes in the door while they’re here. We are finding it a good spiritual practice to welcome these challenges instead of being annoyed at having our smooth existence troubled. 

Growing into our Tiny Pantry

A third initiative began in 2020 as we were all reeling from COVID’s onslaught. One of Red Cedar’s college students had come home for Christmas and observed to her dad that “tiny pantries” (modeled after tiny free libraries) were beginning to show up around town, where people could leave free food for others to take what they needed, no questions asked. Why, she asked, couldn’t Red Cedar do the same?

After numerous fits, starts, and stumbles with box design; build; and worries about zoning, sustainability, and liability, the project has now—four years later—surprisingly become our largest financial witness to our testimonies of equality, inclusion, and community. “Surprisingly” because, unlike the other two initiatives that were proposed with cost projections and adopted with a clear, collective judgment that we could afford them, our Tiny Pantry grew organically from taking one human-to-human step at a time. We began with people simply stopping by to bring items from their car trunk after grocery shopping and someone else moving things to the pantry each day.

Soon it became clear that our offerings did not necessarily match the most popular items being sought (not many of us brought Vienna sausages) and that some of us were better bargain shoppers than others, stretching what we could give further. So we evolved toward a system where we individually contributed money to an extraordinary, visionary volunteer who compiled a list of what people actually wanted, narrowed down the packaging options to those that did not require can openers and had no breakable glass, and began proactively bargain shopping in cost-effective bulk.

We found that about $25–$30 of groceries fit into our box, and it was emptied on most days. We added a $1,500 line item to our operating budget for gaps when contributions fell short, but it was nowhere near the $900 per month that we were coming to see we needed. We began several (now annual) fundraisers. Crafters and bakers among us produce items each year for sale at the community’s Alternative Holiday Sale, and this fall’s multi-family yard sale netted a welcome $1,400.

When we catch our breath to add it all up, we realize that the volunteers who “feed the pantry” daily have put $11,000 of food in that box each year. It feels a bit like loaves and fishes! Where did it come from, one grocery bag at a time? We are pretty sure anyone proposing an $11,000 program back in 2020 would have been quickly set straight about limits to our capacity. But one can of soup at a time, we have truly surprised ourselves.

Our volunteers report that they have been changed by the conversations they have had with the neighbors who stop by to fill their bags. And closer connections with people who use the pantry challenge us in growth-producing ways. “No questions asked” is an absolute, but we all report needing to grow out of reflexive judgment about who uses the pantry. Becoming a place where neighbors can look for help comes with real tension and discomfort as we practice setting limits: no, we do not allow camping in the (sheltered, attractive) backyard of our meetinghouse, even though we have put benches there for resting. No, we cannot manage an on-site Porta Potty, even as we recognize the need. Yes, you are welcome to join us at potluck. But no, you cannot clean out the refreshment table into your backpack. Well, yes and no, some of us are okay with explicit requests for money from someone waiting by the front door as they arrive for worship, and some of us are not. Yes, we need to find a way to keep renters from having to negotiate such limits with anyone who comes in the door while they’re here. We are finding it a good spiritual practice to welcome these challenges instead of being annoyed at having our smooth existence troubled.

Money isn’t everything, of course. And we have made other kinds of progress in leaning into what kind of antiracist faith community we want to be; that is another set of stories. But we can say experientially that thoughtful conversations about new uses for financial resources have opened possibilities, challenged assumptions, and stretched our involvement in social and racial justice.

The post Putting Our Money Where Our Hearts Are appeared first on Friends Journal.

The Gift God Wants You to Have

How do you react to seeing or hearing the word “tithe”? What is your gut saying in response to that word? What is your mind and your heart saying? Which of those three are you trusting the most as you continue to read?

The tithe has the power to set us free: to set us free from the power of Mammon, the power of money. Every time we worry about money, we are distracted. Tithing is the practice of taking the first 10 percent of one’s income and giving it away. It is a statement that we will not be beholden to the almighty dollar (or peso or pound sterling, for that matter).

What people who tithe can do for their community of faith is a different question from the one I ask. I’m going to limit myself to the impact on people who do the tithing. 

The concept is biblical. The best source is in Genesis 28:16–22. The first person who ever suggested that I tithe was a secular Jew. He had been imprisoned in WWII for refusing the draft, and when he came out of prison at Leavenworth, he moved to New York and lived in the same apartment until his death 45 years later. He vowed never to make enough money to pay income tax and support the war effort in that way. And he did it, thanks to his rent-controlled apartment. He talked about the freedom that gave him and encouraged me to try. 

At the time, I was an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada (in 1925, the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists merged). I felt some pressure to lead by example if not by word, and a few years later, I started thinking about following his advice. I had thought of myself as a generous giver to the church, until I moved to northern British Columbia (near the bottom end of Alaska) and met some new people in and around Hazelton, B.C.

One new set of friends was a couple named Jan and Joe Francis, who had come from southern India to work at the church-run hospital. They tithed everything, 10 percent of their gross income. She was an operating room nurse, and he was the comptroller of the hospital, so their income was significant. They also tithed their food. One in ten of the meals they cooked, they made a point of feeding to someone outside their family. They tithed on their garden: they harvested 10 percent of their garden first and then divided the vegetables into bags and delivered them to people they knew would appreciate it. They always left some at the end and invited people to help themselves. They also tithed their labor, giving away more than four hours a week to various community causes and groups. And they did all this without any pretense. I only came to understand these things over time.  

I also want to talk about Charlotte Sampare, who was from the Gitxsan First Nation and taught their tribal language in the local school. Twice a month, she put a check in the offering plate for $129.30; the other weeks she would put in cash. And when she went on unemployment insurance, I noticed the check became only $78.30. Clearly, she was giving 10 percent of her paycheck as a tithe and making offerings the other weeks. It was just automatic: like breathing. Her way of saying thanks for all that she had, and trusted would continue to come to her.

Tithing is the practice of taking the first 10 percent of one’s income and giving it away. It is a statement that we will not be beholden to the almighty dollar.

As I met these people and saw the way they gave, I just assumed that I could not tithe. I wanted to. They looked happy doing it, but I needed more money. In fact, I needed a lot more money to do that.

So I did some calculations. I had recently switched from being a lay minister to an ordained minister and moved to a church that was classified as an aid-receiving charge. This meant that I had to be paid the minimum point on salary scale. The charge I had been working at, paid me 5 percent of the minimum, so I was giving up $1,600 per year to serve the church as an ordained minister (in an church supported with national funds) instead of a being a lay minister (in a self-supporting church that did not have the same salary restrictions.) My wife had a good number of contracts as a freelance writer when we lived on the East Coast, and none of that work could be carried with us, so she had given up $10,000 of income. I was paying back a student loan for my seminary training at a rate of $3,000 per year, and I had asked my parents, in lieu of a Christmas gift, if they could donate $1,500 to the church.

So I was paying, if you will, $1,600 from my salary drop, $10,000 from our income loss, $3,000 for the student loan, and $1,500 from my parents. Now that totals $16,100, but since I regularly worked 48 rather than 40 hours, I added 20 percent to my salary which brought the total up to $22,500. That was what I determined I was “giving” before even paying a penny. I was making $2,000 each month; 10 percent of that would have been $2,400 dollars over a year. 

I had a sit down with God, and I put it this way: As I understand you would like me to tithe $2,400 per year. And you have watched over my shoulder as I made my calculations, so you know I am “paying” the equivalent $22,500 per year. By calculations, you owe me! I reckon you owe me $20,100 per year, but I am generous guy, so I’ll round it down to $20,000. And once you pay me that, I will consider a tithe on my income. And in return, the Inward Light, to my eyes, was remarkably quiet and dim. 

I put the question of tithing aside, but then a good friend in the church said in conversation, “Tithing is part of the Christian experience; I feel sorry for those who are missing it.” And then I went to visit a church, Mount Zion Baptist in Seattle, Washington, where the minister said, “We are not made for tithing, but tithing is made for us.” The Light was flickering. 

At the same time, it occurred to me that I had never in my life met an unhappy tither, but I had met lots of people who talked with resentment about feeling pressure to give at all. 

Over the next few years, a lot changed. First off, God reminded me that I had accepted my ordination and the corresponding move across the country. So really, I had no business giving myself financial credit for doing so. And with time, my income went up, so I no longer could give myself credit for the 5 percent that I had given up when I moved. And after a few years, my wife found work that paid her just as well as the work she had had on the East Coast; I made my last student loan payment; and I acknowledged that any time I worked more than 40 hours per week was my choice. Nobody was asking me to do that. And somehow, I got the message that God’s accountant was a little confused that both my father and I were wanting credit for the same $1,500. All 22,500 of my reasons for not tithing were gone. 

Tithing is freeing and gives joy; both the idea of tithing and the opportunity to tithe is a gift, and for me, it is a gift that God wanted me to have.

What now? I began to make a case that I live in an equal marriage, and I could only choose to tithe on half of my income, and I could not force my will on her half. But then I told her how I wanted to start giving 5 percent of our income away and explained my path. She replied, “Well, don’t put the blame on me without asking me, let’s give 10 percent of your salary. So we agreed that we would start tithing at the rate of $200 per month, 10 percent of my salary. This was in late March. Was this retroactive to January 1, or did it start now? God had been silent on the issue. 

Just three days later, I got a call from a friend asking if he could borrow the exact amount of three months of tithes: $600. He and his family had moved to Vancouver (24 hours of flat-out driving) so he could train as an addiction counselor, and he needed a damage deposit. It was just too well-calculated. I gave him the money and said to myself, if he pays it back, then I will pass it on in another way. 

My wife and I have tithed ever since. Each year, we look at the income figure on our taxes, divide it by ten and we know what our starting mark is for giving. I said at the start that where the tithe goes is not in the scope of this essay. We spread it out between our monthly meeting, other Quaker groups, a scholarship at the local high school, some food security programming, and being able to say yes when we are asked to contribute money somewhere. Any time I hear of something that sounds like it is furthering one of our testimonies, I have the joy of having already committed the money to say yes. 

I told this story the way I have because it is true. It is how it played out for us. But the real messages are what lies beneath: tithing is freeing and gives joy; both the idea of tithing and the opportunity to tithe is a gift, and for me, it is a gift that God wanted me to have. 

I return to the bottom line here: I’ve never met a person who tithes who is unhappy doing so! With that in mind, I invite those of you who are still reading and do not tithe already to take the shoe box challenge: tithe for six months, and in secret, keep your tithes in a shoe box. At the end of six months, take a peek inside. The very worst case is that you have some unexpected savings. The best case would be that you are on your way to receiving this gift for the rest of your life. 

It’s funny that although I don’t often ask why people don’t tithe, I still get a lot of reasons. Maybe it’s not $22,500 worth of reasons—like I had—but I have heard people offer without any prompting: I don’t make enough money; church isn’t that important to me; other people have more to give; I’ve got young children; I’m living on a fixed pension; I have too much debt; I’m saving for retirement; tithing was easier back in the Bible days because they didn’t have taxes; tithing isn’t a Quaker thing; and I give a lot of money away anyway, so I don’t need to. 

The one thing these answers have in common is that none start with the assumption that tithing is a good thing; that tithing is free; and again, in my case, God’s will and desire for me is to experience joy. 

The post The Joy of Tithing appeared first on Friends Journal.

One Meeting’s Journey Toward Right Relationship

As a big meeting with a long history in Philadelphia, Central Philadelphia (Pa.) Meeting finds itself with a significant endowment that its members had no hand in creating but are now responsible for stewarding. As one of the three partners in Friends Center in central Philadelphia (along with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and American Friends Service Committee), we also have fixed and fairly high occupancy costs, and we count on the return from investments—together with member contributions—to help cover these and other meeting-related expenses. Over the years, we have had various opportunities to reach for integrity as we engage with money. 

The Twelfth Street Fund

In 1970 we owned two meetinghouses, a result of the schism that had divided Philadelphia Yearly Meeting until being healed in the 1950s. Central Philadelphia was formed by the joining of a Hicksite meeting and an Orthodox meeting. After much reflection, the decision was made to sell the Twelfth Street meetinghouse; about three quarters of the $700,000 sale price was used to form the Twelfth Street Fund.

