For the first book in the series, we are beginning at the beginning. Tentatively titled By Any Name, it will be a collection of Friends’ expressions of God, Jesus, Light, the Divine, Creator.
We are interested in submissions of poetry, song, fiction and creative nonfiction, photos, paintings, sketches, collage, and photographic representation of three-dimensional work such as sculpture, quilting, etc. We welcome submissions from Friends everywhere, though preference will be given to pieces with some connection to the West, be it through the topic or the artist’s home place. This collection seeks to include many different voices, from children to elders, those who know God as Christ and those who know Spirit as the Eternal Mother.

The fundamental question we hope Friends will explore is, “How have you experienced God or the Divine?” We want your stories about these experiences, in whichever form speaks to you.

Some of the following queries may spark additional inspiration for you.
Who—or what—comes to you in the silence of Meeting or in the joyousness of song?
How does it feel when you experience the Light?
What does it look and feel like to be moved by the Spirit? Do you feel Her breath on your skin,
hear His voice? Describe those experiences.
What does God look like to you? How about “that of God”?
How do you know “the one who speaks to your condition”?

Submission Guidelines
Friends are invited to submit up to four pieces of writing or visual art. Titles, particularly for visual work, are appreciated. Digital submissions are preferred but not required. All submissions should be emailed or postmarked by Saturday, March 6th.

Please include your name, address, phone number, email, and meeting, church or worship group affiliation. A brief biography of two to three sentences is welcome but not required. Fiction and creative nonfiction pieces should be 250 to 2500 words in length. Poems and songs should be no more than 100 lines long.
Visual art may be submitted as either color or black and white. All works should be submitted as a digital scan or photograph. Please do not send your one and only original piece of art! Submissions will not be returned. Digital submissions should be a minimum of 300 dpi at an image size of at least four inches wide.

Please send submissions to:

book at westernfriend dot org or

Western Friend, 833 SE Main St.,
Mailbox #138 Portland, OR 97214.

January/February: Meetinghouses
-Some meetings own them and love them, some struggle to maintain them, others wonder if they need them and if so, how to go about financing one. This will be a collection of stories about various meetinghouses in the West.

March: Friendly Gifts: Eldering & Discernment
-What does it mean to elder or to be eldered? And how does the practice of discernment deepen our lives as Friends and inform our actions?

April: Spiritual Nurture
-Hear about Intermountain Yearly Meeting’s exciting experiment in spiritual nurturing, along with other way in which Friends seek to care for their connections to each other and to the Divine.

May: Ministries of Joy
-Are Friends called to be a voice of laughter, love and joy just as much as they are called to witness the darkness in the world? Hear from Friends who work to help that of God be visible to all.

But there’s one worn slip of paper I’ve purposely kept in my wallet for a couple of years now, given to me by Peggy Senger Parsons, pastor of Freedom Friends Church in Salem, Oregon. I am moved to share it today–seems timely, seems appropriate, seems possible that our nation just might be moving closer to following these simple directives.

The Concise Sermon on the Mount

The down will be up
You are supposed to be effective
You are supposed to be noticed
Don’t do it to be noticed
Perfection= inside and out the same
Trust- it is the anxiety killer
Pray- simply and often
Ask persistently
Act on what you know
Don’t judge-
It makes you look stupid and hypocritical
Love without limits
Make peace
Give without limits
Tell the truth- all the time
This is simple but not easy
You may have to do it alone
It is a foundation that will not fail

The deadline is Monday, November 3rd!

Please run, don’t walk, to your email or mailbox! (Email submissions are greatly appreciated.) Email: editor at westernfriend dot org or mail to Western Friend 833 SE Main St. Mailbox #138 Portland OR 97206.

If you are sending visual artistry of some sort:
-please, no originals, just a copy
-digital submissions are preferred
-images should be at least 300 dpi at the size you think it should be printed
-send files in PDF, JPG, TIFF or PNG format
-photos of three-dimensional artwork are great! Please make sure the photos follow the guidelines for digital submissions as above.

