THE SOMEHOW STRANGELY BETTER
by Elizabeth Watson
The Carey Memorial Lecture
Baltimore Yearly Meeting
August 14, 1976
Introduction
The invitation to be with you tonight read,
The only stipulation is very general: the Carey Lecture should deal with some religious subject of significance to the Society of Friends. Originally, it was to have been Biblical in nature.... Our Program Committee has spoken in general terms of a theme for the Yearly Meeting involving the Bicentennial, such as "Quakers in the Next Two Hundred Years," and had thought of the Carey Lecture as giving us a challenge to face in this way....
I found this curious! Four years ago, in another Presidential convention summer, I was here when you were celebrating your own tri-centennial - and you were looking ahead to the next three hundred years of Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Now you have shortened your sights to Friends in the next two hundred years.
What centennial will you find to celebrate four years from now in the next Presidential summer? I'd like to be with you when you look at Friends in the next one hundred years!
But that's the end! I do not expect to come back four years after that. By then it will be 1984!
So, Friends, I accept the challenge of the invitation to be Biblically based, to be Quakerishly relevant, and to be patriotically prophetic. And if in being prophetic, I sound at times like the Hebrew prophets, saying: Thus saith the Holy One, your God, repent! - bear with me. I am speaking to myself as well as to you.
The King James version of the Bible contains a book called The Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews. J.B. Phillips, modern New Testament scholar, doubts that Paul wrote the letter. In his translation, he calls it The Letter to Jewish Christians, and indicates the writer is unknown. The New English Bible calls it simply A Letter to Hebrews. Chapter eleven begins:
And what is faith? Faith gives substance to our hopes, and makes us certain of realities we do not see.
It is for their faith that the men of old stand on record.
By faith we perceive that the universe was fashioned by the Word of God, so that the visible came forth from the invisible.
(Hebrews 11:103 NEB)
Making use of the background of his Jewish readers, the writer then speaks of the faith of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, and others, and in the 13th verse continues:
All these persons died in faith. They were not yet in possession of the things promised, but had seen them far ahead and hailed them, and confessed themselves no more than strangers or passing travellers on earth. Those who use such language show plainly that they are looking for a country of their own. If their hearts had been in the country they had left, they could have found opportunity to return. Instead, we find them longing for a better country ....
(ibid., 13-16)
Thirty-five years ago this summer, in 1941, George and I and our not-yet-a-year-old Sally led a Service Committee work camp on the south side of Chicago. With the help of people in the neighborhood, our interracial group cleared the rubble from a vacant lot, constructed simple playground equipment, and ran a recreation program for the neighborhood children. Bliss Forbush was in Chicago that summer, taking the final quarter of residency toward his doctorate in theology at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. After his last comprehensive exam, late in August, he visited our workcamp, and spoke words which changed the lives of several in the group. He said,
Sometimes we must give up the obvious good for the somehow strangely better.
Against a background of the faith that impelled the Biblical heroes, and the faith that moved the Founding Parents of our nation to give up their obvious good for the dream of something somehow strangely better, I want to urge us to enter the next centuries with faith, with hope, and with the same adventurous spirit that moved them. To what dream are we ready
to "pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor?" - as did the signers of the Declaration of Independence?
Let's go back and rewrite that passage in Hebrews:
Faith gives substance to our hopes...
For their faith the Founding Fathers stand on record. (Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Tom Paine, John Adams, and a host of others) All these died in faith. They were not yet in possession of the things promised .... [f their hearts had been in the country they had left, they could have found opportunity to return. Instead, we find them longing for a [somehow strangely] better country....
I confess I will be glad when this bicentennial year is over. With Friends I feel I can speak my mind, speak of the deep contradiction I feel in celebrating our own revolution when we have been trying so hard to prevent other people all over the world from carrying out their own much needed revolutions. I am sick at heart at the corruption, materialism, chauvinism in our nation now. A friend of mine put it into words:
I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present ... here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believed in (for all this glow and these melodramatic screamings), nor is humanity itself believed in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? ... It is as if we were somehow being endowed with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.
