Hammonton Food Trucks

June 12, 2015

From the first Ham­mon­ton Food Truck Fes­ti­val. Cool stuff but the lines are way too long for a sin­gle par­ent with four antsy kids.

One of our friends said the line waits were up to 1.5 hrs. I could just about have jumped on the express­way to Philly, got­ten some Fed­er­al Donuts, and made it back in that time. I like that Ham­mon­ton has made then edges of a hip­ster map but this is a bit sil­ly. We end­ed up get­ting frozen treats at the Wawa around the corner.

FWCC Google Maps Mashup

September 12, 2009

FWCC Google Maps MashupThe Friends World Com­mit­tee for Con­sul­ta­tion unites Quak­ers of all stripes togeth­er in joint projects and dia­log. It’s Amer­i­c­as office has the most com­plete list­ing of U.S. and Cana­di­an Friends Meet­ings and Church­es and now has a map to prove it!
This is a mash-up of the FWCC data­base with Google Maps.

Because of lim­i­ta­tions of how many data points Google can show the coun­tries have been divid­ed into regions. The main access page is a screen shot of a Google Map with a old fash­ioned imagemap over­lay that allows you to select the region you want to look at. Javascript good­ness shad­ows the cur­rent­ly select­ed region.

See it live: www​.fwc​camer​i​c​as​.org/​f​r​i​e​nds

Alliance Cemetery

July 28, 2009

Alliance CemeteryI was hired to redesign the web­site of a ceme­tery that rep­re­sents a fas­ci­nat­ing slice of South Jer­sey his­to­ry. In the 1880s, a group of Jews escaped Russ­ian pogroms, came to Amer­i­ca and start­ed a “return to the soil” move­ment that led to the estab­lish­ment of an agri­cul­tur­al colony in the small Salem Coun­ty cross­roads of Nor­ma, New Jer­sey. Before long they estab­lished Alliance Cemetery.

The new Alliance web­site high­lights the entrance gate. The ceme­tery has hired a sur­vey­ing com­pa­ny to do a detailed map of the plots and we hope to add this in with a Google Maps mash-up when the data becomes avail­able. A detailed his­to­ry and pho­tos are also in the works.

The design is hand-coded from scratch and is prob­a­bly the most taste­ful design of my port­fo­lio. The pages them­selves are editable by the client using Cushy­CMS and the Direc­tions page has an inte­grat­ed Google Map.

Vis­it: Alliance​Ceme​tery​.com

The ascent of Apple Pie Hill

September 30, 2007

Yes­ter­day the kids and I took a road trip to Apple Pie Hill, a sum­mit of loose grav­el that tow­ers over the South Jer­sey pinelands from a dizzy­ing height of 209 feet above sea lev­el. A fire watch tow­er on the sum­mit adds anoth­er few dozen feet, enough to get a vis­i­tor over the tree­tops. On a clear day it’s said you can see the sky­lines of Atlantic City and Philadel­phia. For­tu­nate­ly for me it was an quin­tes­sen­tial­ly beau­ti­ful­ly fall day – clear and crisp. It was easy to spot the cities, both thirty-two miles away (most­ly to the south and most­ly to the west respec­tive­ly) and here’s blowups of the two resul­tant photos:
Trip to Pine Barren's famous Apple Pie Hill
Sand road to Apple Pie Hill Trip to Pine Barren's famous Apple Pie Hill Trip to Pine Barren's famous Apple Pie Hill Trip to Pine Barren's famous Apple Pie Hill
More pic­tures, from left: Sand road to the hill, the fire tow­er, the view down through the steps of the tow­er (the kids were left in the car), two year old Fran­cis eager but thwart­ed attempt to repeat Papa’s climb up tow­er. Click indi­vid­ual pho­tos for enlarged and geo­t­agged ver­sions. More pho­tos of this and out stopover at Atsion lat­er in the day on yes­ter­day’s Flickr page.

For those inter­est­ed in repeat­ing our jour­ney, here’s a map show­ing our route up and back. I was most­ly wing­ing it, depend­ing on these direc­tions from NJPines​land​sand​Down​Jer​sey​.com start­ing from near­by Chatsworth NJ, self-styled “Cap­i­tal of the Pine Barrens.” 