Thank you, Friends. I look forward to hearing from you!

REFLECTIONS BY SOME TWIN CITIES FRIENDS ON EVENTS SURROUNDING THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION IN ST. PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS

We who have united in this statement are members and regular attenders of several Quaker meetings in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area. Although our individual definitions of pacifism may vary, we have for years supported the traditional peace testimony of the Religious Society of Friends. We have exercised our right to protest massively but peacefully against the growing militarization of our country and against policies and practices that we saw as contrary to the Geneva Conventions and to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We have also defended the right of others to protest peacefully and to practice nonviolent civil disobedience in support of their convictions.

When we learned that St. Paul had been chosen as the site of the 2008 Republican National Convention, a number of us joined with other groups in seeking from city and county authorities an assurance that our rights to protest would be protected. Many months of negotiation left us with token access to the convention site, but the government’s concern with “safety” did not allow us to state our case directly and fully, nor to get clear answers either from local authorities in advance or from the RNC during the convention. Nevertheless, we felt that an understanding had been reached and that the civil liberties and legal rights of demonstrators would be respected. We know now that we were wrong.

During the week of the RNC St. Paul became an occupied city. Some 3,500 police, many brought from other parts of the country, lined the streets designated as routes for protest marches. These troopers were unidentified, helmeted, and armed. St. Paul is a river town, straddling the Mississippi. Without prior announcement our bridges were closed, isolating neighborhoods and halting business. People unable to reach their homes were trapped in the downtown area and were brutally attacked with mace, pepper spray, and rubber bullets. More than 800 were arrested during the four days of the convention, and many more were detained, abused, and released.

Even more disturbing were police raids on homes and on a meeting hall as much as three days before the convention began. Independent journalists were especially targeted. Sheriff’s officers confiscated cameras and computers and held people at gunpoint. Eight persons arrested in these raids have been charged with conspiracy to riot leading to terrorism.

Now Mayors R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis and Chris Coleman of St. Paul are congratulating themselves on having protected us from violence and made our cities a showcase for the nation. Indeed, outside of police attacks, there was little violence. All we have heard of are a few broken store windows, a damaged police car, one damaged bus, and an attempt to spray diluted household bleach on some delegates. As far as we have been able to determine, the perpetrators of this vandalism are unknown and have not been arrested. That has not prevented the authorities and the press from accusing a group of young people who openly espouse anarchism and oppose war. That group was infiltrated months ago, and the reports of paid police informers have become the basis for pre-emptive attacks and criminal charges. We personally know many members of this group, and we have found them to be gentle people who have a passionate concern for the Earth as well as for the poor, the forgotten, and the “collateral” victims of U.S. aggression.

Some of us were on the streets through most of the protests, offering medical and legal help where needed, and all of us have talked with many citizens who shared the experience. Nowhere have we seen or heard evidence of the dangerous weapons and explosives that police claim to have seized. We therefore join others in demanding a truly independent investigation of how and why our rights and liberties have been violated, our friends intimidated, and our quiet city turned into an armed camp.

Richard O. Fuller
Jeanne Landcamer
Rhoda Gilman
Paul Landskroener
Anne Holzinger
Ava Dale Johnson
Nancy Beecher
James Riemermann
Don Irish
John Cowan
Patricia McGuire
Charley Underwood
Jenny Heiser
Rich Broderick

by Marjorie Sykes, Pacific Yearly Meeting (though living in India at the time)
March, 1975

A lot of people have been raising questions about the whole idea of “membership” in the Society of Friends, not only here in the U.S.A., but also in Britain and in India. And not only now, but for some time past. When I was asked to write for the Bulletin, I got out and re-read a paper I had written exactly twenty years ago, a paper which records the exercise of about twenty Friends (Indian, American, British) who came together in India to consider this subject “in a spirit of worship and of loving candour.” The wording of the record is my responsibility, but I believe it represents a genuine consensus:

“The religious fellowship of a Quaker Meeting for Worship is and should be open to anyone who seeks to share it. But when a person asks for membership a new factor enters in. The Society of Friends is not just a kind of religious club. It is a continuing organism, which was born of the union of the creative energy of prophetic religious insight with the spiritual environment of England in the seventeenth century. Like the physical organism it carries within itself the “genes” of its parenthood, and that parenthood is Christian.