(from Democratic Vistas)
My friend who wrote those words is also the man I work for. His name is Walt Whitman. I work at his birthplace in Huntington, on Long Island. "He, being dead yet speaketh," as the writer of Hebrews said of Abel. Or, in his own words, Whitman is "alive and well" in spirit today. He wrote those words a hundred years ago, at the time of the centennial. In those so-called years of Reconstruction after the Civil War, I suspect people were as disillusioned as we are. I'd like to add Walt Whitman, and the great man he loved and celebrated in beautiful poetry - Abraham Lincoln - to the list of those who dreamed of a somehow strangely better land.
The American Dream! Did not our hearts beat faster when as school children we memorized and repeated at some patriotic Fourth of July celebration those stirring words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, they they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,
that among these rights are life (Yes sir!), liberty (That's right!), and the pursuit of happiness. . . (Is that what they said?)
(Perhaps you've sung it, as I have, in Earl Robinson's Ballad for Americans, or have heard William Warfield sing it.)
That Thomas Jefferson had a way with words! He could write eloquent, rousing words, expressing compelling, noble ideas. Another time he said,
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man ...
Which man's mind did you have in mind, Thomas Jefferson? We know you kept slaves. And we know that at another time you wrote you did not think black men the equal of white. Were they not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights too? What tyranny bound their minds, as well as bodies?
And Tom Paine had a way with words. "These are the times that try men's souls, ..." Abigail Adams probably snorted, "and women's souls, too, Tom!" Back home, looking after the children she had written her John suggesting that
When Congress took up the question of independence for the colonies, might they not properly consider at the same time the independence of women? John's reply was hardly encouraging. "I cannot but laugh," he answered. "We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians; and Negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented."
And yet, John Adams, did not the children, apprentices, students, Indians, Negroes, women - all these you named - long for a land where they might be perceived as having a few rights also?
Where were Friends at this time? They were divided. Some sympathized with the government; some with the revolutionaries. Many tried to maintain the peace testimony. Soldiers were quartered in their homes, their property was confiscated, and some were exiled from Philadelphia to Virginia.
The leadings of their faith went beyond Jefferson and Adams to include all people. John Woolman died in 1772, and so did not live to see the Revolution. In the years immediately preceding it, however, his quiet voice
was saying something "somehow strangely better":
Love was the first motion, and then a Concern arose to spend some time with the Indians, that I might feel and understand their life and the Spirit they live in, if haply I might receive some Instruction from them, or they be in any degree helped forward by my following the Leadings of Truth among them.
One wishes Adams and Jefferson and the others had similarly felt a concern to spend some time with the apprentices, students, Indians, slaves, to feel and understand their life and the Spirit they lived in, so that they could have received some instruction. One assumes they spent time with their wives and children, but to what extent did they see them as people created equal?
To what extent do we see them today as having unalienable rights? In the last few years we have seen a demand for justice and self-determination among Native Americans; we have seen the rise of Black Power, the emergence of the Women's Movement, and the development of a counter culture among the young. They are all trying to tell us something, and we urgently need to understand what they are saying.
But let Love be the first motion, so that we understand them on their own terms. They were patient for a long, long time - two centuries - waiting for the nation to move gradually to a recognition of their rights. If patience has worn thin and they now speak stridently, even violently, let us understand where they are coming from. They are telling us middle aged, middle class, male dominated white Americans that now is the time for us to give up the obvious good as we have perceived it. The people left out of the Declaration of Independence may be able to save us all yet, if we are willing to receive some instruction from them, and if we all follow the Leadings of Truth.
I. NOAH
Let's go back now to the 11th chapter of Hebrews and pick up some of the Old Testament people the writer includes among the faithful. In verse 7 we read:
Through faith Noah, on receiving God's warning of impending disaster, reverently constructed an ark to save his household. (Phillips)
We too are being warned of impending disaster. I do not need to dwell on our polluted air and water, contaminated food, dwindling supplies of energy, our decaying cities. Were Noah alive today, he could be constructing a space ship to take his family to Mars. Time might well run out for him
before he acquired the space-age know-how (and the funding!) to bring it off. Warned of impending disaster, we had better take other reverent steps to save ourselves and all that we we love.
