"11/11/18" and "Second Thoughts"
Department:
[Join Kate Connell online in November to talk about Truth in Military Recruitment. See https://westernfriend.org/event/truth-and-military-recruitment-nov-16]
Declaration from a called meeting, representing Friends in the United States, held at Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, July 20-22, 1948.
Early in January 2015, my world changed. My dad called to inform me that my cousin Muath Safi Yousef al-Kasasbeh, a Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot, had been captured and burned to death by the militant group ISIL – after Muath’s F-16 fighter aircraft malfunctioned and crashed over Syria.
A poem of peace in a time of pandemic.
Do you see war as a giant, iniquitous, futile, unchristian system? Then hurl yourself against it, in full blindness to the seeming impossibility of the task. . . There are no impossibles to those who, in supreme dedication, are rooted deep in the Eternal Love.
-- Thomas Kelly (1941)
I became a convinced Friend the first time I walked into a Quaker meeting for worship. I was twenty-one, and I experienced the best of what Quaker worship can be. Compared with my previous experience of religion – a “stand up, sit down” experience of being “preached at” – I said to myself, “this is the real thing.” That was fifty years ago.
Dear Friends: We needed to learn the struggle of Quaker Alice Herz, who died in 1965. Without warning, we are plunged into her story by the poem “Ten Days,” found in the Jan/Feb 2019 issue of Western Friend.
Ten days a wisp of smoke
from one ancestral strum to the next
distant guitar on the horizon
stark like a city sunset.