When the difficult decision to sell had been made, member Henry Cadbury rose and said, “This money will be the ruination of this meeting.” That remark was taken very seriously. A Proceeds Committee, intentionally made up of folks representing a wide range of views, engaged the meeting in a year-long process of bringing people of diverse opinions together in small groups. That process bore fruit: when the committee’s recommendations were brought to our monthly business meeting, unity was reached on approving the report after just 45 minutes of discussion.  

One significant point of difference—not surprisingly—was whether or not the principle of the Twelfth Street Fund should be preserved and only the interest disbursed. The Proceeds Committee addressed this as follows:

We are committed neither to preserving nor dissipating the funds, but rather recommend that we move ahead in disbursing the money as the Spirit leads us.

A second point of difference was whether to look inward to the needs of the meeting and its members or whether to look outward to the wider community around us. The committee felt:

a clear call that to meet the needs of our members is a tangible way of caring for one another in the meeting community . . . equally clear is the desire to reach out in the urban community beyond the meeting to help rectify the inequities which exist there and to find ways to further the cause of peace, both in this city and the rest of the world.

Requests for grants or loans were received and acted upon by the Proceeds Committee over the next ten years or so. A good deal of good was done and some hard lessons learned. For example, purchasing a rehabbed house and holding the mortgage to enable a lower income family to buy it was a worthwhile undertaking but became a major headache when the family ceased payments on the mortgage. 

The era of administering the Twelfth Street Fund came to an end in late 1984 when the Finance Advisory Committee brought a report to monthly meeting, noting that since its establishment the fund had disbursed over $1,000,000 in grants, loans, and gifts. They recommended that, given the low balance in the fund (approximately $160,000), it not be reopened to outside grant applications, and that:

the Fund’s cash principal should be invested in the Meeting’s Consolidated Fund held at Friends Fiduciary and the income spent in each current budget on social concerns and care of the Friends community.

The meeting approved, and this era of our engaging in the wider community via our unrestricted financial assets came to an end, with two exceptions. First, a portion ($40,000) of the remainder was invested in the Delaware Valley Community Reinvestment Fund, which supported affordable housing and childcare program capital needs in the Philadelphia area through low-interest loans. Second, the restricted funds (by action of the donor) held in our portfolio, the largest of which is for the education of “poor black children,” continued to be disbursed as always.

If our financial resources and our faith were well-aligned, what would that look like? How do we think of the meeting’s financial resources: Is it “our money” or “money for which we are the current stewards”?

The Donations Committee Years

Our second intentional effort to engage with integrity with our finances came soon after the turn of the century, when returns on investment were very high, with the result that our income well exceeded our needs. This led us to create a Donations Committee charged with bringing recommendations to monthly meeting of groups and efforts to support with that excess. The grants were smaller and fewer than had been those of the Twelfth Street Fund, but we agonized, nevertheless, over whether we were doing the greatest good possible and whether we were selecting the best and most deserving organizations. It was helpful when a member reminded us that “this is not our money, we are simply stewards of what we’ve inherited, and we should be focused on dispersal rather than micromanagement.” After five or so years, the economy slowed, the surplus disappeared, and the Donations Committee was laid down. 

Our endowment is held and managed by Friends Fiduciary Corporation. They screen for the traditional Quaker “bads” (gambling, alcohol, weapons) and additionally carry a concern to actively witness through use of their proxy votes, urging companies to be good corporate citizens. About ten years ago, members of our meeting, along with others in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, were becoming increasingly uneasy with having our money invested in fossil fuels. Members of the yearly meeting, in various configurations, shared this concern with Friends Fiduciary. When they set up a separate Green Fund, our meeting acted quickly to move some of our endowment into that new fund, understanding that we couldn’t be promised as high a return. 

This was also a time when our secretary and treasurer took on the challenge, at the request of the meeting, of moving our liquid assets from one of the big banks to a local credit union, another small step in our journey toward integrity in our relationship with money.

Photo by Morgan Housel on UnsplashImpact Investing

The next notable chapter in our journey began in 2021. In an article in the meeting’s newsletter, a member wrote:

Each month at business meeting and in our committee meetings we ask: “How does this decision support CPMM [Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting] in its goal to transform into an actively antiracist faith community?” I would like to suggest that the meeting’s stewardship of our resources, specifically our invested funds, needs examination in light of this query. 

Others in the meeting agreed that it was a topic worthy of exploration, and the monthly meeting set up a working group charged with coordinating a process of information gathering to build the foundation for the working group’s discernment and the meeting’s final decision. After six months of work, the group brought back an informational report which was positively received, and for the first time, “impact investing” became part of the meeting’s vocabulary. We understand impact investments to be those made with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return, which can range from below market to market rates.

Discernment regarding next steps was turned back to the Finance Advisory Committee.  A breakthrough came when several members of the committee, along with a member who had been active in the working group and had deep financial investment experience, met with staff from Friends Fiduciary. It turned out that they were very interested in pursuing the possibility of supporting impact investing by groups like monthly meetings, and were ready to work with our meeting to do a trial run. 

Over the course of 18 months, that small group met with them several times, and Finance Advisory had in-depth discussions about all the many possible ramifications of making such a move. The issue was brought up at meeting for business in the spring of 2024 to see if the meeting would be open to a proposal to move $500,000 to investments that focused on three general areas: meeting the needs of underserved Philadelphians, addressing climate and environmental issues locally, and supporting Indigenous communities. The response was enthusiastic and Finance Advisory was authorized to work with Friends Fiduciary and come back with a specific proposal.

More work was done over the summer and early fall, and in October a proposal to move $500,000 of the assets in our portfolio to three organizations that fit the definition of impact investments was brought to meeting for business. The investment return among the three ranged from below market to slightly above market but in balance maintained a return similar to what our other investments with Friends Fiduciary bring. The meeting approved the recommendation of Finance Advisory without difficulty and with appreciation, and so the next step in our journey has been taken. It is a small step and quite a conservative one, but hopefully it will open us up to further exploration of our right relationship with money.

It is interesting to look back and reflect on what we’ve learned and what might still be learned. How are we yet to be stretched as we seek to bring our Quaker faith and our stewardship of financial resources into greater alignment? We’ve certainly learned that talking about money is hard work and that we need to be tender with each other and listen deeply. 

Questions that come to mind for further reflection include the following: If our financial resources and our faith were well-aligned, what would that look like? How do we think of the meeting’s financial resources: Is it “our money” or “money for which we are the current stewards”? How much is enough? The answer to this question may or may not accord with the meeting’s annual budget. To the extent that our meeting has resources that have accumulated across generations, what privilege has contributed to that accumulation and how might we address reparations? What is our understanding of community? There is, of course, the meeting community, but how permeable is the boundary between the meeting and the wider community? How does our answer to this question inform decisions regarding how we spend/disburse our money? We look forward to where a faithful exploration of these issues lead.

The post Aligning Finances and Faith appeared first on Friends Journal.

Quaker Testimonies in an Economy of Greed

Quakers have long been associated with fair dealings and simple living. In part as a result of that reputation, many of their businesses and institutions have been financial successes. 

After more than 40 years with Friends, I have often been able to see the testimonies in work in the financial end of things: as a fundraiser, a treasurer, a trustee, a grant giver, a grant receiver, and, of course, a donor.

My first interaction with finance at Friends Meeting of Washington (D.C.) was at the then-annual bazaar in which the meeting raised the majority of its budget for good works. It was a large operation, and the first time I attended it, I bid on a clock in the live auction for “finer” things. I noticed during earlier bids that people usually wouldn’t bid against Friends. I was fairly new, so there were a couple of forays by others into winning the clock. They didn’t recognize me as one of their own, but they gradually dropped out, and I got the clock for an amazingly low amount. Some years later, I became the co-clerk of the bazaar, and one of the first things I did was switch to a silent auction in the hope Friends might be persuaded to bid up items or compete. I finally axed the auction section entirely as a nonstarter. We raised more by just pricing things and letting people haggle. Competition was not part of our system.

Over the years, the meeting was a veritable whirlwind of money being used with simplicity, for peace, with integrity, in support of community and equity, and with an eye to stewardship of what we had. Thousands of dollars came from individuals to support the meeting and its programs. One program is Funds for Suffering, which paid fines and bail of members who were penalized for stands of conscience. Another is the Personal Aid Committee, which sends birthday and get-well notes, organizes rides and food for members and attenders, and provides occasional interest-free loans. Recently, small stipends have been granted by the Peace and Social Concerns Committee to support members’ ministries, such as postcard writing for the nonpartisan Get Out The Vote campaign that I felt led to lead. The committee also recently supported a young adult friend traveling to the Middle East to bear witness.

But the monetary cyclone does not stop with support of internal activities. Friends provide nearly two thousand sandwiches annually, partnering monthly with the Salvation Army as part of the Grate Patrol to feed the hungry. Friends give school supplies each September to students at a D.C. public school. And in a decades-long partnership with the World Bank, the meeting has provided thousands of shoeboxes with warm clothing items every December, and now also offers an equal number of backpacks for people in homeless shelters. Books and small games for children are in their backpacks.

The community’s partnering multiplies the work to support equity. The Mary Jane Simpson Scholarship is a great example of economic growth in a Friends’ economic sphere. The scholarship began with $1,000 per year being given to one student who graduated from a D.C. public school. The committee wanted to help more students so the fund now includes Friends from Bethesda (Md.) Meeting and Langley Hill (Va.) Meeting. Now more funding goes to six to ten students over four years; the students are also matched with a personal mentor. Our scholars, chosen from a population with a 10 percent or less graduation rate, have, with our help, an 80 percent or better graduation rate from a four-year program, albeit not always in four years.

A landing in the new addition overlooks the gardens. Photo by Chris Ferenzi Photography (chrisferenzi.com).

However, money is defined not only as a method to trade value but also a method to store value. One of Friends Meeting of Washington’s largest holdings is its meetinghouse, first built in 1930 to provide a meeting that welcomed all Friends when there were two Baltimore Yearly Meetings—one was part of Five Years Meeting, now Friends United Meeting; the other belonged to Friends General Conference. The meetinghouse has been a place where advocacy and action has been centered for decades. It has been an incubator for organizations and ideas such as Friends Committee on National Legislation, School for Friends daycare, the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, and the Washington Peace Center. During World War II, tons of clothing were sorted, sometimes mended, and then shipped to American Friends Service Committee for overseas relief.

The meetinghouse was pivotal in many critical events in D.C. In January of 1974, it was where the last draft resister of the Vietnam War era was arrested. It was the place from which hundreds of demonstrations and rallies went forth including Black Lives Matter rallies, climate events, and Middle East war protests. The physical presence of the meetinghouse on Florida Avenue in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, is a real value to Friends.

I was not at the meeting when they decided to buy Quaker House in 1970. The minutes of the meetings where decisions were made reflect real concern over incurring debt. They celebrated some years later when they burned the mortgage after years of faithful payment. 

When I was meeting treasurer in the mid-1980s, the furnace failed. Many elderly Friends did not attend in the summer because of the oppressive heat. While some Friends considered air conditioning frivolous, I presented this opportunity to combine air conditioning with the new heating system as a way make the space more welcoming in the summer heat. The cost of the air conditioning was a real concern but was greatly minimized by combining it with the cost of replacing the broken furnace. A Friend, who no longer attended in the summer heat said, “If we decide we need it, the money will be there.” We did, and it was. Weddings in July were suddenly possible!

At the end of the last century, after years of lackluster care of Friends Meeting of Washington’s two buildings—the meetinghouse and Quaker House—the meeting increasingly understood that it was not using one of their greatest assets to its fullest potential. Centrally located, in walking distance of the White House and the National Mall where so many demonstrations occur, it offered many benefits. A seed was planted to make it more energy efficient and more accessible (at one place, you had to step down one step, cross a sidewalk, and climb three steps to reach the sloping backyard).

The problem—besides agreeing on the design—was, of course, the cost. There was no question that what we were looking at was millions of dollars. But the structure needed care, repair, and updating.

The need for more investment in our building was clear to many. The ability to pay for a multimillion-dollar project was not. After nearly ten years of discussion, the meeting approved the renovation plan based, in part, on a business plan that included renting event space (weddings, bar mitzvahs, and television interviews). Seven years after that, the newly renovated building was lovely, comfortable, and very sustainable with solar panels and a green roof with beehives where honey is produced to help pay for their new home. Ramps and an elevator—not to mention leveling the yards to the same level as the floors in the building—have made it possible for everyone to get to almost every room in the buildings. New floors were added, as well as tasteful decorations, including information about various Friends, such as Bayard Rustin and Gordon Hirabayashi, to educate those who come into the space. 