Oth­er map views: View Larg­er Map | Satel­lite with Route Map

Hey who am I to decide anything

April 9, 2007

Over on Non­the­ist Friends web­site, there’s an arti­cle look­ing back at ten years of FGC Gath­er­ing work­shops on their con­cern. There was also a post some­where on the blo­gos­phere (sor­ry I don’t remem­ber where) by a Pagan Friend excit­ed that this year’s Gath­er­ing would have a work­shop focused on their concerns.

It’s kind of inter­est­ing to look at the process by which new the­olo­gies are being added into Lib­er­al Quak­erism at an ever-increasing rate.

  • Mem­ber­ship of indi­vid­u­als in meet­ings. There are hun­dreds of meet­ings in lib­er­al Quak­erism that range all over the the­o­log­i­cal map. Add to that the wide­spread agree­ment that the­o­log­i­cal uni­ty with the meet­ing is not required and just about any­one believ­ing any­thing could be admit­ted some­where (or “grand­fa­thered in” as a birthright member).
  • A work­shop at the Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence Gath­er­ing and espe­cial­ly a reg­u­lar work­shop at suc­ces­sive Gath­er­ings. Yet as the very informed com­ments on a post a few years ago showed, the­ol­o­gy is not some­thing the plan­ning work­shop com­mit­tee is allowed to look at and at least one pro­po­nent of a new the­ol­o­gy has got­ten them­selves on the decid­ing com­mit­tee. The Gath­er­ing is essen­tial­ly built on the non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al Chau­taqua mod­el and FGC is per­fect­ly hap­py to spon­sor work­shops that are in appar­ent con­flict with its own mis­sion statement.
  • An arti­cle pub­lished in Friends Jour­nal. When the the Quak­er Sweat Lodge was strug­gling to claim legit­i­ma­cy it all but changed its name to the “Quak­er Sweat Lodge as fea­tured in the Feb­ru­ary 2002 Friends Jour­nal.” It’s a good mag­a­zine’s job to pub­lish arti­cles that make peo­ple think and a smart mag­a­zine will know that arti­cles that pro­voke a lit­tle con­tro­ver­sy is good for cir­cu­la­tion. I very much doubt the edi­to­r­i­al team at the Jour­nal con­sid­ers its agree­ment to pub­lish to be an inoc­u­la­tion against critique.
  • A web­site and list­serv. Fif­teen dol­lars at GoDad​dy​.com and you’ve got the web address of your dreams. Yahoo Group is free.

There are prob­a­bly oth­er mech­a­nisms of legit­i­ma­cy. My point is not to give com­pre­hen­sive guide­lines to would-be cam­paign­ers. I sim­ply want to note that none of the actors in these deci­sions is con­scious­ly think­ing “hey, I think I’ll expand the def­i­n­i­tion of lib­er­al Quak­er the­ol­o­gy today.” In fact I expect they’re most­ly pass­ing the buck, think­ing “hey, who am I to decide any­thing like that.”

None of these decision-making process­es are meant to serve as tools to dis­miss oppo­si­tion. The orga­ni­za­tions involved are not hand­ing out Impri­maturs and would be quite hor­ri­fied if they real­ized their agree­ments were being seen that way. Amy Clark, a com­menter on my last post, on this sum­mer’s reunion and camp for the once-young mem­bers of Young Friends North Amer­i­ca, had a very inter­est­ing comment:

I agree that YFNA has become FGC: those pre­vi­ous­ly involved in YFNA have tak­en lead­er­ship with FGC … with both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive results. Well … now we have a chance to look at the lega­cy we are cre­at­ing: do we like it?

I have the feel­ing that the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of lib­er­al Quak­er lead­er­ship does­n’t quite believe it’s lead­ing lib­er­al Quak­erism. By “lead­er­ship” I don’t mean the small skim of the pro­fes­sion­al Quak­er bureau­cra­cy (whose mem­bers can get _too_ self-inflated on the lead­er­ship issue) but the com­mit­tees, clerks and vol­un­teers that get most of the work done from the local to nation­al lev­els. We are the inher­i­tors of a proud and some­times fool­ish tra­di­tion and our actions are shap­ing its future but I don’t think we real­ly know that. I have no clever solu­tion to the issues I’ve out­lined here but I think becom­ing con­scious that we’re cre­at­ing our own lega­cy is an impor­tant first step.

Neat idea: postcard for World Peace

February 22, 2007

A project from Esto­nia, a “blog of post­cards for world peace”:http://postcardworldpeace.blogspot.com. From the site:
bq. The idea is sim­ple: Send us a post­card from your country/city (or any post­card you want) writ­ing in the back­side a mes­sage of peace to the World. All the post­cards will be uploaded in the blog, and there will be a record of how many post­cards per coun­try we receive (includ­ing a map show­ing the coverage).

