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by J Rourke
On my break at the coffee shop, a regular asked me to tell her about my church sometime.
“It’s Quaker, right? I’m not exactly a peaceable person, but I think I could be. I want to work on that. And Quakers are about Peace, right?”
Read MoreOne of the banes of growing up in a small private school while playing sports with boys from bigger public schools was tryouts’ day, where, usually, the only people I knew by name were my parents. This past year has been kind of like that. Lots of newness. I moved, I started a new job, I got married. With all of the change, I resorted a lot to the narratives I learned growing up, and all year long, I felt like a rookie at tryouts.
In a recent interview, one of the newest members of my hometown Portland Trail Blazers, Mason Plumlee, reveals how rookies are treated in the NBA, and it reflects what rookies face in all professions.
Hazing.
Read Moreby Philip Cox
Even though I hold pretty strongly to the Evangelical side of my Evangelical Friends tradition, I find it difficult to adopt the view, often associated with Evangelicals, of the Inerrancy of Scripture. Having actually read the Bible (like, all of it, more than once) I can admit that there are some stories that seem pretty historically improbable, some parallel accounts that are contradictory, and some descriptions that seem scientifically inaccurate. For the most part, this doesn’t bother me. As a Friend, I see the Bible as a secondary source of revelation. In my experience, it’s the direct, unmediated revelation of Jesus that is central (though, like Robert Barclay, I don’t think the two necessarily contradict).
Read Moreby Eric Muhr
Not so many years ago, I witnessed with interest a continuing debate in my community over Ten Commandments displays. One incident involved removal of a yellow placard from public land at a local airport. Angry letters flooded the newspaper opinion pages. And in further protest, a group of pilots ordered 150 copies of the sign for the sides of their privately-owned hangars.
It’s the kind of thing that happens again and again. And I wonder, how much of the shouting and fist-shaking really qualifies as righteous indignation and how much might be chalked up to plain, old fear.
by: Philip Cox
I used to believe that romance was a part of human nature. As long as men and women existed in the same place, people would get to know each other and fall in love. But conversations with young people in Rwanda revealed some realities.
First, it was common for young men to reach a point in their lives where they would simply decide that they should be married, find a good candidate, get their parents to arrange things, and settle the deal all in the span of a month or two. Second, divorce is less common. Third, "love" between partners was hard for them to define.
Read MoreBy: James Tower
When I was a kid, around 1989 or so, we lived in the Columbia River Gorge in a small town called Goldendale. I was nine-ish and trapped in what felt like the middle of nowhere. My mother had left my sister’s dad and was raising three kids on one income and using every spare dime on a two-year custody battle to keep my sister. It was a dark time of recovery after escaping an abusive situation, and we were very poor.
I remember food stamps and food boxes full of government cheese and canned salmon. I remember Mom always putting the after-Christmas clothing on layaway to lock in discount prices and paying it off slowly for next year’s school clothes. I remember we had this black and white TV hooked up to rabbit ears with tin foil on them. It was a hand-me-down from someone, who, like the rest of the world, had made the switch to color ages ago. I didn’t know anyone else growing up who still had a black and white TV… but it kind of fit with my melancholy world.
Read Moreby: Chrissy Muhr
On a spiritual retreat this last year, I noticed something about fire. Adding new sticks to already-smoldering logs made a lot of smoke, but it took a long time for flames to appear.
It’s kind of like my spiritual life.
Read MoreBrought up by parents at opposite poles of the spectrum (my mother a temperance union officer and my father an amateur connoisseur) I’ve wrestled with conflicting ideas about alcohol’s place in the Christian lifestyle. With no definitive bible verse stating whether the consumption of alcohol is right or wrong, we find ourselves sipping from different theological cups. I’ve seen believers turn defensive and hypercritical toward each other at the mere mention of alcohol, breaking into spats that rival the ugliest barroom brawls. But I’ve discovered that instead of outlining a code of judgment, God’s word uses the subject of alcohol to pop the cork on a discussion of how to live a Spirit-filled life.
Read Moreby: Eric Muhr
I used to work as the education reporter for a newspaper in Idaho, and part of my job was covering spring graduation ceremonies. I attended a lot of commencement exercises. It wasn’t my favorite part of the job. Most of these events felt like little more than a jumble of inspiration about the journey we’re on, about where we’re headed. It was always the same.
Except one time it wasn’t.
Read Moreby: Chrissy Muhr
It has been said that John is the Quaker gospel. It’s in John that Jesus calls his disciples Friends (John 15:15). John gives importance to women by telling the story of the first woman missionary – the Samaritan woman (John 4:3-9). And it is in this gospel that Jesus is referred to as the light.
