Future generations will likely study the events of this year and scratch their heads. Just considering a global pandemic (and the failure of our leaders to address it) and racial injustice reaching a fever pitch, one can almost envision an entire college course examining the calamities of 2020.
Dear Editor:
Friends Committee on National Legislation is asking Quaker meetings right now to offer suggestions about what the FCNL legislative priorities should be for the 117th Congress (2021-2022). I urge Friends in the West to especially focus on legislation affecting our atmosphere, natural environment, and the uses of our public lands.
When I was a kid, I told my little sister that we were forming a club. The two of us held a meeting to discuss possible club names and what kinds of things we would do as members of this club. We decided we would call it “The Do-Gooders Club,” and we would do good things. Creative, right? I’m not sure where things went after that.
Dear Friends:
Your Friends Committee on National Legislation has two internship programs for young adults and both are now taking applications for 2020.
OUR principle is, and our practices have always been, to seek peace and ensue it; to follow after righteousness and the knowledge of God; seeking the good and welfare, and doing that which tends to the peace of all. . .
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.
Some call this place the Holy Land. Some call it the Middle East, some Israel, others Palestine. At the Qumran archeological site in the West Bank, the chalk cliffs are steep and rugged. Yet the desert light brings out delicate hues – buff, pink, peach. The land shimmers in the heat, very much like the desert land of my home near Tucson, Arizona.
Racism and white supremacy, the malignant cancers plaguing America today, are a joint system destroying black and brown bodies. In the past, the Klan did that destroying. Today, statistics do. Those statistics amount to the erasure of people.
Dear Friends: Back to basics.
The life in me needs to be wonderful.
To be wonderful, the life in me -- needs to be safe, needs to be healthy, needs to be happy.
To be happy, the life in me needs to take some risks with my safety and health.
A familiar scene: Bright morning sunlight streams in through the glass of paint-chipped windows of a Friends’ meetinghouse, a simple room filled with wooden benches and quiet people.
