My friend Chris Stern has an arti­cle on the Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing site about accom­pa­ny­ing a younger Friend trav­el­ing in min­istry: “I had been called to trav­el in the min­istry among Friends as a young man (around Matt’s age) and didn’t know what this meant or how to pro­ceed. Some old­er friends had encour­aged me and trav­eled with me to help me find my way. Now I could do this for Matt.”

On Friends Jour­nal, If Quak­ers Were (Also) Witch­es by Sara Jole­na Wol­cott, who was also on this mon­th’s Quak­ers Today pod­cast) and a series of sto­ries from Mary Lin­da McK­in­ney on spir­i­tu­al trav­els after she felt led to slow down her Quak­er activ­i­ties to “expand my aware­ness of the Divine.”

My inter­view with UK Friend Rhi­an­non Grant for Friends Jour­nal’s Octo­ber issue on “Ecu­meni­cal and Inter­faith Friends.” She’s writ­ten for us many times before, but for this issue we have Con­fi­dence in Com­plex­i­ty: Hold­ing Firm to Mul­ti­ple Reli­gious Con­nec­tions. Rhi­an­non is very much a hyphen­at­ed Friend, draw­ing spir­i­tu­al insights from her par­tic­i­pa­tion in Druid and Bud­dhist com­mu­ni­ties. Even those of us who hew clos­er to tra­di­tion­al Friends’ prac­tice have many oth­er iden­ti­ties and influ­ences — place, fam­i­ly back­grounds, per­son­al friend­ships and yes, even pol­i­tics and lifestyle help shape who we are. 

I real­ly like the lessons Rhi­an­non draws about con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing our influ­ences and nav­i­gat­ing through their con­tra­dic­tions using a very Quak­er­ly process of discernment.

From Pales­tine Friend Sa’ed Atshan, “I Wish Amer­i­cans Could See the Human­i­ty of Pales­tini­ans as They Do With Israelis.”

A coali­tion of Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions have called for a cease­fire in Gaza.

On Friends Jour­nal, Ani­ta Hemphill McCormick writes about the Three Nephites, a Mor­mon folk­loric tra­di­tion of helpers who appear out of nowhere to do good deeds, then dis­ap­pear. As she grew up she real­ized she was start­ing to fill this role herself. 

Wess Daniel’s and Robin Mohr are going to exam­ine the some­what dor­mant top­ic of Con­ver­gent Friends in a pre­sen­ta­tion for the Quak­er Lead­er­ship Cen­ter at Earl­ham School of Reli­gion on Novem­ber 29. Sign up here.

Nan­cy Thomas asks How weighty do I want to be?

But I am a Quak­er and “weighty Friend” is one of those delight­ful Quak­er terms that’s fun to say, although the exact mean­ing slips and slides around a bit. I ask myself, is this rem­nant from ear­ly Quak­erism still mean­ing­ful? Help­ful? And what does it mean in ref­er­ence to me?

I love the old tra­di­tions, even the archa­ic words. Some of them car­ry an ambiance of holi­ness, order, and, yes, Quak­er cul­ture. Some still man­age to be use­ful, even after all these years. Maybe “weighty Friend” is one of them?

I like the visu­al metaphor of slip­ping and slid­ing. I think it’s apt when using terms denot­ing a kind of spir­i­tu­al author­i­ty in Quak­er cir­cles. The author­i­ty is ulti­mate­ly com­ing from the Holy Spir­it and the Inward Light. But it’s use­ful to acknowl­edge that some peo­ple have devel­oped their spir­i­tu­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty over a long-enough peri­od that their opin­ion car­ries a lit­tle extra weight.

You’re in poten­tial trou­ble as soon as you name it though: humans seem to have an instinct to rely on social des­ig­na­tions like these and begin to rely too much on the opin­ions of cer­tain peo­ple over every­one else. Pret­ty soon there’s a new class of insid­er Friends and strug­gles over who gets to define that class. You get 200 years of schisms and the exo­dus of gen­er­a­tions of deeply spir­i­tu­al peo­ple who don’t want to bat­tle over the crumbs of pow­er. But Nan­cy includes humor in the mix, which I think is wise and per­haps a bit of an anti­dote to spir­i­tu­al selfishness.

