“The Quality of
Mercy”
by Vicki Cooley
Carey Lecture,
Baltimore Yearly Meeting annual sessions
August 6, 2005
A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawns would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end has magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
— Jack Gilbert
We have joined in worship remembering the bombing of Hiroshima, and I am about to share with you out of my profoundly joyful spiritual experience, so I offer this poem by way of an apology. An “apology,” such as Barclay’s Apology, is an account of what one believes and lives in terms of, and it may include clarifications, as the poem does. The root of my joy insofar as I understand it is love of truth, and so that same root puts me in touch with a world full of pain and suffering and twisted human behavior and loss. All true. But even that truth has the beauty of being true, and beauty calls forth a sense of affirmation from us, if not always joy."
[oral delivery began here]
The texts supporting the theme of these
sessions of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, “called to be merciful,” and the title of
this talk, “The Quality of Mercy,” have the beauty of truth, but they are
truths in tension with one another.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
Micah 6:7-9,
New International Version
The quality of mercy is not
strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from
heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice
blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him
that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it
becomes
The throned monarch better than his
crown;
His sceptre shows the force of
temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear
of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred
sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of
kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show
likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.
Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea,
consider this,
That, in the course of justice,
none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray
for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us
all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.
William
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice,
IV.i.79
The passage from Micah, much loved, calls us
to do all three things, without a sense of either/or. Note that in Portia’s speech “the quality of mercy” refers to an
attribute or quality of character, “mercifulness.” She clearly opposes mercy to justice, and both are decided upon by
an authority which rules. She speaks as
one who understands the social structure and exercises power within it.
[These passages and references to any written
sources I mention are in a handout you
can pick up as you leave, so you don’t have to take notes.]
As I considered the theme, “Called to be
merciful,” interest in restoring right relationship or justice in our
communities, and interest in AVP, I realized that an account of what has called
me and how would be the most relevant sharing I could do with you.
My plan for this evening is
* to tell you about my involvement with the
Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), a little of how it has connected with
other practices in my life, and some of how it has changed me
* to notice how I have experienced “practice”
putting me in the path of direct revelation (Transforming Power)
* to convey to you some of my experience of
our prison system as coercive and distorting, and
* to invite you to experience an important AVP
practice, affirmation, which I believe upholds us in our availability to do
justly (take responsibility), love mercy (cherish and wish well), and walk
humbly (let go of our need for control).
You can tell I am talking about power. Also, I may ask you to do something which
involves speaking with your neighbors.
Since I will be talking about matters of central importance in my life,
I hope you will accept some evidence of strong feeling from time to time. So far as I know, with that I’ve disclosed
the worst---I am not, for instance, planning to talk about money.
In the early 1970’s my husband
began going in to the Quaker worship group in Auburn prison. We figured out that our children could wait
in the “hospitality center” with families and children who were visiting loved
ones in Auburn. (The hospitality center
was a converted gas station which would never be clean, set up for those who
would otherwise have to ait out of doors in rain or winter weather or summer
heat.) We began to drive from Rochester
to Auburn on alternate Sundays as a family.
It took about an hour and a half each way, and on the way home we stopped
for worship and a potluck meal with an older Quaker couple who lived in the
country and had rabbits, chickens, goats, and so on; others sometimes joined us. Our children thought that part was
wonderful, but I remember talking more than once on the trip back into
Rochester, with exhausted children sleeping in the back of the car, about
whether we should keep this routine up.
One very hot July weekend in
perhaps 1977 I went to Syracuse to participate in an Alternatives to Violence
Project (AVP) workshop and sleep on the meetinghouse floor. I went knowing that this program involved playing
silly games, which I thought I could put up with for the sake of
nonviolence. In that first workshop we
never got around to role playing; it seemed very “loose” to me. I began worshipping on Friday evenings in
Attica and did not return to AVP for a number of years, when it “took,” and I
became a facilitator.
Looking back over almost 40 years, here
are some of the practices which have shaped my adult life:
•
Quaker worship, for many years 2 or 3 times a week (Sunday morning in
Rochester, NY, midweek meeting, Attica worship group). You know about this practice from your own
experience.