At the 1974 Friends General Conference, a group of Mohawks shared with us for several days their life style and world view. On the opening Sunday night, they gathered our minds in thankfulness to our Mother the Earth, to waters, trees, grass, wind - all the natural world we depend on for life and food. We take them for granted; we even believe in our Judeo-Christian tradition that God, in giving us "dominion over them," gave us license to exploit and destroy them.
By the presence of these Native Americans among us, we experienced a bit how they lived for generations in this land, feeling their dependence on the earth and companionship with its creatures, so that land, air, and water were not despoiled and animals and birds did not become extinct. For many of us they offered a shining vision of a somehow strangely better way of life; they challenged our costly life-style and our destructive life-view. They called on us as Friends not to rest on the accomplishments of William Penn and John Woolman, but to stand with them now in their struggle for their rights, for justice, and in their desire not to be assimilated into the polluted mainstream of American life.
Hindering my wholehearted participation in this bicentennial celebration is the knowledge that our nation exists because by trickery and broken treaties and violence we took the land from the people to whom it belonged and who had held it as a trust. We pushed them into smaller and smaller enclaves which we "reserved" for them, and as the final insult we have sought to teach them our ways and beliefs and have judged them to be inferior when they held out against us.
Can our Native American neighbors point the way to a simpler life style and less destructive world view? Can we learn from them the need to arouse people to see how our land is becoming uninhabitable, so that we demand responsible government action to curb the greed of exploitive industry, before it is too late? Can we learn to be less wasteful? Can we learn from them our dependence on the earth? And can we encourage them to cherish and persist in their own life and spirit? Jesus had a word for us Americans:
O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky, but can ye not discern the signs of the times? (Matthew 16:3 KJ)
If we can put people on the moon, we can clean up the land we have defiled! We can do it in less than two hundred years, if we will!
II. ABEL
Phillips translates the 4th verse of our chapter in Hebrews like this:
Because of his faith, Abel made a better sacrifice to God than Cain, and
he had evidence that God looked upon him as a righteous man, whose gifts he could accept. And though Cain killed him, yet by his faith he still speaks to us today.
Those last words make me think of Martin Luther King. He had a dream - a dream of freedom ringing from every mountainside in this sweet land of liberty - for everyone. By his faith, he still speaks to us today.
And I think of those uncounted numbers of Black people, taken from their African homeland by force, transported in unspeakable slave ships, sold like cattle, often separated from loved ones, doomed to a life of hard labor, with no rights at all. And yet, by their faith, they still speak to us today in those poignant and beautiful folk songs, their spirituals, which we love to sing. I stand in humility and awe before the incredible resiliency of their spirits which could bring such beauty out of so much misery.
John Woolman saw clearly that slavery destroyed the humanity of the slaveowners, as well as the bodies of the slaves. If his wisdom had prevailed in the land, and Americans everywhere had been persuaded to give up slavery voluntarily, as he had persuaded Friends, we would have been spared the devastating civil war of the last century and the present violence in our city streets. Friends freed their slaves, often at great financial cost, but with concern for the welfare of the human beings in their new freedom.
We were taught that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves - certainly an oversimplification - but still a century has passed and we have not made good the promises of freedom. Congress dragged its feet in securing for our black citizens their civil rights and equal opportunities. Even with laws on the books, we have resisted carrying them out. We are witnessing now the inevitable result of white America's failure to move, even with deliberate speed, to end discrimination. Martin Luther King, being dead, yet speaks to us, in his Letter from Birmingham Jail:
We will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good....
The rise of liberation movements among Black, Spanish-speaking, Asian, and Native Americans is hopeful, I believe. We are uncomfortable
when they sometimes equate us liberals with the oppressors, stereotyping us because of our skin color. We are afraid of and resentful of the violence. Let us remember the long centures when the shoe was on the other foot.
They needed to separate themselves from us to reclaim and identify their heritage and history, to liberate themselves from feelings of inferiority laid on them for generations. They needed to internalize that Black - and all colors - are beautiful.
We "Wasps" have been wrong in assuming that our ways are superior and should be the norm for everyone. We need to free ourselves from the insidious institutional racism which is unconsciously part of all white Americans, even those of good will. Those of us who have power over our own lives must help empower those who do not. We must work in ways acceptable to them to bring about a society where everyone is valued and no one is uncared for.