I think one of the great­est gifts weighty Friends can pro­vide is to give sim­ple words of encour­age­ment. Years ago I taught a six-week Quak­erism 101 class at Med­ford (N.J.) Meet­ing. Most of its mem­bers come from a near­by Quak­er retire­ment com­mu­ni­ty and it is full of weighty and sea­soned Friends — euphemisms aside, I was lit­er­al­ly half the age of all but a few work­shop atten­ders. After one ses­sion, Margery Larrabee came up to me. Even in a meet­ing of sea­soned Friends, she stood out, hav­ing writ­ten pam­phlets on Quak­er elder­ship and being inti­mate­ly involved with the Lib­er­al Quak­er re-embrace of trav­el­ing min­istries in the 1990s. Feel­ing self-conscious, I start­ed ner­vous­ly apol­o­giz­ing, say­ing I should­n’t be out there in front, that I should be tak­ing a class from her. She smiled sweet­ly and said “oh no, you’re right where you are sup­posed to be.” Just a few words, but I instant­ly felt at ease. This was­n’t coffee-hour small talk any­more, but a con­fir­ma­tion that I was on the right path with my teach­ing min­istry, giv­en by some­one who’s author­i­ty came from a life­time of faith­ful ser­vice to the Spirit.

Andy Stanton-Henry’s “All the Way Back to George Fox” looks at the lega­cy of John Wim­ber, a rock musi­cian turned Quak­er pas­tor turned charis­mat­ic church founder. Yes, that’s a lot of turns. Yes, it’s quite a story. 

One of the impuls­es that drove Wim­ber’s min­istry was a desire to “do the stuff” he read about in the Bible, not just talk and sing about it. This is not so very dif­fer­ent from ear­ly Friends. Founder George Fox brought peo­ple back to life, his mir­a­cles edit­ed out of most accounts until Hen­ry Cad­bury col­lect­ed them back togeth­er in the 1940s. James Nayler, anoth­er Quak­er co-founder, devel­oped a full-on mes­si­ah com­plex, even­tu­al­ly re-enacting Jesus’s Palm Sun­day entry into Jerusalem. Wim­ber’s wife talked about their reac­tion when they final­ly got around to read­ing Fox’s Jour­nal:

Read­ing it lat­er, we won­dered what our con­tem­po­raries were so upset about! A move­ment of the Spir­it hap­pened in our group — for which gen­er­a­tions of Quak­ers had prayed for years, but had no idea how it would look when it came — and when it did hap­pen, it didn’t real­ly fit with Quak­er the­ol­o­gy at that time.

Wim­ber’s min­istries got too enthu­si­as­tic for even Cal­i­for­nia Evan­gel­i­cal Friends and he left to co-found the Vine­yard Church­es. In our author chat, Andy and I dis­cuss some of the lessons we might learn from these rel­a­tive­ly modern-day seek­ers want­i­ng to “do the stuff.” 

Also of inter­est: the 2018 post from an anony­mous mem­ber of the Friend­ly Fire Col­lec­tive: The Mak­ing of a Charis­mat­ic Quak­er.

From the Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee: 5 Things You Need to Know About What’s Hap­pen­ing in Israel and Gaza. The always-thoughtful Tim­o­thy Sny­der has a good piece, Ter­ror and Count-Terror, on what dri­ves ter­ror­ism (“For the vic­tim, ter­ror is about what it is. For the ter­ror­ist, it is about what hap­pens next.”). Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing has a brief update on Ramal­lah Friends School.

Quak­er­S­peak inter­views JT Dorr-Bremme on the Quak­er prac­tice of dis­cern­ment. Friends Jour­nal’s fea­tures Chester Free­man’s Bag­gage and Bless­ings: An African Amer­i­can Man’s Expe­ri­ence as a Friend.

This Code Break­ing Quak­er Poet Hunt­ed Nazis. Just that title was enough to make me stop and click.

I wrote up some­thing about Chris Stern’s vis­it to my meet­ing on Sun­day. I’ll share one extract on where he thought ear­ly Friends found their faith:

Chris said part of the answer came from Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gath­ered togeth­er in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” He said this is what ear­ly Friends were wait­ing for: “All of the prac­tices and rit­u­als didn’t have any mean­ing any more. They start­ed wait­ing because Jesus had said he’d show up. Ear­ly friends were averse to doc­trines but had a recog­ni­tion that there was some­thing inside urg­ing them to con­nect with God and urg­ing them con­nect with each oth­er — urg­ing them to love. They real­ized that this was Jesus.”

I was glad that he and trav­el­ing com­pan­ion, Joe Strat­ton, came out to share this min­istry with us. Not includ­ed there is a nice aside about his­toric meet­ing­hous­es. As Friends, we de-emphasize out­ward signs of faith — cross, steeples, altars. This includes our build­ings, yet there is a cer­tain feel­ing one gets step­ping into some of our meet­ing­hous­es. As Chris told us:

When you walk into an old meet­ing­house like this to get a sense of his­to­ry. I felt was trans­port­ed into anoth­er cen­tu­ry. But what is it that res­onates from these walls. Isn’t it the faith­ful lives of the peo­ple who inter­act­ed here all those years? Does­n’t that just draw us in to do that too? To enter that stream of faith­ful lives?