Twenty First Century traveling ministry: of uberQuakers, selfish Friends and the search for unity

July 28, 2005

A guest piece by Evan Welkin

Short­ly after fin­ish­ing my sec­ond year at Guil­ford Col­lege, I set out to under­stand what brought me there. Dur­ing the stress­ful process of decid­ing which col­lege to attend, I felt a strong but slight­ly mys­te­ri­ous urge to explore Quak­erism in my under­grad­u­ate years. Two years lat­er, this same urge led me to buy a motor­cy­cle, learn to ride it, and set out in a spir­i­tu­al jour­ney up the East­ern seaboard vis­it­ing Quak­er meet­ings. While Guil­ford had excit­ed and even irri­tat­ed my curios­i­ty about the work­ings of Quak­erism, I knew lit­tle about how Quak­ers were over a large area of the coun­try. I want­ed to find out how Quak­ers worked as a group across a wide area of the coun­try, and if I could learn how to be a leader with­in that community.

July 26th, 2005: Clarence and Lilly Pickett Fund project report

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The Trans­port: Evan Welkin as he came through South Jersey.

The pur­pose of my trip as out­lined by my let­ter of intro­duc­tion was:

“…the devel­op­ment of con­struc­tive and enrich­ing spir­i­tu­al dia­logue between all branch­es of the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty. I plan to trav­el from South to North, speak­ing with meet­ings about how (or whether) they feel their region­al cul­ture affects their the­o­log­i­cal beliefs with the intent of gain­ing a greater under­stand­ing of the ‘spir­i­tu­al state’ of indi­vid­ual meetings.“

I was very com­mit­ted to keep­ing this vision open-ended in order to iden­ti­fy com­mon threads with­in con­ver­sa­tions I would have with Friends. I hoped in the dis­cus­sions I might iden­ti­fy whether there was some aspect of “region­al fla­vor” to a Quak­er meet­ing in South Car­oli­na ver­sus one in New Jer­sey, for exam­ple. I hoped to iden­ti­fy what these dif­fer­ences might be and some­how look for a com­mon Quak­er thread that ran beneath them I could address with all Friends. In addi­tion, I planned to take pic­tures of meet­ing­hous­es along the way to see if what peo­ple said about their meet­ings was at all reflect­ed in their meet­ing­house archi­tec­ture. In all hon­esty, how­ev­er, I was most inter­est­ed in sim­ply gain­ing a greater under­stand­ing of how Quak­erism is prac­ticed over a very large area of the US. As a Quak­er myself, I want­ed to know what it meant to tru­ly own up to and under­stand this part of my iden­ti­ty and to strength­en my spir­i­tu­al being and hope­ful­ly inspire others.

My ini­tial plans for this project were to pur­chase a motor­cy­cle, learn to ride it and dri­ve from Key West in Flori­da to Maine vis­it­ing Quak­ers along the way. I want­ed to stay near the coast, if for no oth­er rea­son than to have some kind of geo­graph­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity from the Atlantic to ground me along my way. The actu­al imple­men­ta­tion of my plan dif­fered slight­ly in it’s phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion, but I still found it to be a spir­i­tu­al­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly chal­leng­ing endeav­or. I trav­eled along the route indi­cat­ed on the attached map, cov­er­ing rough­ly 4,200 miles over the course of the trip. I began in Greens­boro, North Car­oli­na and trav­eled south to St. Peters­burg, Flori­da. From St. Peters­burg, I trav­eled all the way along the East­ern Seaboard more or less to New York City. From there, I returned to the South by way of Greens­boro to fin­ish in Nashville Tennessee.

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The Route: I vis­it­ed rough­ly 29 meet­ings hous­es and Quak­er places of wor­ship on my trip and met with groups from 15 of them. In a cou­ple of instances, I only met with indi­vid­u­als from var­i­ous meetings.