” The origin of Quakerism in Christianity is undisputed historical fact, and it would be less than truthful to ignore or minimize it. This fact is not one of geographical accident but of spiritual kinship. We ought to expect inquirers to study the Gospel records and the treasures of the Johannean and Pauline epistles, not as an ‘authoritative scripture’ to be accepted, but as the story of a creative and healing power set free.”

Having said this we must also say, with equal clarity and force, that by a ‘Christian’ we mean simply one who seeks to learn from Jesus and to live by the same Spirit. We do not and we must not apply any ‘creedal’ test, and we do not ask for any ‘orthodox’ interpretation of the nature and power of Jesus; we gladly and humbly welcome the work of the Spirit far beyond the boundaries of historic Christianity.

“If an inquirer, having, considered these things, is satisfied that Friends have something which he needs, and desires to become one with the life of the Society, we should be prepared to accept him. We should not be content to offer any lesser alternative to those who desire to be fully identified with us. We must accept the responsibility of decision.”

That was written from the point of view of the Meeting. What about the “inquirer”? And what about those who say that we should return to the ways of the first Friends and have no formal membership roll at all, none of those categories or gradations of Quaker status which may create divisions where none should be?

The beginnings of an answer may perhaps be found in those words which Barbara Janoe used in a recent Bulletin in relation to human sexuality: respect, responsibility, and expectation, considered in their basic meanings. Many people are attracted to Friends because they find themselves respected, looked upon, in a way which seeks to understand rather than to judge. The first significant step towards fellowship is that the newcomer should show a similar respect, should look upon Friends with the active desire to understand, to study the roots of their belief and practice.

If, after this exercise of respect, the seeker desires to be fully identified with Friends, he/she needs to be willing to respond, to make a commitment, to pledge thought and time and talents to the service of the Meeting. This is responsibility. Along with responsibility comes expectation, the confident looking-out-for, waiting for, the Spirit that can enlighten and empower both the group and the individual member within and for the group. It is the quality of this expectation that gives the fellowship the extra dimension that is reflected in its name; we are not merely a Society of Friends, we are a Religious Society of Friends.

These demands are reciprocal. In a healthy Meeting each member respects, responds to, expects from the organic life of the whole body; the body also respects, responds to, and expects from the life each member contributes to the whole. Insofar as this experience is realized, the Meeting and its members come to know one another in depth, in the Eternal; their diversities tend not to division, but to a “dear unity,” whether there is a “membership roll” or not. Human beings being human, there will always be “joiners” and “non-joiners.” Perhaps we should relax, and let the form be shaped by the Life.

And perhaps all of us, seekers and finders, newcomers and old stagers, joiners and non-joiners, should constantly renew our own commitment to respect, to response, to expectation. “Seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

As an expression of our belief in nonviolence and the value of each person, Friends have throughout our history sought compassionate and effective answers to social problems.

One of the most problematic federal policies for decades has been the federal government’s failed War on Drugs campaign. Its stated purpose has been to reduce the production, sale, and use of targeted drugs, the abuse of which can be devastating to individuals, families, workplaces, and communities. Yet, criminalization has failed to reduce drug abuse, has created a major illegal drug and secondary crime network, and has filled our prisons and courtrooms with individuals charged with drug-related crimes, whose drug use would be reduced more effectively with a public health model instead of a criminalization model.

