Every year around Cesar Chavez day I look for traces of my involve­ment with him. In the spring of 1987 he came to my col­lege cam­pus to recruit an annu­al mini-army of col­lege interns to work on what­ev­er cam­paign the Unit­ed Farm Work­ers were orga­niz­ing that sum­mer. I was back from a two-week, semi-authorized drop-out for a peace march and was intrigued with its glimpse into alter­na­tive com­mu­ni­ties. Now here was an oppor­tu­ni­ty to work with a liv­ing non­vi­o­lence leg­end: yes please!

Much of the actu­al work turned out to be pret­ty mean­ing­less, I must admit. I did a lot of cold call­ing to church answer­ing machines to tell them about a video we were going to mail out to them (“nar­rat­ed by Mike Far­rell!”). But the con­text of the expe­ri­ence was great: liv­ing in a rent­ed house with oth­er UFW interns in East Brunswick, N.J. (one of whom became a seri­ous rela­tion­ship); work­ing in New York at a revolv­ing num­ber of desks at what­ev­er union would lend us a room; dis­cov­er­ing cheese enchi­ladas via Cesar’s always kind daugh­ter Lin­da; com­mut­ing into pre-gentrification Tribeca lis­ten­ing to some atro­cious 1980s bub­blegum pop sta­tion because that’s what Lin­da’s tween daugh­ters Olivia and Julia liked.

In July, we orga­nized an event back in Philly for Cesar: a protest out­side the A&P stock­hold­er meet­ing pres­sur­ing them to stop sell­ing grapes treat­ed with pes­ti­cides. I did a lot of orga­niz­ing around this: writ­ing first drafts of press releas­es, help­ing to get local labor unions out to the event to boost num­bers. Googling this morn­ing I found the pho­to above, tak­en at the event. That’s Cesar’s son-in-law and my boss Artie Rodriguez behind him to the right. I would have been some­where near­by just out of cam­era reach. The cap­tion reads:

Farm leader Cesar Chavez speaks to a group of sup­port­ers in Philadel­phia 7/9 out­side the hotel where the A&P stock­hold­ers were hold­ing their annu­al meet­ing. Chavez sup­port­ers were demand­ing that the super­mar­ket chain stop sell­ing Cal­i­for­nia grapes that are con­tact­ed with pes­ti­cides that cause cancer. 

It would prob­a­bly stun kids today that before cell phones many of us just did­n’t take pic­tures. Despite work­ing with him for an extend­ed sum­mer, and walk­ing with him in the 1987 March on Wash­ing­ton for Les­bian and Gay Rights, I have no pic­tures of myself with Cesar (I do have a card­board poster I prob­a­bly drew in ten min­utes, which he signed). But I have mem­o­ries of that sum­mer 35 (!) years ago. He was always kind and fun­ny and sur­pris­ing­ly down to earth. His charis­ma brought togeth­er an inter­est­ing col­lec­tion of fol­low­ers and I was glad to be one.

I’m reshar­ing my March Friends Jour­nal “Among Friends” col­umn here, with a few links and extra thoughts.

For many of us, the act of walk­ing into a meet­ing­house or Friends church, sit­ting on the bench, pew, or chair and clos­ing our eyes brings an imme­di­ate sense of seren­i­ty. We can for­get our wor­ries, our to-dos, our laun­dry and dish­es pil­ing up back home and set­tle into the sweet wor­ship. Togeth­er, safe inside our beloved com­mu­ni­ty, we can turn our atten­tion to the prompt­ing of the Spir­it. There may be wor­ries inside that sacred space — social con­cerns to hold and dis­cern, the joys and sor­rows of fel­low­ship. But the wor­ship space itself is safe, a refuge of Light to inspire, recharge, and reset ourselves.

This is not the expe­ri­ence of every vis­i­tor to a Quak­er space. I’ve been in three sit­u­a­tions in Quak­er meet­ings where my kids have been in close con­tact with some­one who I lat­er learned was a ser­i­al child abuser. I’ve been at Quak­er events where assaults against young adults hap­pened, whis­pered but nev­er pub­licly acknowl­edged to pro­tect the pri­va­cy of the vic­tim — and per­haps of the spon­sor­ing organization.

Two accounts in this issue come from year­ly meet­ings (South­east Year­ly Meet­ing, North Pacif­ic Year­ly Meet­ing) that dis­cov­ered that well-liked — even beloved — youth pro­gram work­ers had been assault­ing teenagers at year­ly meet­ing events. The respons­es of Friends were not always help­ful (one even rein­stat­ed the abuser only to find out there had been more undis­closed vic­tims). Mul­ti­ple authors point out that their meet­ings had no pol­i­cy in place and that the gath­ered body fierce­ly strug­gled to bal­ance com­pet­ing feel­ings of shock, fear, and denial with desires for mer­cy and justice.

If any­thing is unique about Friends’ respons­es, it is our desire to want to see the Light in all, to trust and for­give as we try to under­stand the roots of per­son­al vio­lence. While admirable qual­i­ties, they can some­times leave us unique­ly vul­ner­a­ble to manip­u­la­tion an obser­va­tion made by a few of this month’s authors. As a self-organized soci­ety that is some­times sus­pi­cious of pro­fes­sion­al­ism, we can be ill-equipped to look for, iden­ti­fy, and respond to these kinds of disclosures.

But we need not despair. There are plen­ty of resources out there (Lau­ra McGuire’s “Han­dle with Care: Prepar­ing and Respond­ing to Dis­clo­sures” is a must-read on this). There are pro­fes­sion­als who have stud­ied the issue of abuse in reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties, many of them mem­bers of our own com­mu­ni­ty. There are also year­ly meet­ings that have gone through the pain and heart­break and devel­oped poli­cies that can act as mod­els for all of us.

Need­less to say, these are hard issues and they may be trig­ger­ing. Emo­tions can run high just read­ing these arti­cles. Please exer­cise all the self care you need.

Further thoughts:

There’s a lot of brav­ery among the writ­ers in this issue. Many felt quite ner­vous talk­ing about these issues in such a pub­lic forum. They have expe­ri­enced push-back in pre­vi­ous attempts to raise expe­ri­ences of abuse in Quak­er cir­cles. I’m real­ly proud of the authors and grate­ful that Friends Jour­nal can pub­lish an issue like this.

There’s a online pan­el talk being orga­nized with many of the authors, along with some great co-sponsors. Details are still being worked out but we’re look­ing at March 23 at 1pm ET. I’ll post here when sign-ups are starting.

I’m very excit­ed that the ninth sea­son of the Quak­er­S­peak video inter­view series is start­ing. Here’s the announce­ment promo.

Over on Friends Jour­nal, we’re reshar­ing this 2014 inter­view with Diane Ran­dall, who was then head of Friends Com­mit­tee on Nation­al Legislation.

Diane’s suc­ces­sor Brid­get Moix, has writ­ten a State­ment on Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Ukraine. These kinds of state­ments always depress me because they’re always so pre­dictable — war is stu­pid, we’re Quak­ers, we believe in peace, every­one should back off of the war — but what else can you do? The truth is the truth, no mat­ter how many times we have to repeat it. Rinse and repeat as nations con­tin­ue to use mil­i­tary force to oppress others.

War is Not the Answer