The prepa­ra­tion for my project was sig­nif­i­cant, most notably in respect to my trans­porta­tion. Before my deci­sion to take on this project, I had only once rid­den a motor­cy­cle, and my hazy mem­o­ry of the occa­sion makes me think it was just a brief ride on the back. Pur­chas­ing, insur­ing, licens­ing and learn­ing how to dri­ve a motor­cy­cle was a very involved under­tak­ing that required a con­sid­er­able amount of com­mit­ment to over­com­ing my fear. The process helped me become men­tal­ly pre­pared for the trip, though, by test­ing my phys­i­cal self so great­ly. In addi­tion, I wrote to over 50 Quak­er meet­ings all along the East coast intro­duc­ing myself and ask­ing them to con­sid­er meet­ing with me. As meet­ings respond­ed, I gave them an idea of when I might be in their area and we set up ten­ta­tive vis­it­ing dates. The pur­pose of the trip as out­lined in that let­ter changed over the course of my project, but I will return to that. In addi­tion to these two most time-consuming aspects of my project, there were quite a num­ber of oth­er small­er details to be tak­en care of that are inher­ent to any major trav­el. Pur­chas­ing gear, tun­ing up and prepar­ing my motor­cy­cle for long dis­tance tour­ing, dis­cussing details with my home meet­ing about the trip, etc. were some of the oth­er tasks to be com­plet­ed. For the most part, I did all of this alone. While I had Max Carter to help with some of the pre­lim­i­nary envi­sion­ing and last minute con­tact pos­si­bil­i­ties, I took on most every­thing myself. My home meet­ing was far away and could prac­ti­cal­ly offer very lit­tle in terms of coor­di­nat­ing efforts from that dis­tance. I was not sure how to pre­pare for the trip spir­i­tu­al­ly but left with an open heart and a strong com­mit­ment to be as open as pos­si­ble.
I was pre­sent­ed with quite a num­ber of chal­lenges on my trip, and it appeared that those obsta­cles came either in the form of spir­i­tu­al or prac­ti­cal tri­als along my way. Some of my prac­ti­cal chal­lenges were the theft of my cam­era ear­ly in the trip, the mat­ter of food and lodg­ing and the sheer effort of trav­el­ing over very great dis­tances day after day. The cam­era was sig­nif­i­cant loss because it made the process of gath­er­ing pic­tures for pre­sen­ta­tion much more dif­fi­cult. I had to rely on the poor qual­i­ty and much slow­er pro­cess­ing of a dis­pos­able cam­era for most of my trip. In gen­er­al, I had a sense of who I would stay with city by city along my route, but it was dif­fi­cult to not know any of these peo­ple in advance beyond let­ters and to rely on them so much for their gen­eros­i­ty. I real­ize that this demand­ed quite a degree of flex­i­bil­i­ty both on my part and theirs; this, like my stolen cam­era, helped me learn to adapt and try to be as gra­cious as pos­si­ble. The phys­i­cal strain and men­tal alert­ness I need­ed to trav­el long dis­tances was very tax­ing, result­ing in my deci­sion to not go as far as I had orig­i­nal­ly planned.

A prac­ti­cal issue that did affect the out­come of my project was which meet­ings end­ed up respond­ing to my let­ter of intro­duc­tion. I only received any word back from about half of the meet­ings I wrote to. Of those, I was dis­ap­point­ed that despite the fact I wrote to a large num­ber of Quak­ers both pro­grammed and unpro­grammed, I received a much small­er num­ber of respons­es from pro­grammed meet­ings and of those I did, a num­ber ‘dis­ap­peared’ after the ini­tial con­tact. This may have been entire­ly by chance, but none the less I found my expe­ri­ences with pro­grammed Friends to be dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly enrich­ing for their being so few and I regret­ted their brevi­ty. There­fore, most of my obser­va­tions were among unpro­grammed Friends and I shy away from mak­ing com­par­isons between “unpro­grammed” and “pro­grammed” Friends in this report because I sim­ply didn’t feel like I met with enough unpro­grammed Friends to tell.

In addi­tion, the inter­nal chal­lenge all these prac­ti­cal chal­lenges brought on made it dif­fi­cult to remain spir­i­tu­al­ly cen­tered. Con­stant spir­i­tu­al dis­cus­sion left me strug­gling to be light­heart­ed. I can’t tell if this made my lat­er dis­heart­en­ment with group con­ver­sa­tions greater or whether the dis­cus­sions them­selves dis­heart­ened me. As time went on though, my frus­tra­tions with the dynam­ics I wit­nessed in meet­ings right from the begin­ning of my trip onwards increas­ing­ly affect­ed my open­ness. I relied more and more on a reg­i­ment­ed con­ver­sa­tion for­mat, lim­it­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for spon­tane­ity of spir­it. By the end I felt like a slight­ly strange gen­tle­man who ris­es every week at about the same time in meet­ing for wor­ship with a mes­sage that seems unfor­tu­nate­ly sim­i­lar to the same thing he said the week before.