This glorious place, the renovated building, had an open house on October 19, 2019, to welcome Friends and potential renters to the new space and to launch the events and rental outreach that would help pay the huge mortgage that came with the renovation.

We don’t look too closely when examining the ultimate sources of our wealth as a meeting and community. And we ignore the question about where our plastic tables and chairs will be dumped when they are no longer usable. All of our financial good works are just a drop in the economic ocean. What’s a meeting to do?

Then 2020 happened. 

Author David Foster Wallace told this story in a commencement address in 2005:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

That lack of recognition is the problem, isn’t it? We convince ourselves that we are doing good. We are being fair in our dealings with others. We are as green as possible, composting the meeting’s scraps and growing a green roof near solar panels and the bees. However, our actions exist within the water of world economics.

The plan to pay the mortgage by renting out the space for events was stymied by COVID and the lockdown. We had to rely on our investments as a larger part of the answer to the mortgage dilemma. 

We live to an extent on legacies from Quaker families which came to do good in the Americas and did well, in part because of labor from exploited persons. These funds continue to grow with our careful stewardship in Friends Fiduciary Corporation, where they are invested along Quaker principles. 

Many Friends feel that investments are contrary to integrity and equity. Others would suggest that investments are rarely for peace and simplicity. Nearly all investments make profits on the sweat equity of labor. Capital earns nothing on its own. It is hard not to invest in companies that do not have dirty hands of some kind.

Friends Fiduciary Fund’s solution to this dilemma is to be an active investor: it encourages the McDonald’s Corporation to end child labor in their restaurants and Amazon to respect workers’ rights. It encourages AbbVIE to provide more affordable drugs and Texas Instruments not to produce items that can be used in weapons. But can you say you invest equitably and with integrity when each of these companies have executives being paid tens of millions of dollars salary annually, which in some cases is more than 2,500 times the minimum wage that some of their staff are paid?

East gardens and terrace. Photo by Chris Ferenzi Photography (chrisferenzi.com).

I am not shaming Friends Fiduciary or saying what they are doing is wrong. They are doing what they intend and are paid to do: invest Quakers’ and others’ wealth to sustain and grow it, and also use it as leverage for corporations to do less evil. And they have done a wonderful job for Friends Meeting of Washington based on those goals.

Ultimately, the problem is with the economic system. As Pamela Haines said in her Pendle Hill Pamphlet Money and Soul, the economy, once primarily based on mutual support, is now based on greed.

In the good old days of June Cleaver, vacuuming wearing high heels and a simple strand of pearls, and of George Bailey being saved by all the people he helped in his honest and fervent way, mutual support was more the norm. But the real difference came from the tax system, which taxed income over $250,000 (an equivalent today of $2.9 million) at the top rate of 92 percent—not the 35 percent of today. The Texas Instruments CEO’s salary alone—​​ one of the lower salaries— would be $16 million minus $2.9 million exemption, times the 92 percent tax rate; that would pay about $12 million in tax revenue under inflation-adjusted 1953 tax laws.

Back in the day, that money paid for a lot. For education, roads, bridges, care of parks (and keeping them free), military and economic aid for other countries, and so much more. All those things that made it the “Good Old Days.”

Today, we are encouraged to embrace consumerism, “self-sufficiency” and, ultimately, greed. We don’t look too closely when examining the ultimate sources of our wealth as a meeting and community. And we ignore the question about where our plastic tables and chairs will be dumped when they are no longer usable. All of our financial good works are just a drop in the economic ocean. What’s a meeting to do?

James Baldwin wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” As Virginia Sutton, a member of Friends Meeting of Washington, once said many years ago. “God is the clerk of the results committee. All we are called to be is faithful.” We must be as faithful as we can be in this water in which we live.

The post Letting Our Money Speak appeared first on Friends Journal.

Ubuntu and African Friends’ Giving

Kenyan theologian and philosopher John Mbiti described the African philosophical concept of ubuntu: “I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” This idea contrasts with the more individualistic views of European philosophers such as René Descartes, who concluded, “I think therefore I am.”

The tradition of ubuntu (a word that derives from the Bantu languages of southern Africa) informs contemporary African Friends’ views of financially supporting their meetings and sharing with people facing poverty. Quakers from Kenya, Burundi, and Rwanda reflected on ubuntu and its influence on members’ financial commitment to their meetings and those in particular economic need.

“My concept of ubuntu emanates from the tenets of ‘I am because we are.’ The ‘we’ in this case is the monthly meeting,” said Sussie Ndanyi, a member of Langata Friends Church in Nairobi, Kenya. Ndanyi is also the deputy general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Kenya.

Ndanyi’s Friends meeting provides shared values, community, common meals, worship opportunities, and a chance to sing in the choir. She describes financial support as the lubricant that enables the wheels of the meeting’s activities to keep turning. Members of the meeting are willing to give money in accordance with scriptural advice, according to Ndanyi. Congregants realize that their contributions to the meeting benefit the surrounding community, so ubuntu motivates their giving.

“The concept of ubuntu has really shaped how I give tithes, offerings, and gifts at church. . . . Coming from a third-world country where most people struggle to make ends meet, the little that I get, I give in church to help those in need,” said Mercy Miroya, a member of Mukuyu Meeting in Kitale, Kenya, which is part of East Africa Yearly Meeting of Friends–North.

Photo by Hanna Morris on Unsplash

In addition to being motivated by ubuntu, Friends give to their meetings in order to follow the example of the Wise Men who brought gifts to the infant Jesus, according to Bainito Wamalwa, a member of Mukuyu Meeting. In addition to financial donations, Friends who are farmers offer gifts of bananas, chickens, and eggs.

Nizigiyimana Louis Pasteur, legal representative at Burundi Evangelical Friends Church, noted that a similar practice occurs in his country. In rural churches, Friends have a designated giving period called “firstfruits” in which congregants involved in farming and agriculture donate their first crops and firstborn cattle.

In Rwanda, the concept of ubuntu takes into account individually owned cows, goats, and other livestock. Members donate with community, family, and church in mind, explained Hakizimana Jean Baptiste, pastor of Kigali (Rwanda) Meeting. If one person offers hospitality to another, the implication is that they also have hosted the relatives, friends, and community of the guest, according to Hakizimana Jean Baptiste.

Ubuntu proscribes hoarding resources for oneself and instead urges individuals to share what they have, according to Esther Mombo, who is a member of Nyanko Meeting in Kenya. Mombo is a professor of history in the School of Theology at St. Paul’s University in Limuru, Kenya.

“Ubuntu as a concept is a concept of connectedness. It is a concept of living in community where people have enough,” Mombo said.

The Bible tells believers to tithe 10 percent of their income to support the temple priests, Mombo noted. Modern Quakers can use their tithes to pay their pastors’ salaries.

“They’ve taken their time to be of service,” Mombo said of Friends who work as pastors.

In addition to shaping African Friends’ thoughts on financially supporting their meetings, ubuntu inspires Quakers on the continent to share their resources with people facing poverty, both in their meetings and in the larger community.

Nizigiyimana Louis Pasteur of Burundi Evangelical Friends Church explained that the church has a department of mission that evangelizes but also determines the material needs of members and attenders. To help people facing poverty, the church offers instruction in entrepreneurship. The church also collects an offering each Sunday to support people facing poverty.

“What we are doing is we help the needy when we look at a particular case,” said Ronny Witaba, general secretary of Tuloi Yearly Meeting and member of Kamoron Friends Church in Nandi County, Kenya.

Tuloi Yearly Meeting has provided help in building houses and giving food, according to Witaba. The northeast area of the country is arid, so people need a lot of help with food. The United Society of Friends Women also helps with material needs in the country. The yearly meeting also particularly helps single women and widows who need economic assistance.

Some Friends have skills but no capital, Witaba noted. For example, some Quakers are tailors and welders but do not have the money to invest in equipment needed for their trades. The yearly meeting, which consists of six monthly meetings and 42 village meetings, would like to start a project to assist skilled workers by providing machines needed to do their work, as well as help marketing their products.

People who live in villages often rely on the financial assistance of their adult children who work in cities, according to Wamalwa of Mukuyu Meeting in Kenya. During COVID, village residents experienced food insecurity because so many of their adult children lost jobs in the cities. The church contributed maize and money to help the villagers for a year.

In 2021, a semi-arid county made drier by climate change had a landslide that demolished the marketplace, so the church provided food to those impacted, Wamalwa explained.

A farmer in Rwanda holds the cassava plant harvest. Photo byy kaze.

Deacons are responsible for gathering money for people in need, according to Jean Paul Nsekanabo, pastor of Kagarama Meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, and vice superintendent of Rwanda Yearly Meeting. Members also express their sense of ubuntu through visits to people in hospitals and prisons. When a family’s daughter is about to get married, women from the meeting visit the mother of the bride. The meeting also provides coffins for families who cannot afford to bury their departed loved ones, according to Nsekanabo.

When Quakers in rural areas harvest their crops, they bring the food to the meeting and share with the congregation and any economically vulnerable people, according to David Bucura, a member of Kicuro Meeting in Kigali, Rwanda.

The meeting has a committee of deacons who determine who in the congregation needs help, Bucura explained. The yearly meeting, monthly meeting, and local churches all have budgets, each of which has a line dedicated to helping financially vulnerable people.

In keeping with the spirit of ubuntu, the meeting is sending a missionary from Rwanda to war-torn South Sudan to plant a Quaker meeting there, according to Bucura.

Kigali Meeting reaches out to people who are starving, according to the meeting’s pastor, Hakizimana Jean Baptiste. There is a department in the monthly meeting that is concerned with both spiritual and physical needs. The meeting has smaller gatherings such as home groups, youth groups, and women’s groups, each of which has a leader who keeps abreast of members’ spiritual and temporal needs. The leader will discuss participants’ problems and see if they can help with advice and practical support.

Churches have been closed by the government, and this limits giving because it’s hard to find out how people are doing. Leaders of the youth groups that meet despite their church being closed compile donation lists, so the rest of the congregation can address members’ needs. Some common examples of practical support include building houses for members, paying for funerals, funding children’s school tuition, and addressing food insecurity, Hakizimana Jean Baptiste explained.

The congregation has not gathered for worship for four months, due to government closures, according to Hakizimana Jean Baptiste. New regulations require pastors to have theological degrees. The law requiring divinity degrees included a grace period of several years for pastors to go to seminary. The regulations require church buildings to be located outside residential areas due to congregations’ loud singing. The law also mandates that church buildings be constructed to avoid collapse and that they include parking lots accessible to people with disabilities. The government stipulates that church buildings must have lightning rods. In addition, churches must provide bathrooms that are accessible to people with disabilities, as well as accessible hand-washing stations. The church is working on meeting the requirements but has run out of money for the moment. 

Some church leaders in Rwanda have been involved in stealing congregants’ money and promising believers financial blessings that never materialized, Hakizimana Jean Baptiste explained. These debacles have discouraged would-be donors from contributing, even to reputable congregations.

“It’s so hard to reach out to the community if we’re not meeting together,” Hakizimana Jean Baptiste observed. In the meantime, Hakizimana Jean Baptiste holds Bible study groups for congregants, which allows him to check on the needs of some members. He hoped the church would reopen by Christmas.

Not only does ubuntu lead Friends to support their own congregations, it also leads them to share resources with people in the wider community with specific material needs. Churches and meetings pass around a special offering basket where people can contribute to help those in vulnerable economic situations, according to Bucura. Bucura and other African Friends grew up with the concept of ubuntu and bring this understanding of generosity to their giving. Bucura was the fifteenth child in his family and his parents taught him that if he had something to eat, he had to share it with his siblings.

“Ubuntu is remembering your neighbor and loving your neighbors as yourself,” Bucura said.

Ubuntu involves treating people in extreme financial need with love and respect. 

A related avenue of sharing that is rooted in traditional African values is the harambee, which means pulling together to support those in material need. For example, the community might share resources such as skill and money to build a hospital, house, or school. Mombo visited a meeting in which an elderly person did not have a home so the church community constructed a home for the person.

Meetings currently encourage members to tithe, according to Mombo. In rural villages, tithes can take the form of bringing eggs, chickens, sugar cane, and bananas to share with those in need or to be sold to raise money for the congregation.

African villagers in front of bricks used to build a house. Photo byy poco_bw.