• going into prison, to worship, to visit friends, to do AVP. Where we spend our time is where we live. After 20 years of going into prison, walking
through a cell block in Elmira prison, I had a bolt-of-lightening experience, a
revelation of Truth. It is not usual
for civilian volunteers to walk through a cell block, but in this case
construction of a hospital facility for the wave of AIDS and TB patients
blocked the usual outdoor route. In the
older prisons in New York State like Attica and Auburn and Sing Sing and
Elmira, the cells are completely exposed, with only bars between them and the
public passageway. In many of the newer
ones men sleep in open dormitories, 30 or 50 men to a room. Women guards may walk through at any time,
but I felt like an intruder as we walked past men in their skivvies, men who
could not stand up straight in their “house.”
Abruptly I was caught up and subsumed by a potent certainty, an
unquestionable knowing: this place,
this way, this prison system is evil, totally unacceptable, inexcusable.
•
Another of my practices has been what Sarah Ruddick calls conscientious
or attentive love, a very complex matter:
it is attentive awareness and response to each growing child, inviting and supporting
individual unfolding; training for ability to function with others; feeding and
clothing and preserving from harm; and all the while monitoring and processing
one’s own experience. Ruddick’s account
shows how the capacities developed in this demanding undertaking correspond to
what we need for a “politics of peace.”
Sometimes in AVP we talk about power-over, coercion; power-with,
cooperation; and power-through, transformation. Ruddick’s analysis identifies strands of all three kinds of
power. It illuminated my experience,
including my experience of clerking, and helped me recognize
•
clerking as another of my spiritual practices. A Friend came to me after one NYYM session when I was clerk and
said, “I want to talk about clerking. I
want to learn how to clerk my self.”
•
And then there has been AVP, the Alternatives to Violence Project.
In order to render my experience of
AVP as a spiritual practice, I need to give a little background
information. Here is the briefest of introductions to the
Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP). AVP
began in Green Haven prison in 1975, when a group of long-term prisoners called
the Think Tank asked some Quakers they knew were involved with nonviolence
training to work with them in connection with youth outreach the Think Tank was
doing. The resulting experiential
workshop program, for many years associated with New York Yearly Meeting,
spread through the United States and into much of the rest of the world. In addition to workshops in prisons, there
are programs for community and youth groups, in schools, for staff development,
and in areas of violent struggle, notably as part of the African Great Lakes
Initiative which has roots in Baltimore Yearly Meeting.
Some written sources of information
about AVP are listed in the handout. You
can also learn by experience here in the Baltimore Yearly meeting area; an
article in the September 2000 Washington Peace Letter by Tobin Marsh gives a
good description of AVP. A good way to connect with AVP is to talk
with people who do it, so I want to ask people connected with AVP to identify
themselves. First, I’d like to
introduce and thank the facilitators who came to be on the team for the
mini-workshop we did here, Elizabeth Maher and Stephen Haynes, who usually do
AVP in western NY State; T. Haywood has had to leave already to return to New
York City. Now would everyone who is an
AVP facilitator or otherwise active with AVP and willing to talk about it wave
your hand so people can see who you are, please?
AVP sessions have 4 purposes: affirmation, communication, community
building or cooperation, and conflict transformation or Transforming
Power. At any given moment what is
going on in an AVP workshop is recognizably serving one or (usually) more of
these purposes. AVP does not include much
instruction for its own sake. AVP facilitators
sometimes say, “We do not bring answers.
We offer a process which invites people to get in touch with their
questions, to recognize their options; often answers arise in the group.” There is a mix of activities, whole group
and small groups, with a rhythm to each session: opening circle (“gathering”),
agenda review, exercise with reflection (“debriefing”), active games (“Light
and Livelies”), a closing circle. Most of the exercises are experiential in the
classic educational theory pattern: do,
reflect, analyze or generalize, apply.
So I discovered I liked it. I like the sharing in gatherings and
closings, I like experiential learning, and it turns out I really like Light and Livelies.