With the goal of cre­at­ing “enrich­ing spir­i­tu­al dia­logue” so promi­nent­ly placed as my goal for this trip, I spent a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time fig­ur­ing out what this meant and how it might be achieved. If I were able to cre­ate this dia­logue on my trip, I some­how felt that this would be imme­di­ate­ly ben­e­fi­cial to both Quak­ers and Quak­er insti­tu­tions by cre­at­ing a greater sense of vital­i­ty and uni­ty with­in them. I began to real­ize how sub­jec­tive uni­ty and vital­i­ty are. A dis­tinc­tion I failed to rec­og­nize in my ide­al­ized con­cep­tion was the dif­fer­ence between uni­ty of indi­vid­u­als, such as a good con­ver­sa­tion between myself and a host, and uni­ty of meet­ings, such as a group meet­ing and shar­ing con­ver­sa­tion. As time went on, I began to become frus­trat­ed in group dis­cus­sions and to try to “argue” my inter­pre­ta­tion of uni­ty and vital­i­ty in much the same way I saw oth­er Friends doing. I had hoped Friends them­selves would sug­gest points of uni­ty with­in Quak­erism, but often I just heard folks talk about what they believed in to the exclu­sion of oth­er beliefs. For instance, I asked many meet­ings what they might do as a group if some­one rose in meet­ing and brought a very evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian mes­sage to wor­ship. While at first many spoke about “try­ing to accept that mes­sage” as equal to any oth­er, it seemed that in essence many felt threat­ened by the ques­tion and that I should ask it at all. It seemed that few meet­ings had any estab­lished process of “elder­ing” or hold­ing indi­vid­u­als account­able for the group. I am cer­tain­ly not evan­gel­i­cal nor am I sure I am Chris­t­ian, but I some­how felt accused of being both in these con­ver­sa­tions and there­fore felt less wel­come. There were sev­er­al points on my trip where I strug­gled to find any hope Quak­ers could be lead to unite amongst each oth­er, and it was the dis­tinc­tion between indi­vid­u­als and groups that made all the difference.

Observ­ing group dynam­ics and look­ing for con­ti­nu­ity or uni­ty with­in Friends Meet­ings as a whole along my jour­ney was very hard for me. There were sev­er­al notable excep­tions, but as I fin­ished my trip I found myself ter­ri­bly dis­heart­ened in gen­er­al by much of the group behav­ior I wit­nessed with­in the meet­ings I vis­it­ed. In meet­ings were I felt most suc­cess­ful and use­ful the mem­bers appeared not only to care deeply about each oth­er and the vital­i­ty of their indi­vid­ual meet­ings, but were strong enough to work out­side their own com­mu­ni­ties to engage cor­po­rate­ly in the wider body of Quak­erism and the world at large. They had clear ways of hold­ing indi­vid­u­als account­able to the group as a whole and did so. I did not feel I found this sense in many of the meet­ings I vis­it­ed though, how­ev­er briefly, and could not tell how ben­e­fi­cial my vis­it might be to them. I was sur­prised to be so dis­heart­ened after see­ing folks so quick­ly, but often it appeared very obvi­ous­ly in group con­ver­sa­tions full of Friends inter­rupt­ing or con­tra­dict­ing each oth­er or from side com­ments I heard from indi­vid­u­als later.

I strug­gle to write these words because I felt cared for and looked after by folks from all the meet­ings I vis­it­ed, but I still could not help but feel sad when vis­it­ing meet­ings who steadi­ly lost mem­bers, strug­gled to take care of basic busi­ness or suf­fered from inter­nal feuds. Many meet­ings in Flori­da were in the process of build­ing new meet­ing­hous­es, and while the com­mon cause of such a large order of busi­ness seemed to bring them togeth­er, many Friends in these meet­ings expressed con­cern that it was only a tem­po­rary fix. In fair­ness, many of the meet­ings I vis­it­ed along the way were in fact wor­ship groups and not ful­ly meet­ings, but rather than this being a step­ping stone to a more estab­lished order, it seemed that many of these wor­ship groups strug­gled to keep the few mem­bers they had and seemed to not feel ter­ri­bly con­nect­ed as a group.

