A busy life of service, ministry, and mourning

For several weeks I have been waiting to have a bit of time to catch up on The Good Raised Up; thanks for your patience!


White Privilege Conference

In First Month 2011, I began working with Vanessa Julye of Friends General Conference to arrange for a group discount for Quakers who would attend the 12th annual White Privilege Conference. Vanessa, myself, and at least eight other Friends attended the previous year's conference, and all of us committed to work toward getting at least sixty Quakers to attend this year.

Through Facebook, personal invitations, sending flyers and Frequently Asked Questions to a number of individuals and yearly meetings, and with the help of my partner Jeanne, a few of us pulled together a group of nearly seventy Quakers from at least nine yearly meetings and were able to receive more than half off of the regular registration fee for the conference. Based on the evaluations we've received, it seems like it was energy, time, money, and human resources well spent!

Some highlights from my own experience include...

1. A wonderful and intense keynote by Michelle Alexander, whose remarks about mass incarceration of African Americans and the new Jim Crow paralleled what is on this video--with thanks to FGC for posting this or a similar video on their Facebook page, prior to the conference;
2. An engaging workshop on how to assess your community's or organization's success (or lack of success) in incorporating "best practices" toward becoming a multicultural organization [pdf];
3. Another workshop --which was set up to be more like a round-table--about the extent to which White people in the U.S. who are engaged in antiracism consultation work are making money off the backs of people of color. Ooh-la-la, it was inspiring to have people of color and people of European descent really labor and challenge one another, and see how we White people stayed present when called out on our privilege. A number of White consultants openly humbled themselves in order to listen deeply to the perspectives of their peers who are people of color. It's vital to see these accountability measures in place and to have models of how to engage in the tough questions. Quakers do not have a monopoly on Love being the first motion!
4. Having a room dedicated to the Quaker group, to allow so many of us to collapse during lunch breaks, have worship sharing when we were in need of some shared reflection time, and have a closing worship to bring it all together;
5. Finding out that there is already at least one Friend in InterMountain Yearly Meeting who is considering helping coordinate a similar Quaker group for WPC13 in Albuquerque in 2012!

I came away from this year's conference with a belief that there is the potential for some significant systemic change among Quakers and how we can address, collectively, racism and White privilege in order to bring about healing and reconciliation--from a place not of self-righteousness but of humility and love.


Ministry after WPC12

One of the advantages of attending the White Privilege Conference when it was just 20 minutes from my home is that I could then attend meeting for worship the morning after the conference ended.

I was exhausted and very full, and I was still playing host to an out-of-town Quaker friend who had stayed with us. If I was lucky, I'd be able to stay awake during worship, which had about 6-8 other Friends who had attended the conference.

Well, maybe God uses exhausted people sometimes to be a messenger.

I was Given one of those messages that not only made me shake in my boots but also made my voice, legs, and arms quiver... one of those messages where I was given just a fragment of what I was supposed to say, and then having said it, I was Given a bit more, and so on, for about 4-5 minutes.

The bit that I can recall went something like this:

Today as we sit here in worship, we are committing a radical act: we are praying and worshiping and listening for God together. It is indeed a radical act to be able to companion one another, in joy and in sorrow, whether we look like one another or not; whether one of us is old and the other young; one of us is light-skinned and the other is dark-skinned; one of us is wealthy and the other poor. It is a radical act to choose to companion one another, at a time when society says to be afraid of the stranger, to avoid the person you don't know, to be separate, to go it alone, to be independent. It is a radical act, instead, to choose to be a companion to someone in need, or to open ourselves and allow someone to companion us, so that we may truly be One Family...

I sat down and wept, grasping the hand of my friend sitting next to me: the Power was so fierce and truly dread-full. I was overcome...


The unexpected death of a Friend

Three days after the White Privilege Conference ended, I traveled to New Jersey for the better part of a week to help my aging parents prepare to move to the Boston area.