If we are to survive two more centuries, we must learn from our dark-skinned neighbors that the majority of the world's population are people of color, and our arrogant assumption of white superiority is no longer endurable. We cannot continue to live in luxury while others starve. Our two centuries of independence are over, and the centuries of interdependence have already begun. Imperialism, chauvinistic patriotism, sinister practices of the CIA, greedy activities of multinational corporations, along with racism, must go. Nothing less than the entire human family, and the whole earth, must claim our loyalty from now on.
III. SARAH
There are a few women included among the elders in this llth chapter of Hebrews. (I'm tempted to think this may be further evidence that Paul did not write this Letter!) In the llth verse we read:
By faith, even Sarah herself received strength to conceive, though she was past the age, because she judged that he who had promised would keep faith. (NEB)
Abigail Adams knew that the use of masculine nouns and pronouns in the Declaration of Independence reflected the actual situation. The vote for women was still more than a century away. Women could not enter most professions and in many places they could not own property. They did not have much control over their bodies, and they took their identity from the men in their lives. We remember Abigail Adams not only because her husband was President, but because she struggled to be herself, a person in her own right.
George Fox saw clearly that the Light of God is in everyone, both halves of the human race. It is no accident, then, that Quaker women took the leadership in the struggle for equal rights. At the time of the Centennial,
a hundred years ago, Lucretia Mott and others petitioned the government for redress of their grievances. (Thank thee kindly, Friend Lucretia, thy light still shines for me! And thank thee, Margaret Bacon, for that lovely Lucretia Mott song!)
I represent Friends United Meeting on the Commission on Women in Ministry of the National Council of Churches. I come home from each meeting so grateful to be a Friend! There are still denominations that will not ordain women on the premise that God, being male, can only speak through men!
Will Quaker women continue to be in the vanguard in the years ahead to secure for all women equal opportunities professionally, politically, socially? Will they work to eliminate the Playboy mentality that sees women solely as sex objects? Will they hold up the dignity and worth and beauty of all women - those who choose to marry and those who do not, those who choose to have children and those who do not, those who choose to be homemakers and those who choose careers, those who are too tall, too short, too thin, too heavy to fit the norms of the advertising profession? Will Quaker women help bring our language into conformity with our belief in universal personhood? Will they help free our Judeo-Christian tradition from its long record of male chauvinism? (I sincerely believe that Jesus was not a male chauvinist.)
As women grow in awareness of their strengths and abilities, gain rights, and become whole human beings, men too will grow in wholeness. As women gain confidence to succeed in so-called masculine activities and professions, so also, I believe, men will learn to be open to their own compassion and tenderness. And our commitments to one another will have more stability and be more fulfilling.
I was fortunate to have a father who was not a male chauvinist and who encouraged me to train for a "male" profession. I have been happily married for nearly forty years to a man who has given me space to be myself. I do not personally feel oppressed, and I cannot participate in putting men down. I have loved the men in my life too deeply. And though I feel called to stand up and be counted in the movement to bring liberation to all women, I am concerned for what has been happening to white American men, and many Quaker men in particular. They have had to bear the accusations not only of sexism, but of racism, and are at times victims of
reverse discrimination as Blacks and women are preferentially hired or promoted. I am for human liberation, not just women's liberation.
I do believe women have something special to contribute to solving the world's colossal problems. It is in the area of finding peaceful ways of settling conflict. Women know experientially how long it takes to bring a human life to birth, and how much longer to bring it to maturity. They are nurturers and cherishers. And the world must learn to nurture, to cherish, to affirm human life and dignity. We must learn reverence for life, or we will not likely survive two more centuries of our costly arms race.
I do not want to leave Sarah without calling attention to a phrase in this verse about her. She was used by God "though she was past the age." In this culture which segregates its elders in retirement communities and often arbitrarily terminates their employment while they are still productive, we need the message that it is never too late for God to work through us. Even those incapacitated can "be patterns, be examples" of patience, compassion, even of joy and laughter. Whatever our age or condition we can find ways to be instruments of God's peace.