I found that being foolish—like a fool—released me to feel my oneness
with the group, to “fail” without getting hurt, and I saw this happening for
others. The uninhibited laughter of
play is healing. It is hard to achieve when you are all by
yourself.
Like Quakerism, AVP is based on
community. In AVP the community is
well-defined and can rely on explicit guidelines, which we ask participants to
accept.
[PROJECTION OF GUIDELINES
ON WALL]
- We affirm good points of ourselves and others. Good practice: be specific. Vagueness
risks hollowness or worse.
- No put-downs. I’ll have
more to say about this.
- Let people finish. No
interruptions. This is
countercultural for many of us in some contexts, yet some of our sharpest
conflicts precipitate with the imperative, “Please let me finish.”
- You have the right to pass. The certificate given at the end of the workshop is for having
been there. Many facilitators are
distressed when they are “young in AVP” at apparent nonparticipation, but two
things are true: you are able to
exercise choice only if no is an option, and apparent nonparticipation often
melts, as when the “thug” kid absorbed in a beat-up fat paperback for the first
day and a half of a workshop in Green Haven looked up and made a comment, then
entered into a role play brilliantly.
- Volunteer yourself only.
Big Wind Blows—true of yourself.
- Confidentiality. Respect
people’s stories.
These guidelines are behavioral. They can be upheld by anyone in the group. They allow us to call one another back and
re-constitute the community. For
example, we don’t argue about whether something said was really a putdown, we just offer 2 or 3 affirmations.
Lecture mode is un-AVP. It refuses L & Ls, defies varied
activities, resists changes in energy.
So I am inviting you to do a little AVP. In a few moments of reflection, think of 5 things, unqualified
good things about yourself. I will tell
you when the time is up, and ask you to share 3 good things about yourself with
someone near you.
John Calvi says one of the two
requirements for ministry is to believe in our own essential goodness. Does walking in the Light reveal us as
essentially good to ourselves? Let’s
get quiet, and try, just quietly to ourselves, to reflect on the experience of
affirmation we just had and what we make of our experience of our own and
others’ good points.
The other Calvi qualification for
ministry, or being of help, is “humility and nakedness,” listening in
not-knowing mode. In that, too, I have
been instructed by my AVP experience. As
a self-important member of AVP facilitation teams I have been brought low by my
experience and upheld by the love of my team members. These are grand words, so here are some working definitions:
I
think wishing someone ill is bad; systematically wishing (intending) someone
ill, consciously or blithely, is evil.
I
think wishing someone well is good; humbly wishing someone well, in truth, is
love, as in “Love one another.”
With that background, I am going to
tell you some stories about how I have experienced the transforming power of
love and truth through AVP.
After I had been doing workshops
for a while, it occurred to me to try living without putting anyone down
outside workshops. This puts me at odds
with our culture, including our ways of “having fun” and many of the jokes we
tell or listen to, but it orients me to right relationship with all other
people. It creates some tension
sometimes between me and my co-religionists.
However, I feel free at a deep level, except when I slip, and I have
come to trust this commitment as an experience of Truth, a slow growing
instance of direct revelation (for me).
It also seems to me to be a
practice which prepared me for a sudden, profound, and lasting insight into how
I should live. During a morning program
led by Michael Wajda and Alison Levy at
our Farmington Scipio Regional (think quarterly meeting) Spring Gathering in
May of 2001, they asked us to spend some minutes in quiet reflection on how we wanted
to live. It was a time in my life when
distractions were falling away, almost of their own weight it seemed, and I was
happy to be where I was and offered this opportunity. But I was amazed at the simple clarity of what came to me: I do not want to be dismissive in my
attitude toward anyone, ever. That is
quite a bit more demanding than “No putdowns,” and it is taking time as well as
effort for me to learn what it means, but I trust it completely as True.
Paying attention to not being
dismissive is the negative version, I have come to believe, of doing justly and loving mercy, walking humbly, and
cheerfully!, over the earth, connecting with God in everyone in every
moment. It sounds overwhelming, but
only if we imagine that we are in charge or ought to be in control. If we are (only) participants, we only have
to do our part.