We call for the implementation of a public health model as a sustainable and humane way to achieve the goal of reducing drug abuse in the United States. Such a model could utilize a tightly regulated distribution system for listed drugs. In such a system, drugs could be made available at reasonable prices in order to eliminate or reduce property and personal crime by those paying inflated prices from unlawful dealers. Access to drugs could be conditioned on drug counseling and treatment where abuse is indicated. Failure to comply with drug regulations could result in civil proceedings, including civil contempt for willful failure to comply with appropriate orders. With a portion of the resources resulting from reduced prison construction and operation cost, a major public education campaign could be undertaken regarding drug abuse similar to the campaign against tobacco use, along with enhanced treatment and prevention programs, which are now seriously under-funded.

We also call for decriminalization of drug use and possession, though not production or sale, in order to end the injustice, the violence to property and persons, including those who are dually affected by mental illness and drug use, and the ineffective use of resources that are such a large part of our current system of drug control.

We ask Friends in NPYM to reflect on the deep social costs of the “War on Drugs” policy and to join with others, including the Pacific Northwest office of the American Friends Service Committee, in promoting just and compassionate ways for our communities, states, and nation to address the important issue of drug abuse. We also ask that this minute be sent to all Yearly Meetings in the United States, to encourage Friends throughout the country to consider and act on this issue, and that copies of the minute be sent to all of our state and federal legislators.

Background Information and Resources
(1) According to the Interfaith Drug Policy Initiative:
1.5 million people are arrested every year for drug-law violations—75% for possession, not sale or manufacture. 600,000 of these arrests are for possessing marijuana for personal use.

African-Americans comprise nearly 60% of the people in state prisons for drug felonies. Due largely to the War on Drugs, one in three Black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is in prison, on probation, or on parole—even though their drug usage rates are the same as those of other Americans. 14% of Black men have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions.

A majority of women in federal prisons are there for drug law violation; 70% are first-time offenders. Many are incarcerated on “conspiracy” charges, such as taking phone messages for a live-in boyfriend who sells drugs. More than 75% of female prisoners are mothers of small children.

Nearly 40% of the AIDS cases reported in the United States have been linked to illicit drug injection. The US Department of Health and Human Services has determined that needle-exchange programs reduce the spread of HIV without increasing drug use, yet the federal government refuses to fund these programs.

Civil liberties violations and invasion of privacy are a routine part of drug-law enforcement. These include drug dogs, urine tests, phone taps, paid confidential informants, entrapment, curbside garbage searches, military helicopters, infrared heat detectors, no-knock warrants, and stop-and-frisk searches of minorities and young people. Property forfeiture laws allow police to take property without a criminal conviction.

Mandatory minimum prison sentences have removed judicial discretion over sentencing, resulting in excessive sentences for even first-time nonviolent drug offenders.

The Drug Free Student Provision of the federal Higher Education Act, which makes students ineligible for financial aid if they have been convicted of a drug offense, effectively prevents many students from attending school and often forces those affected while in school to leave for lack of funding.

Federal categorizing of marijuana as a Schedule I substance with no known medical value has deprived many seriously-ill people of its use as an effective therapy for some medical conditions, subjecting them to arrest, fines, and imprisonment even where state law allows medical use of marijuana or when it is prescribed or recommended by their physician.

Tens of millions of Americans—including children and adolescents—still use or abuse illegal drugs. The War on Drugs has failed to accomplish its stated goal of a “drug-free America.”

(2) Under a public health model:
There could be a tightly regulated distribution system for listed drugs. In such a system, drugs could be made available at reasonable prices in order to eliminate or reduce property and personal crime by those seeking to pay inflated prices from unlawful dealers. Access to drugs could be conditioned on drug counseling and treatment where abuse is indicated. Failure to comply with drug regulations could result in civil proceedings, including civil contempt for willful failure to comply with appropriate orders. With a portion of the resources resulting from reduced prison construction and operation cost, a major public education campaign could be undertaken regarding drug abuse similar to the campaign against tobacco use, along with enhanced treatment and prevention programs, which are now seriously under-funded.

The excellent King County Bar Association Drug Policy Project Report, below, discusses the public health approach to reducing drug abuse.

(3) Resources for more information:
King County Bar Association Drug Policy Project Report (PDF)
Interfaith Drug Policy Initiative
Drug Policy Alliance
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

Approved at North Pacific Yearly Meeting’s Annual Session in July 2008.