That image of God as light pervades the writings of early Friends as well as the journal of George Fox.
God is seen as opposed to the forces of darkness. The “ocean of light” represents God’s love reaching out to humanity. Even though darkness seems to cover the world, the light is infinitely larger and all-encompassing. God’s love is a never-ending ocean that flows over the darkness and conquers it.
Read Moreby: Jen Buck
Community Is Hard
For five years, I lived in an intentional community. The idea was that we might follow Jesus more closely by committing to life together. We read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. We shared meals. We practiced spiritual disciplines together every week.
It was hard.
Even as Quakers who share Christ (and so much more), the differences were stark and strong between us. Finding consensus on issues often took months. Each of us had commitments outside of this community. And the community took time.
A lot of time.
Read Moreby: J Rourke
I’ve been working on compassion. It’s the aim of my spiritual work—to focus on interaction that is healing and care-full. Unfortunately, compassion isn’t my default, and I don’t always get there. But it’s a goal.
An example from work.
She came for her drink 15 minutes after I’d finished it.
“Yes, that’s yours,” I said. “Yup, almond milk … Yeah, I can put it in a to-go cup.”
She asked a few more questions. I offered a few more snappy-direct responses. She left angry. It was not my best moment.
Read Moreby: Jared Le Shana
God is love.
It is a phrase that we are well acquainted with, and one we like to use quite a bit. It is biblical. It is a creed that inspires us to be like God, and to seek the heart of the Father. We believe that love is at the center of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and that we are to love just as he loved. But we often disagree with each other on what love looks like for us, as 21st century Christians. Is love tolerant? Is love convicting? Is love tough?
I don’t think I have the answers to all the questions of what love looks like in every situation we find ourselves in, but I would like to propose a different way of looking at ‘Christian love’ (or, in light of what I am about to say, just ‘love’).
Read Moreby: Chrissy Muhr
Sometimes there are words. Sometimes silence. But always, there is music. And I’ve found, especially recently, that this is the image of God that resonates with me.
God as music: the Father composes, the Son conducts, the Spirit enables, and the music flows.
This God music strums the strings of creation, hums through my experience, shapes and shares truth in the voices of a human choir – my friends and neighbors. God doesn’t just speak to me, he sings to my condition.
Listen.
Read MoreWhat does it mean to identify as a Quaker today? I’m not sure. I’d probably be more excited about owning that attribution were this 19th century America with characters like Alice Paul, Elizabeth Fry, and Susan B. Anthony pursuing justice. (Quaker tradition appeals to my inner feminist.) But where are those quietly raging heroines and heroes of the faith now? Early Friends forged their reputation via holy troublemaking; how are we distinguished today?
Are we quietly raging against the tides of oppression and injustice, or simply quiet?
Read Moreby: Eric Muhr
There are times when I’m struck by what I read in scripture, challenged to stop for a moment and think about where I’m going, about whether my life is consistent with what I claim to believe. Take this passage, for instance, from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person.”
I’ve taken a different path, standing up for my rights, demanding justice when I know I’ve been wronged. And Christian culture applauds. Why is that?
Read Moreby: J Rourke
I used to dream of having superpowers. And winning the lottery. And marrying someone super rich and beautiful. And finding out I had a rare condition that made me smarter than everyone else. Only a few elite scientists could see it in me. Every once in a while I even dared to consider that the world around me was of my own construction, and if I focused hard enough, I could manipulate everything in my life to be what I wanted.
I really, really wanted out of my boring life. Honestly, I still want it. Maybe we all do. The problem is that we know – whatever we dream up – it can’t free us.
Read Moreby: Chrissy Muhr
Over and over I’ve come to places of decision. Places where it wasn’t enough to know right, to believe truth. I had to act.
Read MoreGod hears everything I say. And I’m a little embarrassed. All my complaints. Every bitter remark. Each selfish lament. He heard me say that? Cue the red cheeks and regret.
But there’s also comfort: “Because he turned his ear to me, I will call on him as long as I live” (Psalm 116:2). In a world of ads, texts, tweets, Facebook posts, junk mail, e-mail – God’s undivided attention means something. My words are heard through the din, and they are valued by the God who spoke light, sound, color, and life itself into existence. Incredible!
Read Moreby: Eric Muhr
After my brother finished his first year of college, I drove to Kansas to pick him up and bring him home for the summer. It’s a long drive from here to there, so I’d planned for the shortened week I’d face on my return. There were so many things to get done, and time, as always, was on the move. It was hard.
Hard to breathe.
Time was slipping into the future, and I couldn’t keep up. This in spite of how fast I was driving.
Read More