African Friends’ views of supporting their monthly meetings and helping those facing poverty have evolved over the years. Before Kenya’s Mukuyu Meeting started, the missionaries who settled in the area did not request money, according to Wamalwa.

“We thought we go to church to be helped but not to give for the less privileged,” Wamalwa said.

Kenyan meetings own vast tracts of land donated by missionaries and early Kenyan Quakers, according to Ndanyi of Langata Friends Church. However, they are often cash-poor because they lack a formal collection system to generate income to pay clergy, maintain properties, and give to charity, she explained. Since Kenya gained independence from Britain in 1963, more Kenyan Quakers have earned advanced degrees, leading to greater personal wealth and increased donations to meetings.

Colonialism weakened the traditional reliance on ubuntu. When Quakers arrived in Kenya in 1900, communities shared property communally. The newly arrived Quakers initially followed the model of common ownership in establishing Christian villages, according to Esther Mombo, history professor in the School of Theology at St. Paul’s University in Limuru, Kenya. Britain officially colonized Kenya in 1920. Colonialism caused economic and cultural changes. Money, not land or animals, became the currency.

Mombo’s grandmother was among the first women from her village to go to the mission center where she learned to read and write. Communalism was still prevalent in Mombo’s grandmother’s time. People lived in community and worked in shared gardens.

Colonialism led to private ownership of land, according to Mombo. Those who went to school prepared to do jobs in the colonial framework. Instead of relying primarily on sharing or bartering, people earned money to buy things. The concept of money changed the historic system of sharing livestock and property and instead promoted individualism.

“So one could say individualism, the change from communalism to individualism, is basically a colonial and Christian aspect,” Mombo said.

Ubuntu can reach worldwide, according to Wamalwa. Quakers from the global north can express their sense of community with Friends in the global south by supporting such programs as efforts to dig boreholes to provide clean water, establishing a resource center for girls at risk of child marriage, and funding schools for female students.

People with a lot of money are poor in other ways; everyone has something to give, Mombo noted. Giving should be rooted in social justice and should be a way donors can challenge systems that impoverish people, Mombo suggested.

The post A Concept of Connectedness appeared first on Friends Journal.

My Walden Pond is not
even a lake or creek
or even a marsh or puddle
made overnight of rain, it doesn’t
have a place in the land
but only in my hands since
it’s sunk in the territory
of a ceramic cup of tea,
this tiny sea I can make
into a tsunami with a too-swift
step, though mostly
it waits for me see
myself all the way
to the bottom.

The post Where I Go appeared first on Friends Journal.

Don’t worry so much, and so often,
       about yourself.

Be still, and learn the wisdom
       of something only felt:

Sometimes God moves through you
       on His way to someone else.

The post Be Still appeared first on Friends Journal.

I am not the form I occupy nor
the mind stalking me.
                                    Knowing
should inspire me to better care
for the ground I tread and the
treasure I touch, should suffice
to justify bold abandonment of
hoarding, spur dispassion for the
frond of lust tickling every quarter.

True my eye and keep it squared,
focused on the one fact that matters,
in whose name pray we all.

The post True My Eye appeared first on Friends Journal.

Are sacraments merely distractions?

Did Andy Stanton-Henry’s professor not explain the theological position behind our stance on the so-called sacraments? (“More Spiritual than God” by Stanton-Henry, FJ Oct. 2024).

The mainstream churches focus on water baptism because they believe that the one who can baptise in the Spirit is not available to do so: early Friends found that He is. The mainstream churches established a system of ceremonial magic and a body of trained magicians to create a conduit, a medium, for making contact with a God that they believed to be remote: early Friends found that their contact with God was, quite literally, immediate, without mediation or medium. Mainstream churches celebrate a memorial meal for one that they believe is absent: early Friends found that He was present! Christ had come, they came to believe by experiment, to teach His people Himself.

Which of these theological positions does Stanton-Henry disagree with?

The Quaker tradition is a blessed relief to those of us who find sacraments at best a distraction, at best an unnecessary nothing, maybe even an impediment. Let us not repeat the mistakes of the mainstream churches and add in what is not required.

Keith Braithwaite
Glossop, UK

Love and obedience

That line toward the end of Adrian Glamorgan’s “The Devoted Path” (FJ Dec. 2024) that “We speak truth to power and mean it, but we do so with a compassion that knows that improvement is possible and that the powerful can be won over” reminds me of Martin Luther King Jr.’s classic sermon where he says, “I’m so glad the good Lord did not ask us to like our enemies . . . but I will love them, and we will both be winners.”

It’s too easy to hate governments, the rich, the powerful, the influencers, and especially toward those who appear to be doing something wrong in our eyes. I personally remain convinced that annual general elections, where “we the people” get to vote on budgets put forward by our government, opposition, and any other candidates, is the way forward to a “new creation.” I know that I (and everyone!) should always hold the knowledge that I/we may be mistaken.

One year at a time, sweet Jesus.

David Tehr
Perth, Australia

Long-term, love only works as a voluntary choice not inspired by fear or desire.

One tiny-yet-significant quibble is with the word obedience, even in the context of God, as such a word is too easily twisted and abused to apply to imperfect and unequal human relationships. Obedience perpetuates our winner-take-all, majority rules systems excluding most of us and preventing mutual governance via full equality of consensus/spiritual union.

Fortunately, climate change will be quickly addressed by global governments when costs rise too high, just as it was with the ozone hole a few decades ago. When major coastal cities start routinely flooding and grinding to a halt, then the billionaires will more quickly shift investments to clean, green energy solutions, and press central bankers to raise interest rates to slow global economies to reduce carbon emissions. No need to fear, just keep listening to our neighbors so we may have a chance to mutually share our insights.

Thank you again for a very insightful and inspirational article highlighting ancient ways to improve ourselves to better help our world.

George Gore
Chicago Area, Ill.

Rethinking economics

I am really intrigued by the video “How Quakers Can Rethink the Economy” (QuakerSpeak.com interview with Alicia Mendonca-Richards, Oct. 2024). I am indeed myself depending more and more on my connection to what I call the “flowing of love” as I decide how to befriend each moment. It is often amazing to me how well things work out. The books I am finding most compelling are Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul by John Phillip Newell.

I wish Mendonca-Richards had been able to share at least one example of what she was proposing, though I know she didn’t have much time. I also wish she could have spoken a bit more slowly. She is charming and I certainly wish her well!

Sarah Campbell
New York, N.Y.

Acquisition and distribution of resources to sustain life (i.e., economics) have always been central to human societies (and in a sense all forms of life). Cooperation and mutual aid and support have generally been the most successful paradigms. But as humans developed increasingly more abundant paradigms for life sustainment, they often diverged into more uncharitable and exploitative ways of organizing their societies. The currently most pervasive paradigm in Western societies is capitalism, which has been described as “the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.”

Janet Nagel
Greensboro, N.C.

Do not remove

Over 25 years ago I, a lapsed Protestant, attended St. Benedict’s Feast Day at the Benedictine Priory in Weston, Vt. (“Catholic to Quaker” interview with Roberta Bothwell, QuakerSpeak.com Apr. 2021). During the picnic after the service, one of my friends approached me in an agitated state. “Sandy,” he said, “God spoke to me. He said you have to find a church.” I thought for a moment and said, “You’re right.” He replied, “Don’t tell me. Tell God.”

On the ride home I talked this over with another friend. She suggested I try the Friends meeting near her old house, which I was now renting. I knew of Quakers, but nothing about them, so she offered to accompany me.

We sat in the meetinghouse, which had been built in the 1700s. The bench was hard, and as I sat I wondered what the heck I was doing there. Then a man stood and spoke about his experience of returning to meeting after some time away, describing what I later learned was a “gathered meeting.”

After meeting several members spoke to me. One forever endeared himself to me by grabbing up a copy of Faith and Practice with a cover marked by bold words, “Do Not Remove from Meeting,” and saying, “Here. Take this home and read it.”

I was hooked.

Sandy Hale
Villas, N.J.

A Friends meeting with family history

I was very interested in Cheryl Weaver’s article about discovering Quakerism at the Orchard Park (N.Y.) Meetinghouse (“Silent Steadfastness,” FJ Aug. 2024). My grandparents lived about 200 yards east of the meetinghouse on East Quaker Road from 1937 until my grandmother died in 2004. My father and his sisters used to skate on the little pond on the other side of the road from the meetinghouse. Quakers were a big part of the early settlement of Orchard Park. Right across the road from Nana’s is the Obadiah Baker Homestead, with the historical marker out in front noting that it was a stop on the Underground Railroad. My aunt Susan used to say that the creek that ran parallel to Quaker Road was called “Smokes Creek” because of the people who would hide along it.

I visited my grandmother a lot and in the years since I became a Quaker in 1991. I would usually go to worship there on Sundays. I tried to get Nana to go with me, but she never did. I’m not sure she ever actually went into the meetinghouse. My father’s younger sister Wendy remembers that the various other churches in Orchard Park would occasionally have services in the meetinghouse—she told me she had been to church there herself but as a Presbyterian!

The Quaker meeting was revived around 1990. I really felt close to the old Quaker settlers who had gone to meeting there. Weaver writes about looking out the window at the trees in the graveyard. That’s a view I often contemplated when I worshiped there. Thanksgiving was a frequent time to visit Nana, and I remember looking out the window into the gray morning (fall and winter around Buffalo can be pretty bleak), the view livened only by the fall colors of the leaves. Thank you for this wonderful article.

Daniel Read
Durham, N.C.

Correction: 

In “Hope’s Many Answers” by Sharlee DiMenichi (FJ Dec. 2024), the photo caption on page 28 for the School of the Spirit Faithful Meetings program incorrectly identified the location of the group of Friends shown in one of the photos. The retreat pictured on the left took place at the Red Cedar (Mich.) Meetinghouse, not Chattanooga (Tenn.) Meetinghouse.

Forum letters should be sent with the writer’s name and address to forum@friendsjournal.org. Each letter is limited to 300 words and may be edited for length and clarity. Because of space constraints, we cannot publish every letter. Letters can also be left as comments on individual articles on Friendsjournal.org.

The post Forum, January 2025 appeared first on Friends Journal.

On Listening to the Inner Voice

Some people are lucky enough to grow up in environments where they are nourished, cherished, and loved. They learn to love and value themselves into adulthood. The rest of us, not so much. Our mental wiring is set to a channel of constant self-sabotaging chatter. In his book of daily meditations, Bread for the Journey, the late Catholic priest Henri Nouwen described his experience this way:

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, “Prove that you are a good person.” Another voice says, “You’d better be ashamed of yourself.” There also is a voice that says, “Nobody really cares about you,” and one that says, “Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful.”

Nouwen was Catholic and gay at a time when those identities provided fertile ground for deep conflicts in his heart and mind. Although he grew up in a comfortable home, he never felt good enough for his father, and he later admitted to an addiction to others’ approval and affection. He suffered a deep depression from December 1987 to June 1988 triggered by the breakup of a close friendship. Looking down a long, loveless, and lonely tunnel of celibacy, he questioned his faith and his life. Nouwen was able to go on retreat to receive therapy, and there he kept a journal that was published four months after his death in 1996. The book, The Inner Voice of Love, is the most direct depiction of his struggle to reconcile his inner turmoil with his faith and regulate his emotions.

Nouwen found divine assistance with faithful attentiveness to the Voice Within. The excerpt above from Bread for the Journey continues:

But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, “You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you.” That’s the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen. That’s what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us “my Beloved.”

To Nouwen, the voice of love (or God for him) was a prayer of the Presence. He was referring to the voice that spoke to Jesus early in his adulthood, as described in Matthew 3:16–17: “After the baptism of Jesus, just as he came up from the water, the skies opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him, and from the heaven there came a voice which said: ‘This is my dearly loved son, in whom I delight.’” There was no such sudden miracle for Nouwen, but in his darkest moments, he clung to the small voice that spoke to him as it had spoken to Jesus. The discipline of listening to love and ignoring the voice of disapproval helped him overcome his feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and futility. It made him feel loved and lovable.

The story about Jesus in Matthew 3 has two parts: the baptism and the promise of union with divine love. Christianity institutionalized the baptism part, while the first generation of Quakers embraced the spiritual embodiment part. Early Friends believed that divine love and grace flowed into Jesus not through his own merit but simply because he was a beloved child of humanity, and that they could also embody the Divine as an outcome of their convincement.