“The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.”
–Psalm 24:1

The psalmist reminds us of the sacredness of the Earth and all its inhabitants. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms climate change and its devastating impacts to the earth’s human and nonhuman inhabitants. Noting that global climate change is increased by human-produced greenhouse gases, we wish to bear witness against abuse of the earth and our environment.

Global climate change is an urgent moral and spiritual issue affecting all species on our planet.  The rate and severity of climate change are the only unknowns.  With its resulting weather extremes, habitat destruction, species extinction and human dislocation, we see the havoc climate change will wreak on the health and survival of present and future generations. Competition for resources aggravates the conditions that lead to war. We recognize that military production, research and development, training exercises and wars are major contributors to global warming.
We will continue to work in practical ways to put an end to militarism and war. Our sense of urgency about global climate change is fueled by awareness that the impoverished will suffer the greatest hardships, and that the affluent are emitting the vast majority of greenhouse gases.

It is not enough for Friends to care. Our Quaker testimonies call us to become patterns and examples to our communities, illustrating by our actions our spiritual commitment to our earth and its threatened and limited resources.  We are called as Friends to make this a standing priority and corporate witness in our Meetings and communities in the coming year. We urge Friends and others to take all possible measures to slow down climate change through reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases, seeking sustainable levels of human population, and more carefully stewarding earth’s finite resources.

We ask that the newly formed Peace and Social Concerns Committee of NPYM act as a resource and communication conduit for meetings and worship groups in acting on this concern, encouraging faithfulness and accountability, and reporting back to Annual Session in 2009.  Our challenge is to educate ourselves, and move beyond denial and inaction. We ask that each meeting and worship group, as well as the Yearly Meeting as a whole, commit to take specific action in the coming year. The queries from 1998 with a new emphasis on global climate change may be used to begin seasoning appropriate responses to this concern in our worship groups. The following are suggested steps   for meetings and individuals which may reduce the devastation of global climate change and move us toward more sustainable lifestyles:

* Engage in collective discernment in our Meetings to understand and adjust to climate change, allowing the Spirit to work among us.
* Reduce personal greenhouse gases in the coming year through decreased driving, flying, and home energy use, and through using efficient alternatives.
* Make conscious selections about food and water use that require fewer resources to produce, package and transport.
* Become a resource—encouraging and learning from others ways to reduce fossil-fuel consumption.
* Discern our personal responsibility for the negative effects of human over-population and over-consumption and be aware of their link to the inequitable sharing of earth’s resources with our own and other species.
* Labor with those shaping public opinion and policy to support care of the earth.  From local to state, national, and international levels, advocate measures to protect earth’s resources.
* Through personal participation and public policy, work to promote environmental justice and assist the most impoverished and vulnerable, including the creation.

We gratefully draw from Pacific Yearly Meetings’ August, 2007 “Minute on Global Climate Change” for some of these steps.

The Permanence of Matter
by Sally Bryan, San Juan Worship Group

“What perplexes the world is the disparity between the swiftness of the spirit, and the immense unwieldiness, sluggishness, inertia, the permanence of matter. “-Thomas Marm

In our reflective moments, most of us are only too willing to acknowledge that we are involved with mankind. We have believed poets who say we are lessened if a clod washes into the sea, and we have read physicists who say that a butterfly that moves its wings in Japan will affect forces, unknown though many may be, in Chicago. In a few tender and near-incommunicable moments, we may have experienced this all-inclusive relatedness. Truly we know that we are participants in a participatory universe.

But we are human animals—bone and gut and gristle. When I am electric with pain from a broken femur, there is no place left for the realization that another in Oklahoma or Bosnia is in equal (or greater) pain. Neither can I believe that the careful, concerned, competent E.M.T. bending over me experiences one iota of my pain. This seems to me to be a basic, primary, experienced fact. We are matter. This matters.