What appeared to be the main caus­es of this dis­uni­ty, how­ev­er, was the unfor­tu­nate fact that it seems many Friends are Quak­er for self­ish rea­sons. I’m sor­ry to say it, but that was my impres­sion of why so many meet­ing groups strug­gle to find an effec­tive group process. In many of the meet­ings I vis­it­ed it appeared that Friends not only expect­ed com­plete accep­tance of their per­son­al spir­i­tu­al path, but also their polit­i­cal, ide­o­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al ones as well. Like in the case of the evan­gel­i­cal mes­sage ques­tion, it appeared that an evan­gel­i­cal per­son was not sim­ply threat­en­ing to indi­vid­u­als in their spir­i­tu­al beliefs, but also in their inferred polit­i­cal lean­ings and cul­ture. This seemed to show me that the meet­ing was not actu­al­ly for embrac­ing peo­ple in a group atmos­phere as adver­tised but more a cul­tur­al, ide­o­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal sup­port group for like-minded indi­vid­u­als. “Quak­ers couldn’t be Repub­li­can. I can’t stand Repub­li­cans” . This is where the realm of the indi­vid­ual butted up against the cor­po­rate in my eyes.

The beau­ty of silent wor­ship, as many Friends agreed, was it’s abil­i­ty to speak to so many dif­fer­ent Friend’s con­di­tions while still being such a cru­cial­ly group-centered act. In the ear­ly days of Quak­erism, it appeared that this act of wor­ship was a cor­ner­stone for the con­nec­tion that could be felt between indi­vid­u­als in a group set­ting in busi­ness meet­ing, com­mu­ni­ty din­ners or the world at large. From what I saw on my trip, the grat­i­fi­ca­tion and ful­fill­ment of the indi­vid­ual appears more and more accen­tu­at­ed as Quak­erism pro­gress­es rather than ful­fill­ment of the whole meet­ing. When faced with a con­fus­ing or chaot­ic busi­ness process, for instance, it seems in many cas­es that every per­son wants to revert to the way THEY make deci­sions best as the ide­al way for the group. I would has­ten to add that I did not even attend one busi­ness meet­ing along my trip, and that my con­cern for the issue of busi­ness specif­i­cal­ly comes from many, many direct com­ments from indi­vid­u­als frus­trat­ed by their group’s busi­ness meet­ings. I saw on my own that many Friends have so many dif­fer­ent inter­ests and such com­plete­ly busy lives out­side meet­ing, it appears the most they can do to attend­ed worship.

So per­haps the para­dox of the indi­vid­ual and group with­in a uni­ver­sal spir­it is what Quak­erism can ben­e­fit from explor­ing today. I found my atten­tion so often turned to the great folks I found along my way who spoke direct­ly to my con­di­tion. I met so many incred­i­bly inter­est­ing, thought-provoking, eccen­tric, kind and inspired peo­ple on my trip, I can­not help but be awed and impressed. I cer­tain­ly found a kind of uni­ty between them and myself. While I can­not be sure my actions ben­e­fit­ed Friend meet­ings in total­i­ty, I know that my con­ver­sa­tions with Friends were both inspir­ing to me and the peo­ple I found along the way. I believe I bright­ened some folks’ days and gave them a chance to tell their sto­ries. The faith required to get on the road each day, not know­ing where I would end up by night­fall was awe­some and it stretched me con­sid­er­ably in a way that I think Friends appre­ci­at­ed. I am sure that I will con­tin­ue to be in con­tact with Friends I met along the way and will con­tin­ue to think about these issues with them.