There was one other woman mentioned in this chapter in Hebrews, in the 31st verse:
By faith the prostitute Rahab escaped the doom of the unbelievers because she had given the spies a kindly welcome.... (NEB)
You will remember her story in the second chapter of the book of Joshua. Joshua was besieging Jericho and sent his spies into the city to reconnoiter. Rahab had a little house actually on the city wall, and they stopped there as they entered the city. Rumor spread that she was harboring the enemy and she hid them successfully on the roof under stalks of flax while the house was searched. Then she bargained with them for the safety of her parents and her siblings in return for letting them down on the outside of the wall. She knew her city was doomed. Did she give aid and comfort to the enemy because she longed for a somehow strangely better city than Jericho?
Despite her dubious profession, and her questionable loyalty to her fellow citizens, she is included among the faithful. Let us not judge her harshly. And let us also not judge harshly others whose sexual practices differ from ours. Let us, like the unknown writer of Hebrews, acknowledge that God is sometimes able to work through people whose names would not have occurred to us.
IV. ABRAHAM
There is one last group excluded in the Declaration of Independence from those created equal. John Adams names them first in his list of the discontented. He wrote Abigail that the children and apprentices were disobedient, and the schools and colleges turbulent. This has a familiar ring! The older generation has always expected the young men to fight its wars without asking questions, and then wonders why they rebel. Only recently have we Americans given them the vote as early as we have conscripted them.
For me, the most frightening thing about the world today is the uneasy feeling that those in power, here and abroad, do not know what they are doing. They cannot really cope with global problems. They are bungling.
I often fear the world will not survive its present leadership. Like the dinosaurs, many of us older people belong to a group that will soon be extinct. Earth and sky were changed forever thirty-one years ago when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
We pre-Hiroshima types were the inheritors of the myth of eternal progress. We believed science and technology would give us all the more abundant life. We thought the American standard of living was a goal worthy of everyone. We believed the Judeo-Christian God was on our side and that our country was chosen to bring in a new order of justice and liberty and democracy. It is not easy for us to accept the full reality of the mushroom cloud, of Watergate, of My Lai, to face the enormous evil we Americans have loosed in the world. We'd rather not see that our comfortable standard of living is bought at the expense of other people. We still want to believe that God is up there, in our heaven, therefore all must be right with the world - even though we've been to the moon and know that heaven isn't up there.
Those who have grown up since Hiroshima are not the inheritors of our hope or our faith. At a gut level they know the button may be pushed, the atomic accident may happen any time now. They know our planet - with all of human history - may be destroyed, and they are not convinced that God will necessarily step in and save us from our folly. This makes for cynicism and hopelessness in some who are young. They escape in drugs or release their frustration in vandalism. In others it makes for an existential quality in living - an intensity of joy and love. Live fully today. Love fully today. Take no thought for the morrow, for there may be no tomorrow. And yet -
In spite of "the weight of this sad time," I bring you a message of hope. For I believe our young people can yet save the world. The revolution that is needed now is already taking place in the minds and lives of some of them. They have a dream of a somehow strangely better world than the one they have inherited, and they are living as if it were already visible, already here. They step to a different drummer. I live with such young people at Friends World College. I know them in the Life Center in Philadelphia and in the Movement for a New Society. I spent a week with them earlier this summer at the conference of Young Friends of North America. They are not, however, limited to Quakers. They are of many religions, and of no formal religion. I talk to them on trains and planes. I pick them up hitch-hiking and meet them in campgrounds. I hear their songs. I read their poetry. I watch them dance.
The next centuries belong to them and their children. We stand now, like Moses looking into the promised land. Our time is running out. Jesus told us we could not enter the promised land unless we became like children. Can we listen to young people now and walk adventurously into the next century with them? Or will we stand on the sidelines and bemoan the good old days when "earth and high heaven were fixed of old and founded strong?" Sometimes we must give up the obvious good - the myths, the morality, the mind-sets by which we have lived - for the somehow strangely better.