Paul Pfuetze, a scholar who was a
long-time member of Poughkeepsie Monthly Meeting, wrote in a meditation,
. . . Praeis is the Greek word for meek. Even Moses was described as praeis. Now Moses was a lot of things (Num 12:2) but I never pictured him
as meek and mild.
So what’s going on? Maybe the connotations of the word have
changed over the years. So I dug a
little deeper, using some old dictionaries and commentaries. and there I found that the word “meek”
characterized a person who was free of self-will, someone who wasn’t always
interested in getting his or her own way, someone interested in the good of
other people, a person not self-centered.
A meek person was a strong person centered enough in God that she or he
could get angry about the way other people were being treated. . . . [T]he praies were the people
disciplined by God to be God’s trained people, under God’s command, footloose
and uncluttered enough to be ready and willing to do what they thought God
wanted them to do.
This understanding of walking
humbly, and the very difficult questions about how to live which go with it, are
described as freeing, “footloose and uncluttered.”
Here is the story of a further
development in my practice: Newspaper
notices and word of mouth had not precipitated a local Quaker worship group in
the village we moved to in 1994, and in August 2002 I took on service which
required, in my view, regular practice of shared worship in addition to Sunday
morning meeting. At a loss, I decided to
try joining the 2 residents of an interfaith house for retreat and renewal at
their daily prayers, even though “prayer” had not been one of my
practices.
Cobblestone Springs is interfaith,
but the 2 residents are Sisters of Saint Joseph, and they use an inclusive
version of the Catholic breviary. Anne
and Hilary were calm and welcoming. I
was startled at how apt and telling the intercessions and prayers were, and the
readings from the Psalms were familiar and challenging. I decided to open my heart and mind and say
the words if I could find a way to understand and affirm them, and otherwise
keep silent. After a while Anne asked
me, how is this for you? Is anything
difficult? I said I wouldn’t be coming
back if it weren’t fruitful. She said,
“But what is hard?” I said, “It’s hard
not having space, quiet to take things in.
And I don’t experience God as a ‘Lord,’
so ‘Lord, hear our prayer,’ is a hard thing for me to respond
with.” The next day they introduced
long pauses in the liturgy, dropping some of the usual parts of the office to
make more room for silence, and they said, “Would you like, ‘Good friend, hear
our prayer’?” Well, I have been praying
with them most days I am at home since then---except for the last year and a
half on Thursdays, when a group of 8 to 20 gathers in the evening for
Quaker-style worship with attention to peace, at Cobblestone Springs.
A couple of years ago, saying the
words of the Canticle of Mary (one of the parts of the office often omitted), I
was brought up short by my own dismissiveness when we got to:
You
have showed strength with your arm.
You have scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
You have put down the mighty from their seat,
and have lifted up the powerless.
You have filled the hungry with good things,
and have sent the rich away empty.
I could say the words as a vision
of a world order invested in, committed to, believed as possible. My mental comment, however, was (mentally)
loud and sarcastic: Right. Not that I have seen. I heard myself, and I came to a screeching
halt, another bolt-of-lightening moment:
I recognized that I don’t know.
I don’t know whether the long arc of the universe curves toward
justice. I don’t know whether the lines
of force, the Great Whatever I pay attention to when I worship, lifts up the
powerless or fills the hungry or sends the rich away empty. I don’t know that it does, and I don’t know
that it doesn’t. I really don’t know. This
radical recognition of mine was an experience, as I understand it, of what
Buddhists call emptiness. I return to
it, I am further instructed, I forget, I come back again.
These experiences are part of why I am available to hear and
respond to the call to faithfulness which New York Yearly Meeting appended to
its 2004 epistle to Friends everywhere:
The first call is to God, to
faithfulness. Out of faithfulness rises
the call to live in peace. In these
times, we hear God calling us to live peaceably, ourselves, in all our
relationships.
We hear the challenge to pay attention, inwardly, in our households and families,
at work, in our meetings and communities, and in the wider world. We are awakening to the challenges of
mediated relationships, relationships we do not experience directly, with
people who are most affected by our politics and government actions--close to
home or across oceans--, with those who make clothing we wear, who harvest food
we eat.