And shortly before I left New Jersey, I saw news online that a Friend in the meeting had died in his sleep, unexpectedly. He was leaving behind two young children, and he had already buried a daughter a few years earlier, after a boating accident.

So when I came home, one of the first things I did was attend this Friend's memorial Meeting for Worship.

The meetingroom was overflowing, with friends, coworkers, and fellow Quakers taking seats in the hall and in the meeting's library. For each Quaker in attendance, it seemed like there were at least two, if not three other friends, colleagues, or family members also.

Most of the people who spoke out of the silence weren't part of the meeting. They spoke, though, of how Steve's life was a testament of living a principled life and of how very present he was to whoever he was talking with at the time. Men spoke of how Steve's words and actions touched them; women spoke of how Steve's outbursts of singing made them laugh; and young and not-so-young people spoke of missing their Uncle Steve or of cherishing the lessons that they had learned, literally, from their schoolteacher so many years ago...

The messages that came during the worship got me to thinking that we as a meeting really didn't know Steve at all. In fact, we had opportunities to learn about the witness he was carrying out--giving up his car and encouraging Friends to take the bus to worship on First Day--and pretty much turned a deaf ear to him, with an occasional "Walk/Bus/Carpool to worship Day." I think we didn't want to be inconvenienced by what he was asking of us, or we didn't care for how he appeared to be pressuring us to live differently.

And when we stopped listening to Steve, we also stopped listening to how God was moving in his life. More importantly, we stopped listening for how God was asking to be in our lives, too.


Ministry after Steve

A few days later, it was First Day again, and I had made it to early worship, where I could settle a bit more readily into the waiting stillness.

I followed my thoughts as they wove themselves around Steve and the memorial, the things we knew about Steve and the things we didn't know that we didn't know. I wondered who else in the meeting wasn't known and yet wanted to be.

And I thought about my own yearning as an eight-year-old.

I followed my thoughts some more, and remembered an epistle that Ministry & Counsel had presented to the meeting a few years ago, which included a section on how we respond to ministry that is hard to receive.

Before long, the various threads came together, and a message rose out of me. I spoke about Steve and the stories we heard during the memorial. I spoke about myself, being an eight-year-old girl who yearned to be famous, because that was the only way I knew how I could be known by those around me. Famous people are known by everyone: I wanted to be known, therefore I wanted to be famous.

I spoke about how Steve's witness to the meeting was the kind that was like a big stone that is plopped into the middle of a still pond: At first, we are upset that our tranquility is shattered by the plop and splash of that stone, and we focus our anger and upset on the dropping of the stone itself.

But if we are disciplined and grounded enough in the Spirit, we can sit back and be mindful of the ripples of that stone, as they lap at our ankles, and we can understand what messages those ripples carry for us as a community. We can forgive the disruption of the stone itself because we welcome how the witness of that stone and its ripples may be speaking to us and may be bringing us into right relationship with the Spirit.

And so Steve has left us with his stone, and I am left wondering if Steve felt Known by us in the way that his family, friends, and colleagues seemed to Know him, in That Which Is Eternal.

And even if Steve felt Known by the meeting, are there others in the meeting who yearn to be Known but don't know how to reach out?

Do we, as a meeting, make ourselves vulnerable in order to allow the ministry and witness of others to reach us and change us in the Spirit? Do we, as a meeting, practice the sort of Love that is required of us, to know one another deeply, and to open ourselves to one another?

. . . . . . . . . . . .

The days of the White Privilege Conference are over, and my parents are now settled into their new home as they enter this next stage of their life. I look ahead toward the rest of spring, toward opportunities to be of service, and toward some travel both among Friends and with family.

Thanks for reading me.

Blessings,
Liz

Revisiting my Jewish identity

This past week has provided another doorway into my Jewish upbringing. Jeanne and I have been going to a few films that are part of the local Jewish Film Festival.

Oy!