Later in his ministry, Jesus recalled his spiritual embodiment when authorities asked him what the greatest commandment was, in Matthew 22:34–40:

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they collected together. Then one of them, to test him, asked this question: “Teacher, what is the great commandment in the Law?” His answer was, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great first commandment. The second, which is like it, is this: ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the prophets.”

The first commandment is unequivocal, but the second commandment is ambiguous. To many Friends, it means loving our neighbors as much as we love ourselves, and we are pretty good at that. However, there is a reverse meaning that Jesus intended as well: divine will is for us to love ourselves as much as we love our neighbors. That is the discipline of spiritual embodiment.

How do we learn to love ourselves if we did not learn it in childhood? One way is to change our interior script by attending to the Inner Voice of Love. The voice may belong to God, Gaia, Christ, Oneness, the Great Mysterious, or the universal force of love that Martin Luther King Jr. described this way: “Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. He who loves is a participant in the being of God.”

Accessing the Voice Within is not limited to a specific time or location; it can comfort us, console us, re-parent us, and help us regulate our emotions anytime and anywhere. To do so, love must become a new soundtrack playing within, a discipline of unceasing prayer.

My own Inner Voice had acquired no vocabulary of love, so I looked to the writings of early Friends and found they knew about the power of love. In 1663, Isaac Penington wrote about how love can be transformative:

What is love? What shall I say of it, or how shall I in words express its nature? It is the sweetness of life; it is the sweet, tender, melting nature of God, flowing up through his seed of life into the creature, and of all things making the creature most like unto himself, both in nature and operation. It fulfils the law, it fulfils the gospel; it wraps up all in one, and brings forth all in the oneness. It excludes all evil out of the heart, it perfects all good in the heart. A touch of love doth this in measure; perfect love doth this in fullness.

I latched onto the florid style of George Fox, in his Epistle 270, which I personalized and memorized to think and hear in constant communication with Spirit:

The light that shines in my heart gives me knowledge of Divine.
I know the heavenly treasure in my earthly vessel.
The day star arises and the day dawns in my own heart.
I am a temple of Christ.
Christ dwells with me, walks with me, and sups with me.

I also took the liberty of adapting Thomas Kelly to my needs, from a passage in the “Holy Obedience” essay in his A Testament of Devotion:

I offer my whole self in joyful abandon to Love Within.
Turn in humble wonder to the Light, faint though it may be.
Breathe a silent prayer for forgiveness and begin again.Admit no discouragement, but ever return quietly to Love.

Over time, and with discipline, the repetition of words like these reset my mind and heart, and rewired my patterns of thinking. It is still a constant prayer of the Presence that flows into me with love, and it never leaves much room for the nagging voice of self-hate.

The post A Joyful Abandon to Love appeared first on Friends Journal.

An Interview with Quaker Minister Windy Cooler on Interpersonal Violence

On November 7, 2024, Windy Cooler, convener of Life and Power: Quaker Discernment on Abuse, announced the release of the outcome of that project: a common testimony, in which 41 Quakers answered the following query: Do we live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of child abuse, intimate partner abuse, and all forms of violence within the family and community? The common testimony is a compilation of quotes from individual testimonies of survivors of interpersonal violence. The survivors spoke with trained volunteer listeners over the course of two years. Each person whose quotes were included explicitly gave permission for their words to be used.

Cooler, an embraced public minister who is a member of Sandy Spring (Md.) Meeting, envisions the common testimony as a tool to help meetings address interpersonal violence by promoting justice and its healing effect. The project provides a discernment process called “Coming Together for Continuing Revelation” to help meetings respond compassionately to violence.

Cooler joined Sandy Spring Meeting in 2019. She survived domestic violence in a Quaker home. She was asked to leave her previous meeting in the midst of upheaval related to the violence she experienced. Baltimore Yearly Meeting, of which Cooler is a member, in recent decades adopted the language of “embraced” ministry instead of recorded or released ministry. Sandy Spring Meeting currently embraces Cooler’s ministry. The embracement involves ongoing clearness, spiritual support through regular committee meetings, mutual accountability to the ministry, and regularly updated travel minutes. The meeting also has a fund for meeting members with a full-time call to embraced ministry.

Cooler’s next project is the Friends Public Ministry Incubator, under the care of Sandy Spring Meeting. The incubator’s mission is to increase local worshiping communities’ ability to support and be accountable to Quaker ministry through education, discernment, and spiritual support for all Friends in the ministry.

Friends Journal talked with Cooler via Zoom about Life and Power. The interview has been lightly edited.

Life and Power logo designed by Mandy FordSharlee DiMenichi: How would you describe the training that listeners in the Life and Power project received to prepare them to hear survivors’ experiences?

Windy Cooler: We met for a number of hours on two occasions to practice the listening skills that we used in Life and Power. The process is one that [Quaker pastor] Margaret Webb (who was not a listener in this project) and I created in 2020 and 2021. We created the process for my supervised ministry that was a part of my master of divinity degree at Earlham School of Religion. I use this listening process to help Quaker communities that are in some kind of crisis or intractable conflict, and that’s what it was designed to address. More tools besides clearness committees and mediation seem to be in order in our communities.

This was the first group of people that I ever taught to be listeners. Since then, I have taught this process to others—but not specifically to be used around abuse—at Woodbrooke, Beacon Hill, and Friends General Conference Gathering. And there will be another six-week course coming up at Woodbrooke sometime in the spring.

It’s like the game Othello. On the game box, it says the game takes “minutes to learn and a lifetime to master.” The approach is culturally familiar but also very culturally foreign: it’s very foreign to the way that people naturally want to behave. I would say that the training really focuses on retraining ourselves to respond in a way that we have never been taught to respond when someone communicates their deepest truths to us. It’s necessary to solicit the deepest truths, reflect them back, and treat the focus person with the respect each deserves.

SD: When people were going through the process of retraining on how to respond, what were some of the things they had to unlearn?

WC: Listeners were selected because they had experience in therapeutic or pastoral care environments. The way that they were accustomed to listening was to be very responsive and conversational. They were used to asking a lot of questions during the focus person’s testimony. That is not something we do in this process. It’s really much more closely related to the Quaker clearness process than to any kind of therapeutic listening that they had previous experience with.

Listeners in this project had skin in the game and were very concerned about interpersonal violence in Quaker communities. The tendency to express outrage at what happened to the person in front of you—a person you may have a relationship with and yet had never heard their story before—was something that was very hard. It was hard for all of us to keep the urge to express outrage in check, but it was necessary: not because no one should express outrage, but in that role where you are listening and helping a person listen to themselves, you have to maintain your role as a mirror.

SD: What kind of debriefing and support did listeners participate in after hearing survivors’ stories?

WC: I did a very poor job of debriefing listeners, and I did a very poor job of having any kind of debriefing process for myself; that’s something I really regret. This was not because of lack of intention. We had talked about having a debriefing process; there were just no resources. The lack of [financial] resources available for this project—or any projects related to interpersonal violence in the Quaker world—really hurt it. It made the project go on for longer than we had intended; it was intended to be a one-year process, but it ended up being two years.

I can’t speak for other listeners, but I experienced a lot of stress because I didn’t have any kind of peer support or debriefing process set up for myself. Material poverty caused some of the project’s failures because everyone that was participating was a gig worker [who volunteered instead of working at a gig]. Every hour spent on this project is an hour that is taking food out of your mouth. We were unable to consistently compensate for the time. People were attracted to the work but not because of the hope of compensation: it was always very clear that there would be none. It became very hard, in reality, to choose to spend another hour on unpaid labor.

SD: How does the structured process prevent the shushing and eldering that Quakers might otherwise employ to suppress stories of abuse?

WC: The process is based, in part, on the trauma theory espoused by [psychiatrist and researcher] Judith Lewis Herman. She talks about creating spaces of safety, memory, and then reintegration. The listener restrains themself from making comments. The listener serves as a container and a mirror, restraining themself in order to create a sense of safety. They are creating a space of psychological safety in which the focus person can hear themself completely. Each focus person receives a typed copy of the testimony. It’s made very clear that nothing will ever happen with that testimony that they haven’t consented to. Anyone who was quoted in the common testimony explicitly gave me permission for that version of what they said to appear. Some people did not consent, so their testimony did not appear.

In the group process now available to meetings, someone is appointed to read aloud the common testimony twice to begin the first worship sharing session, in which people repeat back only what they heard. Someone who gave testimony or a survivor [of abuse] might be present in that session, and the other participants would likely not know that.

Having people repeat back only what they heard is a way of restraining some of the responses we typically get such as, Oh, that’s outrageous! I can’t believe that that happened to someone in our community! That didn’t happen in our community! Who are these people? I have just the solution. I have a story about my own survivorship.

These responses are not helpful. I have found in watching this process that shutting down all of that in that first worship sharing is enormously helpful in allowing everyone to hear and indicate they have heard by repeating back what they have heard. Often survivors have never been heard or have never attempted to be heard in their community. They can actually see that everyone is capable of hearing them when [those who listened] repeat back exactly what was said to them.

Repeating back what was said feels, I think, a little anxiety provoking in the moment; people may be primed to feel impatient. However, repetition is essential for creating the foundation for the kind of conversations they want to have later.

If you’ve ever talked to someone, been triggered by something [they had done], and they don’t acknowledge first that they hurt you, you’re not getting anywhere. This process lets survivors know that they have been heard. It also takes listeners out of that place of having been triggered; they go to a different place in their nervous system by saying, Oh, I heard this. They go to a place of curiosity instead of fight or flight where they can say, I see.

You then build on that curiosity by going into a second worship sharing, where only things that people are curious about are stated: only questions are offered. It’s really important—no matter how urgent those questions feel—for no one to attempt to answer them. It is important that you maintain the place of curiosity. And again, you can think about one-on-one relationships. If you’re talking and trying to vent your feelings and the other person immediately goes into problem solving, do you feel heard? Repeating back what has been said puts people in a place in their nervous system where they can actually act on Quaker theology, which is about listening, curiosity, and creating a new world.

It’s in the third session—which hopefully takes place after some food and rest, and someone who provides pastoral care is present—that people are allowed to speak conversationally with each other again. It’s a work session, but you’re not trying to come up in one hour with a solution to a multigenerational problem. Instead, the goal is to create a list of queries that will guide future work: intentional work in interpersonal violence, as the years go by.

The process brings to the fore interpersonal violence, which can take the form of sexual violence, racial violence, micro-aggressions, gender-based violence, domestic violence, elder abuse, and financial abuse. In fact, there are many ways we hurt each other in the world, and therefore in our meetings. The process allows us to build queries around these hurtful abuses that are specific to each community. I believe this is a better alternative than going to some expert organization that will tell you what the right answer is and that all that is needed is to check your boxes.

I’m critical of such externally based solutions because I’ve never actually seen them work in reality. I used to work in this way, and in the last couple of years, I’ve realized it doesn’t work. What happens in your nervous system when you engage that way—just checking boxes—is you’re not embodying the problem, and the problem is an embodied one. We all have experience with interpersonal violence. To be reminded of this experience, to go to that place of Quaker theology and culture that has drawn us together in our worshiping community, and to consider queries created while deeply listening is what the process is designed to do.

SD: What motivates Quakers to be reluctant to hold people accountable for upholding an abusive status quo?

WC: I actually have stopped using the language of accountability, so I’m glad you asked the question that way. I’m going to push back on it a little bit. I’m actually for accountability, but when I used to talk about it, I meant addressing the wrongdoer in some way, as in, why did you do this? And I hear that in your question too, but . . . why? Why are we upholding the status quo of interpersonal abuse? Why can’t we hold each other accountable to something different? That is now the way I hear language about accountability. I don’t want to be offensive, Sharlee, because I don’t really mean it in a bad way, but when I look at myself when I used to use that language, it was incurious or something. The question begins with why, so it sounds like curiosity, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt more like I was asking, why are you pissing me off? Why are you making me angry? That isn’t a curious question; it’s blaming. What this process does is acknowledge my own capacity for violence. It acknowledges everyone’s capacity for violence; it acknowledges our capacity to be victims; it acknowledges our vulnerabilities in radical ways. It’s a way of loving each other more completely, and I think that it’s very uncomfortable for us to love each other in that way.