(Also those we pay to imprison and
those we hire to guard and lord it over them.)
Our relationships involve the
exercise of power, and they require the recognition of power and power
differentials. Over time working in AVP,
I had begun to notice that I could be wrong about things I had not earlier
questioned. One example: Competition can build community. After
years of thinking competition was something to be avoided in an AVP workshop,
but also years of learning to let others “do their thing,” I was in a workshop with a facilitator who
came from another prison and brought us a Light and Lively called Jukebox; it involves
singing on cue and is an elimination game.
I noticed the men were all having a good time, including those who had
been eliminated. So was I. I was working hard on not getting
eliminated, and I was learning about how I handle competition. It dawned on me that refusing to deal with
experiences of power exercised between people in a mode prevalent in our
society was not a good way to learn more or recognize how we make choices.
I was learning because I had begun
to be open to learning, trusting the process and my fellow facilitators. AVP workshops are facilitated by teams,
usually 3 or 4 people, always if at all possible including at least one
recognizably from the same population as the participants (so in prison,
prisoners; at Baltimore Yearly Meeting, some young people). Over time I have come to believe that some
of the power of AVP comes through teams which include people who are
“different” from each other—men and women, older and younger, black and white
and Latino—and who work together, for three days, who prove themselves
trustworthy to the workshop community, and who embody something the world often
seems to claim is not comfortable or practical. Teams make decisions by consensus, spending time before a workshop
building mutual understanding as well as planning an agenda, and consulting
when a question comes up.
Now that’s the ideal, and most of
the time reality comes pretty close. In
Groveland prison, where I have been active in AVP for the last 5 or 6 years, the
facilitator community struggled with repeated major conflict over “lead
facilitators” acting unilaterally, bossing people around, and on the other hand
not providing for the needs of the workshop.
The men decided that we should not designate lead facilitators for
workshops in Groveland. I was
distressed, as I was clear that the responsibilities of the team had to be
recognized and met, and I thought experience should be given weight. However, some facilitators who have been
active in AVP for years were among the most difficult team members.
I started taking responsibility,
filling in when the team didn’t provide.
I noticed that other team members took care of making sure supplies were
on hand, usually remembered to write up and post agendas, guidelines, and so
on, but in calling team meetings, structuring agendas, coaching apprentice
facilitators, I felt I had to take responsibility but without the support of
the community asking me to. It took a
while before I got it, that the community was not asking me to.
I think I was able to see how much
I tended to assume that my take on things should prevail because I worked for a
number of workshops with three other facilitators, Poised P. I., ‘Gater Dean,
and Incredible I. The four of us, in a
simple, direct way, loved and trusted each other, and we knew it. I had identified to the team my need to work
on not taking charge (note that “taking responsibility” morphs for many of us
unnoticed into “taking charge”), and they started helping me to notice when I
did it. Their love and patience and
acceptance never wavered. Another facilitator and I have begun a list of
what the team functions and tasks are, which any facilitator can refer to or
call attention to, or ignore.
Now perhaps you can understand the
wariness with which I first approached the theme of Baltimore Yearly Meeting,
“Called to be merciful.” It seemed to
me perilously close to “Called to dispense mercy,” and not the same thing as loving mercy. Remember Portia says it is “enthroned in the hearts of kings.” However, I have come to see the courage of
taking responsibility and accepting that sometimes we have responsibility for
exercising power, like the attentively loving person who learns the
predispositions we would need to be peacemakers. We may be called to be full of mercy, not-knowing and not
judging. But how do we exercise care
and responsibility in that case?
Here is another, fairly recent AVP
story with one answer: an enthusiastic
facilitator set up a “scripted” role play:
a father and his two sons are running a used furniture store. The younger son absconds with the cash. The father and older son build back the
business despite the loss, and then one day the younger son comes home,
broke. Workshop participants chose to
play the three roles. The older brother
was furious, demanded to know where all the money had gone, and the younger
brother humbly said, “I spent it on drugs in Chicago.” A generous-spirited older man had chosen to
play the father, who welcomed his younger son, told the angry older brother
that there would be time enough for talking about working relationships, that
first they needed to let the neighbors know that they were going to have a
party to celebrate the younger son’s return.