It's the first time since 1986 or 1987--when I left that faith tradition--that I've been surrounded by so many Jewish people.

I was nearly overwhelmed. In the few hours I spent at the community center one evening, I began to wonder--again--how my life would have been different had I been exposed to a different kind of Judaism when I was growing up.

...Or how my life would have been different had I actually followed the kind of Judaism that my family practiced!

At the first film we went to, it was hard to stay present: the crowd that gathered could have been the same people from the New Jersey synagogue I grew up in. Most people were in their 50s, 60s, and 70s; a number of women were rather dressed up for just a movie; some were even wearing furs (!).

And the women and men were LOUD. They greeted each other loudly, they interrupted loudly, they took their seats in the theater loudly, they whispered loudly, as if every utterance of theirs had an exclamation point at its end. ("Are you saving that seat?! Are there enough seats for all of us to sit there?! I don't like sitting so close, can't we move back another few rows...?!")

That's when it hit me:

Jews were extroverts.

And as if to affirm my observation, within two minutes of my mentioning that to Jeanne, a stranger sat down and struck up a conversation with her. Amazing!

In one of the venues, at a suburban Jewish community center, there was a small art gallery off the lobby. We had about 40 minutes of wait time before the film and so I went into the gallery, giving myself some space away from the throng of the enthusiastically loud extroverts.

The exhibit was about the mystical part of Judaism known as Kabbalah. As the explanatory material in the exhibit pointed out, the Kabbalah traditionally is/was studied only by men, and only after decades of study of the Torah and of the Talmud. But for this exhibit, these art pieces were all done by women, and their expression of this deep, forbidden part of Judaism that had long been cut off from me and my Jewish sisters, moved me deeply.

A week later, reflecting on what I saw and what I read, something still stirs in my soul...

Was it a wonder that my twenty-some years of experience of Judaism was so empty, if as a child or young adult I didn't have access to the mystical part of the Living Presence that speaks to my condition?

Is it a wonder that Quakerism--a mystical faith tradition that is accessible even to children and youth--is it a wonder that Quakerism continues to speak to me, thirty years after I was exposed to its manner of worship?

Having just had that opening and wondering, I entered the theater with Jeanne--and watched a film that was focused on true events from the Holocaust.

Raw would be an apt word to describe how I felt after that experience.

Seeing La Rafle with a Jewish audience--the persecution, the horror, the hope-against-hope even though we know how it ends--definitely has a visceral power that binds the nonobservant Jew with the devout one; the cultural American Jew with the practicing Israeli Jew, the Reformed Jew with the Orthodox.

With the Jews depicted in the film, their story was our story; their pain was our pain. This I had been taught religiously while growing up, not by words but by everything but words.

It seems that in Judaism, the Holocaust is one of those topics where it's whispered about within earshot of Jewish children, making them curious about what the grown-ups are talking about and never spoken of directly until the kids are older. Then, when we do find out, we are horrified and we don't have the skills or the mentors to help us learn what to do with our pain. We turn into adults who whisper within earshot of Jewish children about the atrocities that no one ought to have lived through, and the cycle and the connection-through-pain continues.

So it was hard for me to come up out of that shared event of the film. I had a familiar but awful feeling about the experience. It took me about ten minutes of silence and of averting Jeanne's concerned gaze before I could say anything:

The thing is, growing up and learning about the Holocaust, it's all about an identity that's sustained through pain and suffering. This is what happened to so many Jewish people, even though both sides of my family had been safely in the U.S. long before World War II, and yet I was taught verbally and nonverbally to accept this as part of who I am. And if I don't connect with the suffering, if I don't stay connected with the Jewish community, than who am I?

In Sunday school, I have no memory of ever having been taught about the joy of being Jewish. I had no models of that until I was in graduate school when I connected with one Jewish family who had showed me a different way to be Jewish. But I wasn't surrounded or immersed by that sort of community and so it never took.

