Pages tagged "Culture"

Dear Friends: So there I was in the fellowship hall of the Rose Drive Friends Church in Yorba Linda, Orange County, California. My role was that of the official observer from Pacific Yearly Meeting. This was my fifth year attending the annual conference of the Evangelical Friends Church Southwest and I saw some encouraging changes. When I attended my first session in 2006, these fellow Quakers struck me as more evangelical than Friends. This time (January, 2015), I felt that I was among Friends. That feeling began with hearing some Quakerly statements about the need to be diligent about listening to God’s voice, and “Jesus is Right Here, Right Now!”

“Did you see the letters?” asked the little 7-year-old at my side. I had just returned from a trip overseas and was recounting some of the highlights. Letters?

Dear Editor: I write in response to the article, “Shining Light on Anti-Semitism,” published in the July/August 2016 issue of Western Friend.

Vietnam is a mixture of old and new, the simple ways of villages and the cutthroat competition of modern global capitalism, ugly nightmares from an ancient history filled with devastating wars and current struggles to recover.

Old white people elected a person who ran on a racist, xenophobic, misogynist platform as president of the United States. That’s us baby boomers. That’s me. How did this happen? Maybe we need to stop pointing fingers and wringing our hands and get honest about how this happened and what we’re going to do to take back our democracy.

George Fox described himself during his early adulthood as “a man of sorrows in the times of the first workings of the Lord in me.” Shortly later, he stated, “After this did a pure fire appear in me, a spiritual discerning came into me.” By the following year, while he was 24, a major transformation had occurred, “In the year 1648, as I was sitting in a Friend’s house . . . I saw there was a great crack to go throughout the earth, and a great smoke to go as the crack went, and that after the crack, there should be a great shaking. This was the earth in people’s hearts which was to be shaken before the Seed of God was to be raised out of the earth . . . and great meetings we began to have.” He discerned the reason for this change was because “the Lord God had opened to me by his invisible power how every man was enlightened by the divine Light of Christ; and I saw it shine through all.”

I began exploring my spiritual path through Buddhist meditation in my early twenties. Since that time, I have attended five weeklong, silent, Buddhist retreats. These were pivotal to my spiritual growth and developing self-awareness. My last one was in December, and I realized two things. First, to be in silence is a practice that gives me the space and grounding I need to seek authentic wholeness and to strive to align my life with a higher purpose. Second, I realized that because I knew no one at these silent retreats, I was essentially surrounded by strangers, and I left with unsettling feelings of emptiness. In the last decade, I have grown to love the continuous community of Quakers. Recently, I have been feeling more guided to keep my spirituality contained within Quakerism, as it is my home.

Heritage is an inheritance, a kind of gift, good or bad, we receive from the past – cannot avoid receiving, since it’s ingrained in our character and being. Even when we may not recognize it or admit it (and especially if we do), it’s an essential element in who we are. As Quakers, we carry our generally unwritten heritage forward, especially in unprogrammed meetings. We do not subscribe to any dogma, governing us from the top down. Times change, and we change with the times, trying to respond as responsibly as we are able, with integrity, common sense, good will and (we hope) divine guidance. As Quakers we look to the past. We have a respectable history, checkered with human mistakes, but in the main reflecting who we are. We may seem somewhat “left of center,” but we generally fit in with other citizens of our country and are friendly with other denominations, even those not specifically Christian, i.e. Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist. We are glad to share our heritage, but we do not want to impose it on others. ~~~

Matters of budget and finance during our annual Quaker gatherings can often lead us from questions about numbers into existential conversations about why we even have yearly meetings. During one such business meeting this summer, which considered the 2016 budget of Intermountain Yearly Meeting, I found myself thinking of Edwin Starr’s Motown classic, “War.” Except the lyrics I heard in my inner ear were: “Yearly Meeting! What is it good for? Absolutely everything!”

The ability to see and write clearly, the justice of an open mind, the opportunity to observe people and events during a complex period in a conflicted country: all these qualities Henriette Groot brings to her recently published journal, which recounts her experiences in South Africa in 1986 – Zebras for Table Mountain. Groot is a member of Central Coast Meeting in San Louis Obispo, CA (PYM). She and her husband took a round-the-world sailing voyage at a critical time in history. This journal reflects Groot’s curiosity as the couple approached South Africa in September 1985, her interest in people of all classes and races, her knowledge of the Apartheid struggle, and her desire “to be with South African Quakers.”