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Friends United Meeting |
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Quaker Life
April 2003
Over 200 Quakers attended the FWCC special called conference on the Friends peace witness, held at Guilford College, January 17-20, 2003. Coming from 28 yearly meetings/associations, they considered the theme, "The Friends Peace Witness in a Time of Crisis." There were 17 workshops, 22 plenary panelists, a score of interest groups and 18 home groups. It was the first time in 30 years a gathering has been called to listen around a testimony. A virtual conference continues at www.friendspeace.org where you can find the text of panel and workshop presentations, participate in conversations with leaders and participants, and have access to a wealth of practical connections and resources.
A Cloud of Witnesses
By Pam Ferguson, Indiana Yearly Meeting
Wilmer Tjossem, Iowa, told the story of his great grandfather who lived in Randolph County, North Carolina when the Civil War began. He was a young farmer with a wife and a three-year-old child. Because of his Quaker heritage and beliefs, he refused to join the Confederate Army and refused to pay for someone to take his place. Just before the Battle of Gettysburg, he was arrested by Confederates, tried and sentenced to execution for refusal to fight. Somehow his execution didn't happen. Instead a gun was strapped to his back and he was forced-marched north, in all likelihood on his way to Gettysburg. His wife didn't know where her husband was and believed him dead.
In the march north, this young man managed an escape and made his way to Indiana; a safer place to wait out the war. When the war ended he walked back to North Carolina to reunite with his wife and child. Living through a war alone with a young son was incredibly difficult for this young woman and she was near mental collapse. The shock of seeing her husband, who she thought was dead, was more than she could handle. Tjossem's great-grandfather packed up his family and moved to Iowa where his wife's mental condition worsened and she was institutionalized for 50 years. The Quaker Meeting he attended in Iowa became the center of his life and he remained faithful to Quakers in spite of the price he paid for refusing to fight in the Civil War. Years later he repeated this story to his eight-year-old great-grandson, Wilmer Tjossem, who began his own journey into peace and pacifism.
This peace conference reminded me of the cost of pacifism. The same evening we watched conscientious objectors from World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War stand and be recognized for their peace witness. Those jailed for their beliefs and those presently nonregistered for the draft also stood and were recognized. I was moved by those lives and sensed a cloud of witnesses surrounding these living people, a cloud that included Wilmer Tjossem's great-grandfather, his wife, and many others who paid dearly for their testimony of peace.
My personal journey to peace and pacifism began at sixteen with the suicide of my sister. This journey became a lifestyle and the beat of my heart through the nine years I spent living in war zones in Southern Sudan and Uganda. At the edge of these places my eyes and at times my heart were consumed with hopelessness—starving children, amputees and refugees. I've heard more landmines, gunshots and explosions than I ever want to hear again. The only thing that spoke to my heart in those places and lifted me from the edge was the hope for peace, and the possibility that one day men and women would find nothing more urgent or more important than making God's peace and God's kingdom visible in our world.
At this conference, I was called again to where I live—to build peace in my home, in my marriage, in my meeting and in my community. To bring God's presence and peace into the jail a block from my home and into the classroom of 6th graders where I teach sex education. This message of peace needs to be made visible in my own community and country as we sit on the edge of war. The places where peace is needed are endless. The task is large and daunting, but I left the weekend knowing I am not alone. I am in the midst of a community of Quakers and peacemakers whose hearts beat with the same passion and hope as mine. We did not need to issue a minute affirming our commitment to make peace in our world. Our living lives, our beating hearts, our daily work is God's covenant made visible. And we join a cloud of witnesses.
Renewing the Covenant of Peace
By Bridget Moix, New York Yearly Meeting
"I told them I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of wars...I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strife were."—George Fox
These words of Fox surrounded and filled me up throughout the FWCC special called conference on Friends peace witness, held at Guilford College, January 17-20, 2003. And these words continue to nourish my spirit as I've returned to the work of lobbying, organizing, and witnessing with Friends in the midst of the sometimes deafening beat of war drums. The FWCC conference did not result, to the concern of some, in a final epistle or minute that reaffirmed in a clear, prophetic voice Friends' witness for peace in a time of crisis. There was no final piece of paper to carry home to our churches and meetings, no historic declaration that we could record and point to when we are asked—as we will be—"What canst thou say?"
In my mind, though, the conference achieved much greater works. It brought Friends together across our diverse traditions in a spirit of kinship, worship and collective seeking. It created a space where experiences, queries, concerns and insights could be shared across generations on the challenge of living our peace testimony. It helped melt some of the false barriers between peace activist and spiritual seeker that we've created in many of our own minds and meetings. And it prodded Friends to gather as a Society and examine together who we are as a religious people and what God's call is for us in this moment of history.
A central message I discovered in the FWCC conference is that none of us individually hold the answers. Rather, we must seek them with God as a gathered community. Many of us at Guilford found ourselves engaged in what we sensed to be a sacred effort—even as clumsy and uncertain as we often felt in undertaking it—of renewing our commitment to the covenant of peace. George Fox spoke of this covenant when he refused service in the king's militia. It appears in Isaiah, "For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you" (54:10), and in Ezekiel, "I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; and I will bless them and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary among them forevermore" (37:26). It is a covenant that stretches through the ages.
Our covenant of peace with God, not any epistle or historic document proclaiming the Quaker peace testimony, will be our source of strength and truth in living a peace witness in a time of crisis. For it is this covenant which binds Friends as a religious community in the struggle to live the Kingdom of God on earth, no matter how violent, how unjust, how fear-filled the world around us may be. The FWCC conference was a beginning, not a culmination. In this historic moment dominated by war and fear, Friends are feeling ourselves called back as a community into "that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars." And we are beginning to heed that call.