And now I realize and remember that Quakers were also persecuted. Yet even while they were imprisoned and starving, they apparently still experienced such joy in the Spirit. A joy that I myself have experienced directly! And I see how much modern Quakers talk about the joy that comes with being faithful! It's such a different message, a different experience...

Somehow I feel I was denied a Jewish experience that could have been mine, which I suppose is exactly what happened, even if no one set out to make it like that.

And while I was having my real-time flashbacks to my life as a Jew, I was also getting reconnected a bit with my Quaker blogging friends, and my experience of worship has been having a new quality of depth to it...

Where God is taking me I cannot know. I do seem to be drawn into the community that is available to me at the time, provided there is authenticity, mystical experience, reflection, and joy.

Thanks for reading me.

Blessings,
Liz

Quaker bloggers move to the head of the class

In the past few weeks, two Quaker bloggers have been appointed to serve a couple of international Quaker institutions.

First was Barry Crossno, who is the incoming General Secretary of Friends General Conference, an organization that provides programming and services to Friends across the U.S. and Canada, and regardless of branch affiliation (though most folks in the U.S. forget about Canada and misinterpret FGC's reach). Martin Kelley has a nice write-up about Barry's earlier place in the Quaker blogosphere.

There's also Robin Mohr, recently appointed as the next Executive Secretary of the Section of the Americas for Friends World Committee on Consultation. I consider Robin to be a personal friend of mine: we've talked by phone on a number of occasions and had a chance to meet up in person a couple of times, both at three FGC Gatherings and at one or two Convergent Friends events.

(Now is as good a time as any to throw in a mention that these two Friends also have personal essays in the print collection of Quaker blog posts, Writing Cheerfully on the Web.)

So what are the possible implications of having two Friends, previously or currently active in blogging--not to mention Twitter--at the servant-leadership helm of groups such as FGC and FWCC Section of the Americas?

For me, it gives me hope that regardless of branch affiliation, form of worship, language of theology, or system of belief, Barry and Robin will invite all of us to a deeper place of mutual respect for one another's authenticity of faith.

They'll likely affirm our previous and current participation in our own Quaker worship communities, be they Friends churches or fledgling unprogrammed worship groups--and then they'll ask us to consider the Inward Teacher more fully, side by side with messages that are from Scripture and with experiences that come from the perfectly imperfect realm of human experience.

I hope Robin and Barry will continue to let us peek into their lives a bit, too, letting us know what they are struggling with; inviting perspectives from beyond their own institutional circles in order to be true to the Loving Principle that draws all of us into the family that is the Religious Society of Friends.

God is good. All the time.

Blessings,
Liz

Tom "Bigfoot" Tannehill and his ministry to me

The other day I had the opportunity to reflect on a person whose life ministered to me in ways I had not understood before. I suppose the passage of time and learning about someone's death provides the right opportunity for such hindsight to be made clear.

Tom Tannehill stood about 6-foot-four, and looked like a perfect candidate for a college wrestling heavy-weight championship team. He was so huge that his nickname was Bigfoot. Back in the late 1980s, I didn't know his real name for several weeks after I met him, I think.

Tom was born Deaf, and his friendship with me as a new sign language interpreter gave me a doorway into American Sign Language that few inexperienced interpreters would have access to.

I think our friendship was cemented at the time when we met each other, at the local Deaf club, which at that time was the main hangout for Deaf people--before fast internet connections, social networking, and webcams reduced the need for face-to-face communication.

While having a nice introductory sort of conversation, Tom inserted a sexual joke--something that a number of Deaf people do as a discreet way to check the comprehension level of new interpreters.

I not only understood the joke, I also sharply replied that I didn't care for it.

I think Tom was taken aback by what I said--not only because it indicated that I had understood what he had signed but also because for the most part, non-Deaf people aren't as blunt or as "plain speaking" as Deaf people themselves. So I caught him off-guard on those two points.