I’m trying not to use a lot of psychobabble in my answers to you, as though it were a trauma workshop, but in my work as a trauma educator, I talk about attachment theory, which many people are familiar with. I think that people with secure attachments are very rare; I don’t know these people. Most of us are, to some degree or another, anxious or avoidant, which means we either cling too tightly to others and violate their boundaries or we run away from other people and refuse to let them in. And I think that the work toward becoming a more secure person and the work to become a more secure community is going to be deeply uncomfortable, because we have not experienced a world in which it is safe both to expect and to give reliable love. We have to be prepared to receive reliable love. This is not so much about holding people accountable as it is about opening up in order to create the environment in which we can be reliably loving to one another in the world as it really exists.

SD: What are some of the most important insights you gained from the research of Judith Brutz?

WC: I met Judy at a Friends General Conference Gathering several years ago. I had learned of her work from an elder at my meeting who had participated in Judy’s ministry about violence in the family. Judy had had a hard time of it. Back in the mid-1980s she published two peer-reviewed studies on interpersonal violence in Quaker families. We Quakers had as high a rate of interpersonal violence as any other population in the United States. In families where someone carried a peace ministry, it was actually higher. I have seen policies that were authored at that time in response to Judy’s work that prevented workshops on family violence. These policies are still actively in place.

[Editor’s note: Some Quaker organizations have formal written policies that state they will not host educational events about interpersonal abuse. There are also informal barriers to hosting such events. Some Quaker elders have experienced trauma when listening to survivors’ stories that detail Friends’ capacity for violence, according to Cooler. Survivors speaking of their experiences to their Quaker communities could demonstrate emotional dysregulation, and those listening to their stories were unprepared to support them, Cooler explained.]

Judy was a PhD sociologist. People who were not PhD sociologists told her that she must have done her research incorrectly. Eventually, she gave up the ministry. She died recently, I am sad to say. It is so important to name our elders and our peers in ministry, so I name Judy’s life and the impact of her work on her and our community.

The second Judith that is key to the Life and Power project is Judith Herman, who we were talking about earlier. Judith Herman changed my life. She’s one of the few authors where I can say, “I picked this book up as one person and put it down as a different person.”

Before I read her, I was convinced there could be a policy model for addressing interpersonal violence. As a survivor myself, I thought that if I could just find the perfect policy and convince other Friends to adopt it—a kind of technocratic approach—I thought I would feel heard. I think many of us in the Quaker community thought that we would be heard, if we could just find or write and implement the right policy.

There are many things that helped me to see that’s not true. For one thing, some Quaker meetings did begin to enact good policy, and it didn’t change anything. For another thing, I saw in her work something that felt true to me. She said trauma is not a psychiatric issue; it’s a justice issue. What she meant by justice was not holding people accountable necessarily or punishing them. To be more precise, it was about changing the world in a fundamental way: increasing our capacity to hear each other. She talks about how trauma is isolation: isolation from yourself, from your truth, and from your community, and the people that you need to love you.

I have added to this an understanding that it is also alienation from the Divine, which is a really serious thing. Quaker community is where the Divine is speaking to the Divine’s own self through our relationships. What does it mean to be a traumatized Quaker: to be separated from yourself, your community, and from God?

Dr. Herman’s treatment of trauma is about the community responding to trauma and re-absorbing the traumatized person intentionally. Her approach is one of commitment; it’s committed love. It’s staying the course with each other, and that’s what I think we’re here to do.

It entirely changed my frame of mind for approaching survivorship and also in recognizing that in the Quaker community we must increase survivors’ voices about violence. I’ve heard explicitly so many times that we don’t need to revisit the past; we only need to prevent future violence. Dr. Herman helped me to see the reason that idea felt wrong was because it was wrong: we will never prevent future instances of abuse if we can’t talk about abuse. How can we prevent something that is taboo to talk about? If you understand that trauma is ongoing violence against the people in our communities, to say that you can prevent future abuse without addressing the topic is nonsense, because it’s ongoing.

SD: Could you explain a bit more about the understanding of trauma not being a psychiatric issue but instead a justice issue?

WC: So what I understand Dr. Herman to be saying is an inherent criticism of psychiatry, which is interesting as it comes from a psychiatrist at Harvard. I share a concern about psychiatry, even though I’ve had lots of therapy. I love therapy and recommend it to people, as a matter of fact, but psychiatry focuses on the individual and on a person’s behavior. In the United States, psychiatry often takes the individual out of commitment and relationship with other people and puts them in a little chemical box that can be controlled. Justice is a more vague idea than medicine allows for. But Dr. Herman specifically talks about something called a “healing justice”—not a phrase she came up with—by which she means a world in which survivors (she calls them extraordinary survivors) can be in positions of leadership as whole people and help heal the world through the wisdom they have gained by surviving trauma. I think a world in which justice is present is a world in which we can fully, adequately, meaningfully love each other and bring each other into environments of growth and real peace.

SD: How do you explain the dearth of writing on how the peace testimony applies to family relationships?

WC: There’s the unvarnished version, which is about misogyny and racism. It is more comfortable to focus on what you perceive as the world outside of your family and community, and to project yourself into that. It is more difficult to take a good, hard look at yourself, your own behavior, your family, and your Quaker community. It’s not sexy to take a good, hard look at the people around you. There’s no reward for it, as you can see by the fact that I’ve spent 12 years of my life doing full-time, unpaid labor. When I ended that work, nobody came and threw a party for me; nobody gave me a Nobel Prize.

I don’t want to make this about me, but I am a good example. This was really hard work, and I’m not alone in it. There are dozens of Quakers in the United States also doing this hard work. We’ve lost our meetings; we’ve lost relationships; we’ve lost income; we’ve been made vulnerable by it. Why would anybody choose to do that?

It’s White supremacist behavior and male supremacist behavior to be concerned with what you can conquer: war on the outside versus what is slippery and difficult.

SD: What are some examples of how a meeting can respond in healing ways after going through the process of continuing revelation based on the common testimony?

WC: I have faith that if meetings become aware of this process and use it, they will come up with some creative stuff that I can’t foresee. I am entirely sincere when I say wisdom doesn’t come from outside of us; it comes from within us. I’m mostly curious about what can come of this when we experiment with it. I would like to see meetings become spaces where, first of all, we can actually talk to each other about our real-life experience and our individual relationships with violence.

The post Preparing Ourselves to Receive Reliable Love appeared first on Friends Journal.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the two most widely read new articles this year were about George Fox, widely recognized as the founder of the Religious Society of Friends—after all, 2024 marked the 400th anniversary of his birth. But Friends had contemporary concerns as well, which spoke to issues at the center of our spiritual lives and our relationships with one another.

5. True to Your Word

An anonymous Friend told us that many Quakers are living in faithful polyamorous marriages, and that we should all learn to acknowledge they can be as faithful in their way as partners in monogamous couples. “Quietly carving out space for ethically non-monogamous marriages harms no one,” they said, “nor does it force any marriage to be open. Rather, this small mental shift embraces more of the joyful diversity found within the Religious Society of Friends.”

4. White Supremacy Culture in My Clerking

“I recently served as clerk of the board of trustees at a Friends school. It was a turbulent time for the school, and board meetings were often contentious,” Michael Levi recounted. “I offer the following account as a personal case study in identifying and wrestling with racial harm in a specific Quaker practice.”

3. Dear God, Help Me Here

Staff writer Sharlee DiMenichi spoke to several Quakers with experience working as chaplains in hospitals or hospices, as well as those who offer palliative care for dying patients, about prayer and healing. “The most important thing,” one hospice worker reflected, “is coming from your heart and being in your own spiritual alignment and letting God work through you.” 

2. The Radical Original Vision of George Fox

“The spiritual discoveries and direct experiences of the first Quakers were so radical that their fellow Christians called them blasphemers and heretic,” Marcelle Martin reminded us—and George Fox was in the center of the storm, “proclaiming the possibility of being restored to the original state in which humanity had been created, in the image and likeness of God, with a perfect, divine nature.”

1. George Fox Was a Racist

“George Fox was racist, and he perpetuated the notion of slavery,” Johanna Jackson and Naveed Moeed wrote, a stark contrast to the celebratory tone surrounding much of the attention paid to Fox this summer. “Friends reading this article may try to argue a way out of this, but the evidence is clear and we should embrace it.… What we are asked to do as Quakers is understand what it means to have leaders in our faith who are deeply flawed.”

Banner images: Jono Erasmus; David Pereiras; Robert Spence

Catch up on past years’ lists!Top Articles of 2023

• #5. Three Common Fallacies of Quaker Leadership by Andy Stanton-Henry.
• #4. Speaking Up for Palestinian Rights Now by Steve Chase.
• #3. A Visit to the Hector Meetinghouse by Chester Freeman.
• #2. From Atheist to Friends by John Marsh.
• #1. Young Adults Want What Early Friends Had by Olivia Chalkley.

Top Articles of 2022

• #5. The Art of Quaker Quilts by Vicki Winslow.
• #4. Quakers Must Take a Stand on Abortion by Erick Williams.
• #3. Safe Meetings Don’t Avoid Conflict by Donald W. McCormick.
• #2. The Peace Testimony and Ukraine by Bryan Garman.
• #1. Flawed Quaker Heroes by Kathleen Bell.

Top Articles of 2021

• #5. A Quaker Call to Abolition and Creation by Lucy Duncan.
• #4. Pistachios and Cats by Lynn Gazis.
• #3. When Quakers Were the Karens by Elizabeth Cazden.
• #2. The Mystical Experience by Donald W. McCormick.
• #1. Are There White People in the Bible? by Tim Gee.

Top Articles of 2020

• #5. A Quaker Antiracist Reading List
• #4. Quaker Meetings Respond to Coronavirus by Katie Breslin.
• #3. Recognizing Racism, Seeking Truth by Inga Erickson.
• #2. Careful Discernment or Spiritual Timidity? by Kat Griffith.
• #1. The Middle-Class Capture of Quakerism and Quaker Process by Donald W. McCormick.

Top Articles of 2019

• #5 Selling Out to Niceness by Ann Jerome.
• #4 Building White Racial Stamina by Liz Oppenheimer.
• #3 A Quaker School’s Response to Allegations of Sexual Abuse by Erik Hanson.
• #2 We Are Not John Woolman by Gabbreell James.
• # 1 Slavery in the Quaker World by Katharine Gerbner.

Top Articles of 2018

• #5 Are We Really Christian? by Margaret Namubuya Amudavi.
• #4 What People Really Want from Church and Quaker Meeting by Donald W. McCormick.
• #3 Simple Living Beyond the Thrift Store by Philip Harnden.
• #2 Can Quakerism Survive? by Donald W. McCormick.
• # 1 Civility Can Be Dangerous by Lucy Duncan.

Top Articles of 2017:

• #5 Mystical Experience, the Bedrock of Quaker Faith by Robert Atchley.
• #4 Weeping to Joy by Betsy Blake.
• #3: A Mysticism for Our Time by Roger Owens.
• #2: It Breaks My Heart by Kate Pruitt.
• #1: A Quaker Approach to Living with Dying by Katherine Jaramillo.

Top articles of 2016:

• #5 Framing the Light by Jean Schnell.
• #4 Why Quakers Stopped Voting by Paul Buckley.
• #3 Affirming Ivy by Laura Noel.
• #2 The Third Reconstruction by William J Barber II.
• #1 A Gospel of Quaker Sexuality by Kody Gabriel Hersh.

Top articles of 2015:

• #5 Baltimore, the Time Is Now by Sarah Bur.
• #4 Reflections on Selma by Gail Whiffen.
• #3 What Quakers and Catholics Might Learn from One Another by John Pitts Corry.
• #2 Realizing Wholeness: Reflections from a Gay Palestinian Quaker by Sa’ed Atshan.
• #1 Beyond Goodness Sex by Su Penn.

Top articles of 2014:

• #5 Dear Friend/Good White Person by Regina Renee.
• #4 Sustainable Simplification Shuns “Shoulds” and Sacrifice by Chuck Hosking.
• #3 A Quaker Argument against Gun Control by Matthew Van Meter.
• #2 My Experience as an African American Quaker by Avis Wanda McClinton.
• #1 White Narcissism by Ron McDonald.

Top articles of 2013:

• #5: Bum-Rush the Internet interview with Jon Watts.
• #4: Categorically Not the Testimonies by Eric Moon.
• #3: Are Quakers Christian, Non-Christian, or Both? by Anthony Manousos.
• #2: Quakerism Left Me by Betsy Blake.
• #1: We Think He Might Be a Boy by Su Penn.

