On Wednes­day Friends Jour­nal exec­u­tive direc­tor Gabe Ehri told us all to work from home until fur­ther notice. For­tu­nate­ly we had just got­ten the April issue off to press, which is good because final proof­ing is best done in per­son. Now we’re all ping­ing each oth­er with Slack and Zoom and hun­ker­ing down into the new normal.

We do have an arti­cle on COVID-19 from Katie Bres­lin and I’m updat­ing it with Quak­er resources that I’m find­ing. There are a lot. Every year­ly and month­ly meet­ings is tak­ing this seri­ous­ly. All of my pub­lic events this week­end have now been canceled.

It will be inter­est­ing to see how we all adapt. I think I’m going to be a lot chat­ti­er online to make up for the loss of face-to-face con­tacts. I expect this email newslet­ter to go back to fre­quent post­ings. If you find resources you think I should share let me know by email (martink@martinkelley.com) or Twit­ter (martin_kelley). Be safe every­one. Check in our your neigh­bors. Be gen­er­ous. Enjoy the lit­tle joys that come with iso­la­tion (I’m hap­py to lose my com­mute for awhile and to see my fam­i­ly more). And keep every­one in your prayers.

A new arti­cle up on Friends Jour­nal: Katie Bres­lin has writ­ten on how Quak­er Meet­ings are deal­ing with COVID-19. Even since writ­ing the arti­cle yes­ter­day, she’s heard that more meet­ings are can­celling wor­ship ser­vices. I’m hear­ing from church­es near me that they too are can­cel­ing ser­vices. Stay safe every­one and let me know of any Friends who are nav­i­gat­ing the world on online worship.

Quak­er Meet­ings Respond to Coronavirus 

Friends adapt to the spread of COVID-19.

Friends Journal 

We’re all com­ing up with lists. Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing has com­piled this one, with help­ful links to oth­er Quak­er year­ly meet­ings. There’s also a use­ful list of advices from Rad­nor (Pa.) Meet­ing — there’s noth­ing unique about it but it could be a use­ful selec­tion to cut and paste into your own meet­ing newsletter.
https://​www​.pym​.org/​s​a​f​e​t​y​-​r​e​s​o​u​r​c​e​s​-​f​r​o​m​-​m​e​e​t​i​n​g​s​-​r​e​l​a​t​e​d​-​t​o​-​c​o​v​i​d​-​19/

On Abid­ing Quak­er, Patri­cia Dall­mann tells a sto­ry of two very dif­fer­ent Quak­ers:

Unbe­knownst to him or to me that morn­ing, we each embod­ied a force that in rela­tion to the oth­er, as Pen­ing­ton wrote, had “no com­mu­nion or peace between them”; these forces con­tend (like the two kings referred to in the epi­graph) for the soul of human­i­ty: to edi­fy or to destroy. Though this Sun­day morn­ing inci­dent involved only two peo­ple in an emp­ty meet­ing­house, it was, nev­er­the­less, the Lamb’s War: a skir­mish in which the pow­ers clashed, pow­ers which when pit­ted against one anoth­er on a grander scale deter­mine history. 

From Steven Davison:

This trans­fer­ence of blame, hurt, and anger to the meet­ing calls for a spe­cial kind of pas­toral care that we don’t seem to do very well or even talk about much. I am not at all clear about what’s called for myself, but I grieve for the peo­ple I know who have been hurt in this way and also for the meet­ings in which this pain and ten­sion lives as a shad­ow on the fellowship.

He has some good obser­va­tions here, like this one: “Friends also have a per­verse ten­den­cy some­times to min­is­ter to the per­pe­tra­tor in a fraught sit­u­a­tion, rather than the vic­tim.” This is cer­tain­ly a phe­nom­e­non. I remem­ber a meet­ing sit­u­a­tion some years back in which every­one at the meet­ing pri­vate­ly agreed that a cer­tain mem­ber was being mean-spirited in their char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of oth­er mem­bers but didn’t say any­thing even as peo­ple start­ed leav­ing the meeting.

He talks about ear­ly Friends’ use of the con­cept of gospel order, but admits that “modern-day Friends hard­ly even know it exists.” I’ve seen a rel­a­tive­ly tra­di­tion­al­ist meet­ing fail a fair­ly straight-forward test of gospel order. Why would we pass up an oppor­tu­ni­ty to help a recal­ci­trant mem­ber find some inner heal? Do we secret­ly think that peo­ple can’t change?

Hurt by the Meet­ing | Through the Flam­ing Sword

The Friends Jour­nal “From the Edi­tor’s Desk” blog began as ideas for future which I post­ed here on Quak­er Ranter. At a cer­tain point I real­ized I should share it on Friends Jour­nal web­site direct­ly. But I still want read­ers here to know about upcom­ing issues and to share them to poten­tial writ­ers. Don’t under­es­ti­mate your abil­i­ty to inspire: often an arti­cle’s birth starts with an expe­ri­enced friend sug­gest­ing a top­ic to a new writer. If you know a Quak­er who might have some­thing inter­est­ing to say on this top­ic, please share this with them. Here’s an excerpt to my Edi­tor’s Desk blog post.

Thin spaces is a term mys­tics use for those places where our human world and the Divine come clos­er togeth­er. They’ll often cite those his­toric sacred spaces that catch our breath when we enter, loca­tions where one can feel the echoes of gen­er­a­tions of worshipers.

But for Friends, every place has the poten­tial of being a thin space. Indeed, per­haps every place is already brim­ming over with divin­i­ty and only waits on our abil­i­ty to set­tle. Our phys­i­cal spaces tes­ti­fy to that ethos by mak­ing wor­ship rooms plain, uncon­se­crat­ed, and func­tion­al, and our wor­ship is based on a divine immi­nence that needs no pas­tor or litur­gi­cal ritual.

Learn more at the blog post Writ­ing Opp: Thin Spaces.