I turned to leave the conversation, but Tom apologized, we changed the subject, and became friends.

During the early years of our friendship, and as my own interpreting skills in American Sign Language advanced, I learned that Tom was a cherished Boy Scout Troop leader, beloved by non-Deaf troop leaders, by non-Deaf council members, and of course by the dozens of Deaf scouts who made up nearly all of his troop over the years.

When Tom asked me to interpret at the week-long Boy Scout camp that was 45 minutes outside of Milwaukee, I agreed. A year later, and for a few other years, I helped coordinate a small cadre of other interpreters for the camp. We interpreted everything from announcements at meals to classes about astronomy--I had to figure out how to sign concepts like "solar eclipse"--and lessons held on sailboats.

Tom's joy at being a Scout as a child and a Troop Leader, mentor, and role model to other Deaf scouts was contagious. He was using his gifts; his work was bearing good fruit.

And then he made a poor, terrible, unconscious choice when a scout in his troop came into his tent one night and manipulated Tom to touch him.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

A year ago this month, news broke that the Catholic priest at St. John's School for the Deaf near Milwaukee had molested hundreds of Deaf boys during their time there as students.

Among his victims was Tom Tannehill.

I remembered that Tom told me about Father Murphy; he told me about having gone to school at St. John's--which was closed a short while before I moved to Milwaukee out of college. Deaf people in the community identified the priest by using the sign for PRIEST, followed by the hand-spelled letter M, tapped at the breastbone two or three times.

When I heard the news about the molestation, my heart went out to Tom: over the years, I had heard he had moved to Indiana somewhere; that he wasn't working with Scouts any more.

At one point, I had managed to learn that Tom was back in Milwaukee, briefly, and I made my way to where he was staying--I want to say it was with his parents at the time.

When Tom came to the door and saw I was there, we hugged each other hard. He invited me in; we sat down to catch up.

And out came his story.

He had been molested by Father Murphy at St. John's long ago. He also had loved Boy Scouts as a kid, and he had gone on to become an Eagle Scout and to live out the Boy Scout's oath in his personal life and in his life as a Troop Leader.

He never suspected his lifelong passion to be stripped away years or even decades later by the unconscious actions taken by a Boy Scout who himself had been molested. But when that scout sneaked into Tom's tent one night, Tom's unconscious found a way out, and unfortunately, Tom couldn't cope, didn't think to reach out for help.

Did Tom go on to molest other scouts...? I honestly don't know; maybe it's better that way. But I do know that someone reported him to the Boy Scout Council, that he was barred from participating in Scouts again, and that he was sentenced to jail when he was in Indiana.

His days as a scout leader, and as a member of the venerated Order of the Arrow,* were gone. And until now, so was his story, perhaps.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

My move away from Wisconsin and from the interpreting profession in the late 1990s had long muted my desire to stay in touch with all sorts of people from that part of my life. So when the story about Father Murphy's molestation made its way to the mainstream media last year, I decided it was time for me to look up my old friend again.

I did a Google search and learned that my friend Tom had died in 2007. My opportunity to reach out to him in light of the news--which included an article from Milwaukee, saying that Tom also had molested students at the school--was gone. Time was up.

Despite the news that could have tarnished my view of Tom, my love for him and my friendship with him are still teaching me. Many who didn't know Tom, and many who did, may now think of him as a monster. But Tom was a friend to me long before I knew of his actions, and Tom was also somebody's son, somebody's brother.

God's love for him--including God's love through me--isn't diminished because of his shortfalls. Maybe God's love for us, and God's love through one another, even becomes more necessary, more warranted when we fail.

These days, when I have an opportunity to respond to someone who I'd rather view as a monster or think as someone to be fearful of, I will need God's grace to remind me that we are each a Beloved Child of God, with a story that at the very least might need telling, and at the very most, might need healing.

Thanks for reading me.

Blessings,
Liz
________________

*This was long before I understood about cultural appropriation.