There is another constraint on our moment-by-moment realization that “the hurt of one is the hurt of all.” As we are encased in our biological matter, we are entwined in our cultural precursors. These move in overlapping circles from those general to the whole of humanity, to those that increasingly focus on the single individual. Civilized by the tribe, family, and associations, each is a uniquely complex, uniquely encultured human being. Brought together into this moment (and each succeeding moment) are all these assumptions, approved ideas, “right” ways of seeing and doing. And out of all this welter of possibility, our being, our spirit, our consciousness, plummets every moment at the center of the about-to-be-actualized event. The strength of the bonds of habit vary from time to time and from person to person. But to be human is to be encultured by all that has produced us.

Matter we are, but it is possible to believe that we are something more. Perhaps there is that of God in us, an inner Light. Perhaps we are ineluctably physical matter, and free will exists only in our capacity to delay a response, allowing events around us to shift while less strongly programmed ideas and actions arise in us.

Whatever reason we ascribe to it, we are aware that as we face each other (as I hold fingers over the keys), possible words tingle on the threshold. Yet, some are chosen to emerge into the air, onto the paper. It is exhausting to realize that each second carries both the movement of the habitual and the possibility of its deflection. Recognized or not, both initiation and response hold the flick of new potentiality.

It is most comfortable to speak from and to a culture with a shared canon. Thus at ease, we need not remember the assumptions that create congruence. We can be safe with the habits that spring easily to us.

We ask how we can teach that bigotry is wrong when we cannot confront bigotry that faces us. A bigot is a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his/her own belief or opinion. So can one call another a bigot without being one? In Friendly circles there are approved ways of thinking about multicultural neighborhoods and affirmative action, but are they right because they are shared? And are those who argue for the demise of affirmative action, who favor cultural grouping of homes, “wrong,” and bigots if they argue too passionately?

This is the nub of the problem. Each of us is comfortable when we are with those who share our significant and deeply held beliefs. Adrenaline pumps when a serious challenge is raised. Fight or flight, that’s our animal heri-tage; it is one of the sluggish and permanent features of matter.
It is possible to seek out those who hold opinions that contradict our own. Indeed, Friends work harder than most people at extending the comfort zones of familiarity. But understanding develops slowly and most often affection follows. Shared space is essential. The more contrary the views, the more alert each must be to private assumptions so that challenge does not immediately leap to reification and the attack of labeling. Exchange means that each is willing to hold lightly even the most deeply-rooted principles and ideas. If I am passionately right, and I identify you as a bigot, no growth in understanding is possible. Indeed, no meeting is possible. “All real living is meeting,” Martin Buber says. We need divine assistance, moment by moment, as we face each other, ready now to change and to be changed. This continued seeking is the essence. We cannot rest on the belief that for all time divine accord has been given.

The greatest challenge comes from those who do not place a high value on tolerance. It requires strong faith and deep will to continue to move into encounters with them. Despite repeated failures, each moment is a new instant of potentiality, despite all previous failure.

Most, however, have tolerance somewhere on their personal value scale. Meeting is possible when Friends are simply and immediately present in the moment, holding strong beliefs while knowing deep down that they could be partial or mistaken, bearing the pain that contradiction always brings. The mutuality of this willingness to accept or to inflict hurt impregnates the moment with the possibility of change. Hiding hurt, avoiding hurt, is a strategy for missed meeting, for assuring
that past assumptions pour forth unmitigated, shaping the future.

In the general sense, we know that “the hurt of one is the hurt of all.” But few generalizations are empowering over personal pain, over challenges that aim at the solar plexus. Saints (and poets, Thorton Wilder says in Our Town) may hold suffering lightly. But most of us are imprisoned by it. Our sluggish, unwieldy, and permanent physical matter and cultural past whirl us into howling out our pain and defending our personal beliefs. Again and again, all-inclusive relatedness is submerged in the frenzy of personal crisis. But when it subsides, when we approach the still center again, we know. Our human selves have raged forth, loosed from our spiritual understanding. But there will be another time. We can try again. Perhaps T.S. Eliot is right; “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. “