In terms of this trip as a foun­da­tion for Quak­er lead­er­ship, I must say I was a put at a bit of a loss at what that might mean. Some­one men­tioned it might be like “herd­ing cats.” One lead­er­ship role I did see often, which wor­ried me, was that of the “überQuak­ers,” as we at Guil­ford like to call them. It appeared that in many instances, I end­ed up stay­ing with the mem­bers of meet­ings who were the “movers and shak­ers” of their meet­ings for their dogged ded­i­ca­tion to the meet­ing as a whole. Sad­ly, in many instances these folks seemed to bear a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of respon­si­bil­i­ty for the affairs of their meet­ings, spir­i­tu­al­ly, logis­ti­cal­ly and ener­get­i­cal­ly. They did not resent this role, but it appeared to me that they were rarely con­scious­ly cho­sen for that min­istry by the group but instead had the posi­tion thrust upon them. These folks were com­pli­ment­ed by an unfor­tu­nate­ly large seg­ment of Friends, often plead­ing busy sched­ules, who appeared to be unable to com­mit to the meet­ing beyond the cathar­sis of meet­ing for wor­ship. Part of wit­ness­ing this left me ques­tion­ing my com­mit­ment to Quak­erism by the end of my trip. If this is how Quak­erism works, why should I even both­er devel­op­ing ‘lead­er­ship’ to become an “überQuak­er”? While it may not have burnt out those who I stayed with along the way, why would I pur­pose­ly stick my neck out for the ben­e­fit of the group as a whole when it seems that few oth­ers are actu­al­ly inter­est­ed in any­one but them­selves at the end of the day? It is not that I begrudge self­less­ness by any means, but Quak­erism can­not sur­vive on the self­less­ness of some and depen­dence of many. Or at least it should not in my eyes.

Per­haps what wor­ries me is that with the amount of time and effort I put into this trip, I am already falling into the “überQuak­er” mind­set. “Well, if things aren’t going right I’ll just have to do some­thing myself and decide how they can be fixed.” This is my great fear. This is not the think­ing of a vital, post-authoritarian reli­gious soci­ety. I imag­ine a vital Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty that is full of folks with var­i­ous com­mit­ments, but all with a shared desire not only to come to wor­ship togeth­er but to do busi­ness togeth­er, reach out and make sac­ri­fices to bring in new mem­bers and active­ly take on projects as a meet­ing that all can agree are the Spirit’s will. I would like to see a much greater sense of group inten­tion­al­i­ty, but I know that is not some­thing one indi­vid­ual can force. I have learned that I have a great deal of per­son­al growth to go through before I am ready to con­tribute as I would like to the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty. I think in many ways this trip made me feel more inex­pe­ri­enced and appre­hen­sive with Quak­erism but I strive for that place of faith and con­fi­dence. I am begin­ning a book about my expe­ri­ences on this trip, in addi­tion to cre­at­ing a dig­i­tal pre­sen­ta­tion fea­tur­ing the meet­ing­house pic­tures I took.

I wish I could say I knew this trip was God’s will, but the rhetoric with which many peo­ple have invoked God’s name in my life has blurred the lines between spir­i­tu­al sur­ren­der and ego­tis­ti­cal manip­u­la­tion. As one par­tic­u­lar­ly astute Friend put it “As with so much else in life, imple­ment­ing our inten­tions should allow for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of being self con­ceit­ed.” Much of what I found along my trip reflect­ed strug­gles with­in oth­ers about the will of God in their lives, some of which start­ed ear­ly in Friend’s lives and some that only began when they took Quak­erism as their own. Iron­i­cal­ly, it appears that the dif­fer­ence I was look­ing for in geo­graph­ic dis­tri­b­u­tion was actu­al­ly sur­pris­ing­ly absent over such a large area. All the Friends I talked to were in some way strug­gling with the issue of how they fit into the larg­er group, a com­mu­ni­ty of the Spir­it and of Quak­er busi­ness. As I sought to find par­al­lels in my con­ver­sa­tions with Friends, I was con­stant­ly remind­ed of the push and pull of the indi­vid­ual will ver­sus the will of the whole. In many Friends eyes, this strug­gle is fun­da­men­tal­ly a dance between the indi­vid­ual and answer­ing to the Spir­it that is with­in us all.

Some Queries I made up for myself along my trip were:

  • How do I remain secure and non-threatened in my own faith to be open to others?
  • What are my blind­ness­es or bias­es from my Quak­er roots?
  • What is self­less­ness and is it ideal?
  • How do I know what is my will and what is the will of God?

Quaker Map Hack

May 26, 2005

blankTo the best of my knowl­edge this is the first Quak­er Google Maps hack, show­ing the meet­ing­hous­es of down­town Philadel­phia. Click on the thumb­tacks for details; click on the satel­lite view for a cool view! Like much of the web it looks much bet­ter in “Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. Hack cour­tesy of the extreme­ly exper­i­men­tal “MyGmaps”:http://mygmaps.com, data from “Quakerfinder.org”:www.Quakerfinder.org. Here’s my short list of “Google Map Hacks”:http://del.icio.us/martin_kelley/map.
Although I love Quak­erfind­er, it should be not­ed that Google does almost as good a job list­ing area “Friends Meet­ings” via their “local search” feature.