So, where’s all the Indians?” asked Yaynicut Franco, one of the Wukchumni adults. The whiteness of the conference was a bit shocking to us, given the title: “Quakers, First Nations, and American Indians.”
“Imagine what would happen,” said one of the Quaker teens, “if a Quaker group held a conference called ‘Quakers and LGBTQ People’ with no LGBTQ people!”
We gather the children,
the tender and shy, the mischievous,
lead them to a jagged beach to find
their treasures of stillness
while their own parents settle into
the meetinghouse to gather
Light. We let the children wander
between piers, time dissolving
into moistness. One boy with purpleSaturday morning, I reach the border at Nogales, Arizona. From near and far, the fence rises. From a distance, it appears as a blade that slices apart both the wholeness of the natural world and the wholeness of a human community. Up close, the twenty-foot barrier imprisons and excludes, looming like a nightmare. The huge, vertical, rust-colored metal slats nearly overlap.
The Dazzle of Day – Review
Book by Molly Gloss
Reviewed by Carl Abbott
Here’s a challenge: Write a novel in which a Quaker business meeting is the dramatic pivot point . . . and make it a compelling read.
Old white people elected a person who ran on a racist, xenophobic, misogynist platform as president of the United States. That’s us baby boomers. That’s me. How did this happen? Maybe we need to stop pointing fingers and wringing our hands and get honest about how this happened and what we’re going to do to take back our democracy.
Immersed in stories as humans are – print, radio, television, internet, social media, interactive gaming, virtual reality – we can easily lose sight of truth. Especially when a story fills our imagination with images we dearly want to believe in, we can feel reluctant to break the story’s spell.
Dear Editor: I write in response to the article, “Shining Light on Anti-Semitism,” published in the July/August 2016 issue of Western Friend.
Dear Editor: I loved William Matchett’s delicately profound “Notes on Quaker Speech.” I share his sentiment that locutions like “Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business” are tortured and twee. It has been said that Friends abolished creeds, but couldn’t exterminate the creedal impulse.
According to philosopher William James, “Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.” This elegantly describes the nature of our relationships with others. Through our biases and subjectivities, we create views of the world that may not actually exist.
Perhaps you know the joke, “What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Quaker? Someone who knocks on your door and then refuses to speak to you.” At the same time that we want to create the Peaceable Kingdom, we’re a bit hesitant about making too big a deal about the event, figuring others need to find their own way to it, without us being too pushy.