The Whispered Words of God
By Ben Richmond, Director of North American Ministries, Friends United Meeting
The peace and justice for which we long does not depend on our goodness, strength or wisdom. The Good News is that God who already knew our weakness even before we confessed it, chooses—even so—to use us from time to time to give expression to the peace and justice which is at the very heart of God.
The peace testimony is not a proposition or law, but an unfolding story that reveals itself as we respond to the whispered words of God.
The Good News is that God does actually speak in the midst of our angry, scared and selfish community. From time to time, this gives us courage or strength that we need to go into places that we would otherwise not go, to take nonviolent risks for justice and peace. At these times, we have found the reality that the cross does lead to the experience of resurrection.
All this leads me to suggest that the most radical thing that we can do for peace in this time of perpetual war is to invite others into the experience of the community of faith that we have found so transforming. In this sense, we must all be evangelical.
One of our workshop leaders expressed the vision that every Meeting might sponsor one of its members to participate in a short-term delegation or become a long-term peace team member.
As the United States has moved to a stated doctrine of perpetual war, the possibility of military conscription that will include both men and women becomes greater. Our Meetings need to help our young Friends think through their faith, particularly in regard to issues of war, peace and conscientious objection.
And finally, because we have seen so clearly that war is but one expression of a way of life that has apocalyptic implications for the future of life in God's dear creation, our Meetings must find ways to hold one another accountable in matters of our lifestyle and possessions.
Is it not pure joy that Christ has called us to be companions on this journey?
Being Faithful in the Midst of Darkness
By Jan Wood, Northwest and Wilmington Yearly Meetings
To my eyes, the gathering moved on two levels that informed and shaped our Leadings—the conceptual and the experiential.
On the conceptual level, key concepts gave us common framework and language. Peace was no thin discussion of no-war-in-Iraq. It was a full and dynamic space of Life and Power that was fully attentive to the roots, seeds and fruit of Shalom. The parable of the Good Samaritan became the language for talking together about the paradoxical demands of peace and justice. The Lamb's War became the metaphor to frame our vigorous assault against the powers of destruction with weapons of Light, Love, Trust, Confession/repentance/restitution, Simplicity, Community. Despite our theological diversity, we moved in a sense of unity around the privilege and responsibilities of being faithful to God who invites us to join the transformative and redemptive Gospel Order in the midst of darkness.
On the experiential level, there were discernable movements that moved like waves. The first motions were a sense of relief that at last we were gathered in shared discernment and community, a common recognition of the true severity of our national sins, an air of expectancy that God would lead.
The second motion was fear. Fear of what faithfulness might be asking of each of us. Fear of our inadequacies for the tasks—both individually and for Quakers as a whole. Fear that we wouldn't be able to discern the movement of God and leave with only hand wringing and empty talk.
The third motion was a shift from pieties to practicalities. We let ourselves embrace the paradoxes. Peace and Justice. Peacemaking as process as well as result. Renewed intentionality toward families, meetings, neighbors and communities while still working for systemic changes. Life style needs in light of economic and environmental shalom.
The fourth motion rose like bubbles as water starts to boil. An individual opening here and there. A catalyzing worship message. An interest group on celebration. Then a consciousness shift from fear to good news. Good news of the amazing invitation to join God's heart in peacemaking. Good news of grace and enough-ness upon people who know themselves to be clumsy and inadequate. Radiant lived-through testimonies of joy in the midst of suffering. The Yesness of God's Spirit rose transforming the landscape of the crises—altering our attentions and intentions.
The conceptual and experiential flows converged—and there was a sense of God's invitation forward.
We parted, not with Minutes, epistles and papers, but as changed people. We parted with a joined intentionality to step forward with an urgency commensurate with the dangers of these times.
Renewing Our Call to Be Peacemakers
By Doug Bennett, Earlham College President, Richmond, Indiana
From the gathering's first morning, we were reminded that the Peace Testimony cannot simply be taken as given, even (or especially) among Friends. Larry Ingle, from Tennessee, reminded us that Fox and other early Friends came only by fits and starts to its first articulation. Ron Mock, from Oregon, noted that if we believe in radical adherence to the Holy Spirit, how can we know what we will be called to do tomorrow? And Janet Melnyk, from Georgia, underscored that pacifism is not an unambiguous biblical mandate: verses urging peacemaking can be met with verses that can be quoted to justify war. Through several hundred years of expectant listening, we have understood the Bible as suffused with the call to love one another, even our enemies, and heard God calling us to be peacemakers.
Our gathering in Greensboro was not simply an occasion to derive implications for action from a foreordained mandate, but rather an opportunity to renew the call to peacemaking in ourselves and in one another. We came from across the United States and Canada, and from across a wide arc of theological compass points. We brought experience of several generations, and thus of several times of war, to mix and melt together in renewing this commitment.
In two dozen workshops, we had occasions to learn about projects and initiatives, from Alternatives to Violence project training and Friends Peacemaker Teams to plans to assemble a non-violent peace force.
One urging I found helpful was to work locally, within our own means and networks, not to think we each and perhaps alone bear the burden of devising a national strategy for stopping a war. Our efforts will connect together and be sturdier if we work in this way. Another helpful thread in the discussions was to explore anew the connections between peacemaking and simplicity. Quakers have powerful testimonies about both. Our efforts will be clearer and deeper if we steadfastly adhere to both.
Perhaps I only reveal my own mood, but I sensed a measure of dismay and uncertainty as we gathered: Can we find the strength? Do we have to endure this again? In a worship session the second morning, Nancy Maeder, from Indiana, spoke of her spiritual preparation—looking to the Cross for bearing suffering. In the gathering, we were hoping to draw clarity and confidence from one another, and from God, as much as to formulate action plans. And I believe we did.
Copyright (c) 2003 Friends United Meeting
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