Top articles of 2012:

• #5: The Safety of Silence by Lindsey Mead Russell.
• #4: Eight Questions on Convergent Friends, an interview with Robin Mohr.
• #3: Quakers Are Way Cooler Than You Think by Emma Churchman.
• #2: Homosexuality: A Plea to Read the Bible Together by Douglas C Bennett.
• #1: When Quaker Process Fails by John M. Coleman.

The post Our Top Five Articles for 2024 appeared first on Friends Journal.

Citing the ongoing amplification of incivility on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter, several Quaker organizations officially stopped posting updates on X and increased involvement on Bluesky starting on December 16. In addition to Friends Journal, Friends groups that have departed from X include Canadian Friends Service Committee, Quakers in Ireland, Quakers in Britain, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Quaker Council for European Affairs, Woodbrooke study center in the UK, Pendle Hill study center in Pennsylvania, The Friend magazine, and Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC), according to a press release from FWCC.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who president-elect Donald Trump selected to lead a soon-to-be-established Department of Government Efficiency, acquired the social media site in a $44 billion deal in October 2022. He currently co-owns the company along with rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs as well as Qatari and Saudi firms. Previous Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who helped found Bluesky, has criticized Musk’s leadership at Twitter.

Ron Hogan, audience development specialist at Friends Publishing Corporation, publisher of Friends Journal and the QuakerSpeak video series (which Hogan says will also stop posting on X), commented in writing:

I became concerned about the cultural changes taking place on Twitter immediately after Musk’s acquisition, but we initially believed that it was still worth the effort to scatter the seed of our messages and hope that some of it might land on good soil. Over time, however, it became increasingly clear that the ground at X had become choked with thorns, that it was no longer a place where voices like ours could flourish. When FWCC informed us of their plans, I consulted our staff and we agreed it made sense to join with them and the other Friends taking part in this action.

Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, said in a statement:

Quakers are led by their faith to work to make the world more equal and more peaceful. This engagement inevitably includes some compromise, talking and listening to others. We seek to answer that of God which is to be found in every person. It seems that X is no longer a forum where this can happen. When the bad outweighs the good, it is time to see other methods of engaging where it is easier to find common ground with our fellow human beings.

Hogan noted that some Friends argue for remaining on X in hopes of connecting with users there. He believes the discourse at X has coarsened to the point that further engagement would be counterproductive.

“We aren’t hiding our light under a bushel by leaving,” he argued. “The algorithm is throwing a bushel over our light as long as we remain.”

Hogan also noted Jesus’s biblical recommendation to shake the dust off one’s feet when leaving a town in which one feels unwelcome and unheard.

One dissenter from this view is Quaker author Alistair McIntosh, who posted on X, “I prefer it when Quakers bring an alternative presence to conflict zones. Has God not already got sufficient angels in heaven? Can we not, as our 1947 Nobel Peace Prize citation quotes it, act ‘to build up in a spirit of love what has been destroyed in a spirit of hatred.’”

The post Friends Journal, Other Quaker Groups Withdraw from X appeared first on Friends Journal.

End Times and Solid Ground

It has been said that growing old is not for the faint of heart. I would say that living in the twenty-first century is not for the faint of heart either—and there are many of us who are trying to do both! These are times when the ability to rely on strong spiritual foundations has never been more critical. An old hymn speaks to the importance of standing on solid rock, not sinking sands, yet I wonder if our spiritual foundations are as solid as we would wish.

Our world has been dramatically transformed in the last handful of centuries, leaving traditional religion scrambling to meet our psychic and spiritual needs. And, while these may or may not be end times, they are certainly calling into question the future of life on Earth as we know it. With dire climate warnings, soaring inequality, corrosive racism, and frightening cultural divides, the unrelenting and escalating bad news on all fronts collides with our society’s deep-rooted narrative of inevitable progress and our need for a place to stand. 

We find ourselves disoriented—shell-shocked even—and desperate for relief. A competitive and individualistic culture focuses our efforts on personal goals, providing little space for engaging with loss and fear. It leaves us vulnerable to the lures of consumption, distraction, addiction—anything to numb us to emotions too painful to feel. And it sets us up to grasp at modern forces for a certainty that seductively claims solidity but still leaves us on shaky ground. 

One is that narrative of inevitable progress; another is the lure of separation. Whether we are speaking of independence, privacy, or even loneliness, all rotate around the sanctity of the individual that has accompanied modernity. Though there is certainly something to value about individual agency and choice, there is also much to challenge us when we consider our spirituality. 

Though there is certainly something to value about individual agency and choice, there is also much to challenge us when we consider our spirituality. 

This seems clearest when we frame the issue as one of private ownership. Wealth and progress—we have come to believe—depend on the individual being able to reap the rewards of individual effort. Extending this logic, we ask what it means to have private ownership of our own separate lives. How does that affect the way in which we engage with other people, other groups, other species, other generations to come?

Privatized lives are, at their root, protected lives—whether in the form of isolated individuals managing their own separated existence and engaging with the world’s problems as best they can or whether in the form of small self-identified groups building walls between themselves and the rest of the world and creating their own narrative of reality. To the extent that our lives are privatized, in whatever form, our feet are slipping toward sinking sands.

Another central thread of modernity has been humanity’s concerted quest for greater knowledge. That process has been steadily accelerating, with scientists having opened up whole new frontiers of knowledge that would have been unimaginable to our grandparents. There is certainly much to celebrate in this process. Knowledge, they say, is a powerful thing, but it is also a fearful thing. We have become increasingly vulnerable to the belief that it is all-knowing: that knowledge equals wisdom. Traditionally, to know the name of something was to hold power over it. Misused, that power would break the sacred order and wreak havoc. Why, I wonder, does that ancient warning ring so eerily true in our present condition?

For those of us who have shifted our allegiance from an all-knowing God to an all-knowing science, our salvation rests in immersing ourselves in trying to stay current, to understand the pressing issues of the day while continuing to process more. Though there may still be a place for the spiritual, those beliefs and practices come to conform more and more to the ways of knowledge acquisition and application in the secular world.

If, on the other hand, we’ve never made that shift in loyalty or have simply decided that there’s no way to absorb so much information, then our commitment may be to wall off that sea of knowledge, refuse to give it legitimacy, and base our lives on whatever guiding principles can bring the greatest measure of peace or happiness.

One approach supports a spirituality more grounded in science and the big picture, the other in the small joys of daily life. One tends toward pessimism, the other toward optimism, but both are engaged in a dance around the power of knowledge, and neither seems built on completely solid ground.

Another more timeless dance that we are all engaged in is the intimate dance with despair. Some of us embrace despair as a sign that we are strong enough to face reality and still continue to put one foot in front of the other. Some respond with a set of rose-colored glasses and a fierce determination to control the narrative on our own terms.

Yet despair dominates both approaches. Those who choose for the rose-colored glasses are grasping for protection against despair, desperately needing to believe that everything will be fine. Our wishful take on reality is our protective armor. The doomsayers move straight toward despair, trying to gain strength by embracing it as closely as we are able, hoping that our willingness to claim the most unpalatable take on reality and to look the most unpleasant facts in the eye in spite of how we feel will somehow stiffen our spines and prove our worth.

Do we go with a resolute pessimistic acceptance of what we can see of reality in a stubborn determination to press on regardless of the odds, or do we wall off that which seems unthinkable with a protective rosy narrative and equally resolute optimism because that’s all we’ve got?

I see signs of a third way: one that doesn’t center despair as the most powerful player in the room. I remember sharing some despair with a friend and realizing that the voice I was hearing sounded like that of a very little girl: a voice from my childhood. Of course, I was too little then. The forces that governed my life were way beyond my control. 

It was an “aha” moment. The despairing feelings that come up so quickly, with regard to climate for example, were present in my peers and me long before we had ever imagined what we’re now witnessing. They are old feelings, lingering still from when we were too small to have any impact on the world around us. I find it very clarifying and refreshing to consider that they are therefore not inevitable. They are always looking for a convenient place to attach in the present—and the climate has become an irresistible magnet—but they are ours to challenge. 

This is not to say that we don’t have a problem! As the big international forces that have brought us to this point grow in their complex interconnections and global impact, the magnitude of the threats we face is unprecedented. We may not survive. But what if we could look despair in the eye and still embrace an alternative place to stand?

As we engage with all these powerful forces of separation, secular knowledge, and despair, I see a common choice. Do we go with a resolute pessimistic acceptance of what we can see of reality in a stubborn determination to press on regardless of the odds, or do we wall off that which seems unthinkable with a protective rosy narrative and equally resolute optimism because that’s all we’ve got?

If we are willing to question our allegiance to these constants around which our lives are oriented one way or another, what do we replace them with? As I consider the common thread of protection, I wonder what would happen if we decided instead to dance with openness? 

This would mean abandoning privacy and all the walls that protect us and then opening ourselves—with our own hearts and minds and bodies—to connection with the human beings around us and with the ecosystems in which we are embedded. It would call us to dig through the layers of culturally accepted individualism in many of our Quaker meetings to get to the radically corporate foundation of our tradition. 

It would require the humility to assume that anything we learn will illuminate bigger areas of unknowing that were previously invisible to us. It would call for the cultivation of an attitude of wonder at the unknowable. It would remind us to center experiential knowledge above all else, as early Friends did.

It would center a loving heart, as we open to the possibility that love’s opposite is not hate but despair. It would call us to welcome and build our capacity for grieving, to pierce the numbness that allows us to accede to evil, and to maintain our capacity for expectation and hope. Without openness to grief, we have little choice but to protect ourselves from anything that might elicit it.

It would invite us to open ourselves to the unseen, breaking through the story line of the permanence of what is and engaging with a vision of what could be: human beings centered in their goodness and capacity, communities building their own common wealth, non-extractive social relationships, regenerated soil: rewoven webs of life. 

The world needs people who can exercise our imagination and weave new realities from the most insubstantial of threads, people who can say “this is real” even when nobody else around can see it—and act on that reality. Buoyed by that vision, we are better able to step into the unknown and better able to help each other out of the sticky immobility in which so many of us have been ensnared and into the nature to which we were born and move toward our highest dreams. 

A dance with openness calls us to cultivate our ability to listen for what rings true. Tuning our ears and starting with small moments in our daily lives where we feel such alignment, we can build that capacity to listen in other places, at other times. This involves noticing and addressing what keeps us from being able to hear that “clear and certain sound,” as John Woolman says. What clutters our minds? What messages have we absorbed, and what habits have we developed that muffle the ring of truth?   

Somehow we have to believe more fully in our ability—in our right—to listen for the Divine and to manifest what we hear. Ultimately, I believe that all those little moments of clarity, each inhabited fully, will join together to shape a life of ever-increasing integrity and purpose, and I can think of no greater and more grounded gift to our battered world. By following any of these invitations to stay open, I believe we are finding our way toward a more grounded spirituality. 

Grounding ourselves in hope is a workout. It calls for a rigorous discipline of cultivating gratitude. It calls us to remember that regardless of the magnitude of the forces we find arrayed against us, we always have power over our viewpoint about the nature of humanity and the possibilities for transformation.

There are other disciplines as well beyond a commitment to maintain an open heart that can help us along this way. One is cultivating a discipline of hope. This is different from being a fan of hope, passively enjoying the feeling when it descends upon us. It is different from focusing only on happy things and refusing to engage with anything else. Rather, this is a repeated decision to be present to the goodness at the heart of reality, regardless of all the reasons for despair that clamor for our attention on every side. 

Grounding ourselves in hope is a workout. It calls for a rigorous discipline of cultivating gratitude. It involves getting access to perspectives and information that are not readily available. It requires moving beyond basking in obvious beauty or goodness to finding them in places where they are obscured, bruised, and battered. It calls us to remember that regardless of the magnitude of the forces we find arrayed against us, we always have power over our viewpoint about the nature of humanity and the possibilities for transformation.

A second discipline that has been calling my name recently is that of deciding to show up. Generations of training in the Protestant work ethic have conditioned many of us to measure our value in the work we can do to make this sorry world a better place. But no matter how long and hard we work, no matter the depth of our determination, we are bound to fall woefully short. There is no way this work ethic can be the solid foundation for a fruitful spiritual life.

This alternative discipline seems utterly simple and surprisingly profound at the same time: to show up as fully myself as I possibly can—in every moment and every place and with every person and institution, reaching deep into my roots and stretching up and out to my full extent. It might seem safer to hide in quiet despair, knowing that who we are can’t possibly be enough, but somehow, this discipline has the ring of truth. 