At this point a man in his 30’s
interrupted and said, that’s not real, that’s not the way it should go. After a lively discussion of family
experiences of betrayal, over and over, by drug-using members, the man in his
30’s took the role of father and played out a tough love approach, telling the
returned son that he had to go through rehabilitation and then might come back
to the family business but would not have access to the cash.
What does it mean to do justly or
be merciful when drug addiction is involved?
A good friend who served 3
sentences for stealing to support a drug habit has been clean and sober for 20
years. He is a certified substance
abuse counselor, working with clients who often miss their appointments, resort
to drugs again, and otherwise disappoint hopes for change. He says, “I do not judge. Everyone is doing the best they can. I tell them the consequences, but I do not
judge.”
Our prison system, like drug
addiction, invites and promotes corrupt, ill-wishing relationships, among
guards and other employees, among prisoners, and between groups.
Quakers
object to uniforms. People in prison,
whether incarcerated or employed, wear different colored uniforms, and their
identities and relationships are reduced to their grouping by clothing: “the white shirts are supposed to come
through this afternoon,” “we’re all wearing green, you can’t give orders.”
Attica
prison looks like a Disneyland castle from a distance (there are Disneyland
scenes painted on the wall of the children’s play area of the visiting room,
including a castle that looks like the prison), and it is set in lovely hill
country, with farms and woodland and varied views, serene. In the middle 80’s a man who had attended
Quaker worship some died suddenly of a heart attack; he was a lonely Irishman
who had killed someone in a barroom brawl, and his death was remarked but his
life was not remembered. I didn’t like
it, so I went for the first time to the prison graveyard, a country cemetery green
and quiet, where I walked among the rows of small stones, recent temporary
markers, and found Jimmy’s grave. It
was a good thing for me to do, but I also found the grim reality that older graves
had no names, only numbers. The modern
ones have both.
Eastern Penitentiary in
Philadelphia is no longer used as a prison but can be visited. You can learn how prisoners were held in
solitude to read the Bible and reflect.
Those who brought their food wore hoods. The penitentiary was conceived of as merciful because there was a
presumption that isolation would be redemptive and was not punitive (punishment
in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions is understood as infliction of
unnecessary pain, as Ginny Mackey showed in a study she did for the
Presbyterian Church in 1981). We know
that penitential isolation drove people mad, but we now have solitary housing
units (SHUs) like Five Points, a new prison built on the site of the Seneca
Army Depot in western New York State, where the cells have stainless steel
doors with double slots so that food can be delivered without any human
interaction. Remote control doors open
into chain link cages like dog runs to allow an hour a day of fresh air, as
required under a ruling against cruel and unusual punishment. The building serves as a hood.
I have come to accept that some men
in prison experience their prison time as their salvation, even though most
prisoners—including some of those same men—have the direct knowledge which came
to me when I was walking through Elmira prison: the prison system is evil.
We may wish for humane, respectful
institutions where some people could be held apart, (Tim Newell, a British
Quaker and prison governor holds out a vision in his 2000 Swarthmoor lecture, Forgiving Justice), but that is not a
current option in the United States.
Some of us may work for such a vision, but in the meantime human beings
live in thrall. What does it mean to
not know, when we do know things that make us afraid or that are unacceptable? Does meekness or walking humbly sometimes
mean that when we see danger we step into it and join the person whom we do not
fully trust? That is the solution
chosen in the Circles of Support and Accountability, initiated in Canada for
people who are released from prison after serving sentences for sexual
offenses.
So let us look at a very hard
question, the question of our trust in our communities. I have known since I was a teenager that I
needed to share in worship with others, that I depended on the practice of
shared worship. In recent years I have
thought that many of us may need to live in community in order to live in the
Light. But I have found most
communities come and go, not remembering who they have been or what they have
committed to, and with times together often treated by their participants as
optional activities. Notable exceptions
in my experience have been family, midweek meeting, the community association
of the deliberately diverse ward of the City of Rochester where we lived for 22
years, and AVP in some of its manifestations.
Earlier this week Baltimore Yearly
Meeting Friends prepared for the annual sessions by considering Gospel Order in
retreat sessions. In her Pendle Hill pamphlet (#297) on Gospel Order: A Quaker
Understanding of Faithful Church Community, Sandra Cronk writes (p. 31):
For the process of mutal accountability to
operate with integrity, it is obviously necessary for all members of the
community to live in a close relationship of love, trust, and caring. There needs to be a commitment to Truth and
a deep listening to God and to each other.
. . . We cannot love each other
into wholeness unless we know each other well and have that knowledge anchored
in God’s love and truth.
Think of your own experience,
Friends: when have you experienced such
community? For many years I thought
that since we no longer have the agrarian and market town context for Quaker
meetings, we could not expect trustworthy communities. But I think I was wrong! Quakers have begun deliberate communities,
many for older people, some intergenerational.
And Quakers are learning to connect for the time being, letting go as
the stream of life carries us apart, and connect anew. We are learning to accompany one another in
meetings for faithfulness, and we are even learning to keep spiritual company
with people from other traditions. Our
longing for stability may sometimes mask our desire for control,
predictability. We are unpredictable, and
the world is unpredictable, but the company is good even in the midst of change.
As a recovering self-important
person, I have told you how AVP has changed me and led to further changes; I
have tried to convey to you some experiences of Truth; I have told you that our
prison system is in my experience evil and unacceptable; I believe we can
create alternatives not by reforming the system but by giving our selves to
accompany one another. You have
directly experienced self-affirmation, and you have seen me practicing it. I hope you have begun to understand why I
said affirmation
upholds us in our availability to do justly (take responsibility), love mercy
(cherish and wish well in truth), and walk humbly (let go of our need for
control).
In closing I want to affirm
Baltimore Yearly Meeting Friends and your varied levels and forms of community. I have learned of the wonderful ways you
accompany one another in the camp program, in the Junior Yearly Meeting and
High School Young Friends group. I note
that many Friends beyond your Yearly Meeting are still helped by Barry Morley’s
example and forthright guidance, and you were his company. You provided support and good counsel as the
Africa Great Lakes Initiative took form, and money! (Oh, sorry, I said I wouldn’t mention it.) I have experienced the good order of your
sessions, the warm and welcoming spirit and actions of your clerks and staff
persons and volunteers, and the frequent grace and joy in your interactions. You listen to one another’s stories. You are practicing community.
That must be part of why you have
been able, together, to struggle and wait to find what it means to be faithful when
others reject or disrespect some of you, how to hold to peace-ability in all
your relationships . I have learned new
possibilities of faithful community from you, and I feel fresh hope for
networks of accompaniment. I leave you encouraged that you are
responding to the call to do justly and meet responsibilities and to love mercy
in cherishing connection and wishing well to everyone, including yourselves,
and those with whom you have differences.
notes to accompany Carey Lecture,
Baltimore Yearly Meeting annual sessions, August 6, 2005
AVP/USA
1050 Selby Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55104
877-926-8287 (Toll-Free)
avp@avpusa.org www.avpusa.org
John Calvi, “Quakers and Ministry,” FGC Connections, Spring 2000, p. 3
Newton Garver and Eric Reitan, Nonviolence and community:
reflections on the Alternatives to Violence Project, 1995 Pendle Hill Pamphlet
Virginia Mackey, Punishment:
In the scripture and tradition of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, 1981, a
paper presented to the National Religious Leaders Consultation of Criminal
Justice, Claremont, California, Sept. 13-15
Tobin Marsh, “Learning Alternatives to Violence in Prison,”
September 2000 Washington Peace Letter
Tim Newell, Forgiving
Justice: a Quaker vision for criminal justice, Swarthmore Lecture 2000,
Quaker Home Service
Paul Pfuetze, Meditations,
1986, Poughkeepsie Monthly Meeting of Friends, n. p.
Sarah Ruddick, Maternal
Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace,
1989, Beacon Press