As we face these challenging times, my mind goes to how much energy we expend in bracing ourselves. Some of us are braced as we head resolutely into the storm: calling out warning in the voice of the prophets and refusing to be comforted by more hopeful perspectives that seem too naïve. Others have searched out a space that provides some shelter from the storm, bracing themselves by building what protection they can and resolutely turning their energy and attention toward the possibilities of the present.

Some are braced to stay upright in the midst of the storm; others are braced to ward off its horrors. I know the feeling of bracing against the despair that comes with looking out and knowing that anything I can do is wholly and hopelessly inadequate. I know the alternative of claiming whatever power I can by refusing to look beyond what I can control. I’m ever more committed to a third way: shifting our energy from bracing to grounding. My intention is to show up clear-eyed and openhearted; deeply connected and undefended; present to both the challenges and heartaches of this world, as well as all its incredible richness and joy, rooted in spirit; and ready to do my share.

Whether or not we can successfully find our way through this tangle of crises that have been centuries in the making and into a livable future, we can still show up. Now this has the ring of truth, the feel of solid ground.

Theologian Walter Wink offers advice about discerning the nature of that share: finding our way between the hubris of assuming the burden of the world on our shoulders and the lonely conclusion that we have nothing to offer. He suggests that our role is first to listen for what is ours to do, then to do that: no less and no more. And finally, we are to wait in quiet confidence for a miracle. Whether or not we can successfully find our way through this tangle of crises that have been centuries in the making and into a livable future, we can still show up. Now this has the ring of truth, the feel of solid ground.

The post To Dance with Openness appeared first on Friends Journal.

Every morning, I am reminded that another day has been gifted me, one in which I will most likely have food to eat, water to drink, and a roof to provide shelter. 

If you spoke to anyone in my family who came before me, you’d find none of the above were foregone conclusions. They came from Russia and Ukraine in the early to mid-twentieth century, and those who made it to America survived pogroms, Stalin, starvation, and Hitler. While their spiritual optimism grew quite dim before they arrived in the New World, they wasted no time in reconnecting with their faith once they settled into 1950s America. Having survived their darkest nights, my family taught me to notice how each new dawn negated the darkness that at times can envelop us all and leave us bereft and hopeless for the future, whether on a global, national, or individual scale.

In the Slavic tradition of my forebears, a candle is lit on the birthdays of those who have passed, in remembrance of their strength and courage and the hope that we can be guided by their examples. These ritual candles call to mind the Quaker tradition of seeking the Inward Light: that which guides our lives towards hope and the greater good. The act of striking a match and burning a candle gives hope. It is the essence of spiritual optimism. 

In the Slavic tradition of my forebears, a candle is lit on the birthdays of those who have passed, in remembrance of their strength and courage and the hope that we can be guided by their examples. The act of striking a match and burning a candle gives hope. It is the essence of spiritual optimism. 

When my daughters were eight and ten, I turned my love of being with children into my full-time job, working as a preschool teacher during the day and attending graduate school at night. Extremely optimistic, as usual, in my new endeavor, I was surprised to find this was emotionally and physically taxing and would require an extraordinary amount of patience both from myself and my family. 

As it always does, life intervened soon after when my mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. After class one evening, I approached my professor, apprised her of the situation, and told her I’d be missing several sessions.

“You cannot miss any more classes,” the woman responded.

I looked at her and attempted to breathe. I was stunned. Had she really just said that? Perhaps, in my fatigue, I was imagining it. No, she just stared back at me, as I planned my next move. Having long ago learned that the best words in scenarios such as these are no words, I simply bid her good night and left the class.

I could not remember a time in my recent life when I was so angry. As I left class and made my way to the subway, I decided to drop out of school. There was no point. I sat down on the train and thought I had one thing going for me: I had taken action. However, as the train made its way in and out of lit stations and dark tunnels, I became less sure. By the time I got home, I had made another decision: to give this situation time. At this late hour, while hungry, tired, and not thinking straight, I was in danger of reacting rashly from a place of resentment.

In the light of morning, I had an insight. (One day was what I needed, a setting and rising of the sun.) This made me feel better, almost hopeful, as if my Quaker faith was slowly returning. “Faith is more than insight,” Quaker Rufus Jones once wrote. “It is always the beginning of action.” By the end of the day, I had done some math: how much time had I invested in graduate school, and how many credits had I completed? The answer came in the dwindling light: I was more than 50 percent in. Was a dark moment with an unempathic professor going to damage my career?

The action that Jones refers to must have impact. Time to reflect as well as going to work comforted me. After all, the professor’s words had nothing to do with children or my love of teaching. She could not take away what I already had: the absolute delight of educating young children and the respect of their families.

Longtime Quaker and Virginia poet Maria Prytula, who happened to be my late mother-in-law as well as the aforementioned relative, once said that our biggest adversaries are our greatest teachers. It would take me some time to come around to this, but the professor was simply doing her job, informing me in no uncertain terms of what the rules were. In programs where licensing is the end goal, the state requires a certain number of classroom hours. Miss those hours and you don’t get your license. The most obvious question is why the professor did not simply respond by saying, come see me because we have to discuss the hours you will miss.  

Choosing not to drop out, I spent less time visiting my mother-in-law, and I passed the class and was one step closer to graduating. Most importantly, the time I spent reflecting on the incident that almost cost my career resulted in not only an important action but a deeper sense of the meaning of faith. I was also more resilient. After all, one careless comment was nothing compared to the daily challenges I faced as a classroom teacher and longtime student. It should be noted that I went to graduate school on my terms, choosing to expand a two-year program to six in order to spend more time with my family. In the end, the professor taught me that her lack of sensitivity was no excuse for my loss of faith. She also taught me that time and decision making must be done in the Light. 

In the end, the professor taught me that her lack of sensitivity was no excuse for my loss of faith. She also taught me that time and decision making must be done in the Light. 

One never knows where a message of faith will come from. Who would have thought an unpleasant exchange on a cold, dark night would remind me to stay faithful, to always take an action of impact—no matter how small—and to always return to the Light so as to connect with a sense of spiritual optimism?

Many people talk about how awful things are in the United States: that there is no sense of hope and that we, as a country, are headed in a terrible direction. While I certainly agree that we are at a crossroads, I know from my family’s experience that things have always been challenging and that there have always been new demons to face. After all, just a decade after my family’s arrival, I was born into the tumult of the 1960s: the daily domestic bombings, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the violence that resulted in the Civil Rights Movement. These tumultuous times led into a new decade with rising gas prices, high unemployment, massive inflation, and the political landscape of Watergate.

Yet amidst the chaos, there were always the “helpers” that the late Presbyterian minister Fred Rogers referred to: those willing to communicate, fight, and agitate for social justice. In the June 1, 1964 issue (PDF) of Friends Journal, Quaker John de J. Pemberton Jr. said, “Civil rights issues cannot be resolved by officials alone; only a total commitment of the conscience of an entire people to fulfillment now of the promises of 1776 will do it.” Helping is optimistic action at its most exemplary.

Let us dwell then not in our dark moments, but in the reflection of candles lit with relentless optimism.

Are we, as a country, headed in a terrible direction?

The results of the presidential election might answer this question. Or perhaps not. It is possible that this moment, like others throughout history, is an opportunity to turn our collective despair into “the beginning of action” that Rufus Jones spoke about. It might be that such adversity proves to be our greatest teacher.

After a period of reckoning, as well as recovery—because self-care at times such as this is crucial—it is time to begin action, once more. Action is empowering, feels good, and gives us focus. Work is always better than wringing our hands. What actions can we take toward “forming a more perfect union”? The list is endless but for the purposes of brevity, I will simply choose three.

First off, there is work to be done saving the planet, volunteering at any local organization that fights climate change is a great place to start. Second, children always need our help, especially those from vulnerable communities and in the current moment, the migrant population. Finding a way to support such children and their families is another opportunity. 

My work at the polls in the past two elections has given me a new sense of the never-ending U.S. voting dilemma. In the twenty-first century, American voters still face issues of suppression, intimidation, and access, culminating in the attempted power grab of the 2020 presidential election. There is however a vast disparity in understanding simply how to vote. The inadequacy of American voter education is clearly at fault. I hope to use my skills as a writer and researcher to better understand how I can contribute to making our system one where every citizen votes, every vote is counted, and that every vote counts.

Each of the above actions reflect our inner light, guiding us towards a future filled with spiritual optimism. As Quaker Edward Burrough said, “All that dwell in the light, their habitation is in God, and they know a hiding place in the day of storm; and those who dwell in the light, are built upon the rock, and cannot be moved.”

Let us dwell then not in our dark moments, but in the reflection of candles lit with relentless optimism.

The post A Moment of Darkness, a Decision Made in Light appeared first on Friends Journal.

Update, December 5, 2024: Killer of Quaker Clerk Convicted of Second-Degree Murder and Sentenced to Life in Prison

On November 21, Sean Rivera, 30, pled guilty to second-degree murder in the April 2023 shooting death of his mother, Carol Clark, 72, clerk of Unity Meeting in the Frankford section of Philadelphia, Pa. Rivera also pled guilty to kidnapping charges, possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance, weapon possession, false imprisonment, unlawful restraint, and reckless endangerment, according to the Bucks County District Attorney’s office.

Judge Stephen A. Corr sentenced Rivera to life imprisonment without parole. Rivera will simultaneously serve 28 to 56 years on the additional charges, according to the Bucks County District Attorney’s office.

Our original reporting from April 11, 2023:

The clerk of Unity Meeting in the Frankford section of Philadelphia, Pa., was found dead Sunday night in a shed on the property of the historic meetinghouse, according to the Bucks County District Attorney’s office. Carol Clark, 72, suffered fatal gunshot wounds after being drugged with fentanyl and kidnapped, according to an affidavit of probable cause filed by detectives. 

Police charged Clark’s son, Sean Rivera, 28, with criminal homicide, kidnapping, aggravated assault, possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance, unlawful restraint, reckless endangerment, and possessing an instrument of crime, the affidavit stated.

A Friend who knew Clark through work with Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting described her as dedicated and generous with her time. Clark worked full time as a lawyer but still found time to administer an afterschool program, hold Friday evening meetings for worship, and offer youth cooking classes on Saturdays, according to Hollister Knowlton, who served as clerk of Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting from 2012 to 2019. Clark also served on the board of Frankford Friends School, according to Knowlton.

“I just want people to remember how much she gave of herself to the Frankford community,” Knowlton said.

Rivera’s brother, Adam Clark-Valle, of New York State, called police after Rivera told him conflicting stories about their mother’s whereabouts, according to the affidavit. Rivera first told Clark-Valle their mother had died of an illness, then claimed she was hospitalized due to a heart attack. Clark-Valle drove to the Morrisville, Falls Township home his mother shared with Rivera then looked for her at area hospitals.

After obtaining a warrant, police searched the 505 Berwyn Road home and discovered two Glock 9 mm guns with receipts bearing Rivera’s name. They also found one padlock and an empty padlock package. Police searched a Toyota RAV4 registered to Carol Clark and found a pair of bolt cutters.

According to the affidavit, Rivera told detectives that he had purchased fentanyl, which he mixed with iced tea and gave to Clark, along with a dinner of Chinese takeout on Saturday evening. Between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. Sunday, while Clark was lethargic from the drug, Rivera put her in her wheelchair, pushed her outside to her RAV4, put her in the vehicle, and drove to the Unity Meetinghouse. He pushed her in the wheelchair to the shed, put her inside, and shot her about five times, according to the affidavit.

Rivera told investigators that he had cut the padlocks off the shed and locked it with a new padlock after the killing, the affidavit states. 

Police used a key they found while searching Rivera’s person to open the lock on the shed. They found a dead woman inside covered with a blue tarp, according to the affidavit. Her appearance matched photos of Clark provided by Clark-Valle. Detectives found a spent casing and spent bullet nearby.

Authorities do not have a motive for the alleged murder, according to Manuel Gamiz of the Bucks County District Attorney’s office.

Bucks County Public Defender Lisa Williams is representing Rivera. His preliminary hearing is scheduled for June 7. Williams did not return a phone call requesting comment on the case.

Authorities placed Rivera in the Bucks County Correctional Facility without bail, according to the district attorney’s office.

The post Quaker Clerk Murdered on Philadelphia Meetinghouse Property (UPDATED) appeared first on Friends Journal.