What they have to teach us, I think, may be summed up as "the wisdom of insecurity." First, intellectual insecurity. This generation grew up on the new math. They are users of calculators, programmers of computers, players with cyclotrons. But they know that computers cannot do our thinking for us. As the programmers say, "Garbage in means garbage out." They see the world through the lenses of new scientific knowledge. They are at home in the space age - the world of relativity where nothing is fixed forever, or even for very long. Although it boggles our minds and we are insecure because we can't pin things down and understand it all, it's a tremendously exciting time to be alive. It's a much vaster universe than we had supposed, far more beautiful and awe-inspiring than the world we grew up in. Consider that the human mind figured out how to put people on the moon and, what is even more astounding, to bring them back again! What may we not see in the next two centuries?
Then, too, we can learn from the relativity of their values. They have rejected our morality and think us hypocritical. We preach honesty, but stretch the truth for convenience and our business practices embrace a multitude of sins. We preach the sanctity of marriage, but they witness the
exploitation and infidelity. They have different guidelines. One young person put it this way: if you care what happens, it's all right. It's not caring - about people, about yourself, about things - that is wrong. That's a more workable code for the space age, perhaps for any age.
They are seeking to restore morality to economics - "economics as if people mattered," as E.F. Schumacher says. They have knocked around the world enough to know that problems of hunger and habitation, of energy, ecology and economics must be solved on a world basis. They no longer buy selfish patriotism. And they no longer buy competition and the American standard of living. The greatest culture shock our Friends World College students face is not in going to Africa, or India, or Guatemala. It is their re-entry into affluent America. It is confronting the uncaring values by which many of their parents live in white suburbia.
The years ahead will not be peaceful and uneventful. Those who place too much value on comfort and security are probably in for a rough time. Those who are unencumbered and flexible will more likely survive. We talk simplicity, but find it hard to practice. Jesus said that the meek - those with nothing to lose - would inherit the earth. In the days to come the back-packers will probably fare better physically and spiritually than those in mobile homes. (We've just lived through a hurricane on Long Island, and certainly the mobile homes did not do too well!)
Returning to our chapter in the book of Hebrews:
By faith Abraham obeyed the call to go out to a land destined for himself and his heirs, and he left home without knowing where he was to go. By faith he settled as an alien in the land promised him, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob.... He was looking forward to the city with firm foundations whose architect and builder is God.
(Hebrews 11:8-10 NEB)
Abraham left the obvious good of his permanent home for the dream of a somehow strangely better city that he wanted to help God bring into being. He became a tent dweller, along with Isaac, his son, and Jacob, his grandson. Did they teach him the wisdom of insecurity, of being unencumbered and flexible?
Let us too accept the challenges and uncertainties of the future, believing it the better part of wisdom not to place too much stress on security for ourselves and our families. In the end we cannot surely protect ourselves or our children from disease, vicissitudes, accidents, hurricanes, encounters with evil, nor from an atomic holocaust. The best we can do for our children is to teach them to care for themselves and for others, and to
help them acquire "coping" skills through experience.
We have a dream of a peaceable kingdom where the lion and lamb dwell in peace, led by a child. Edward Hicks painted it in many versions, and in the background he always painted William Penn with the Native Americans on the banks of the Delaware River in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Common Wealth! Can we be pioneers and help bring this dream into being? Because of our Quaker heritage, we should be living as if this Commonwealth of God were already here.
Let us join hands with our Native American neighbors to develop awareness of our dependence on the earth - for George Fox told us that if we "dwell in the Light, which was before the earth was, with it we will preserve the tender plants."
Let us join hands with our neighbors of assorted colors to create an interdependent world where no one goes hungry, for we are to "walk cheerfully over the [whole] earth, answering that of God in everyone."
Let us not make fun of concerned women but listen to them and work with them in equality to foster reverence for life and to find peaceable solutions for our disputes, for we are to "live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars."
And let us follow our young people in accepting the wisdom of insecurity, for we are to "look upon our treasures and the furniture of our houses and the garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these our possessions."
Let us walk cheerfully into the future, ready to give up the obvious good we have enjoyed because we dream of a strangely better world where no one will hurt or destroy, a Commonwealth whose architect and builder is God.
Mine eyes have seen the glory! O be swift my soul to answer ... be jubilant, my feet!
Elizabeth Watson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and graduated from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, with majors in Greek and English literature. She wanted to enter the ministry and spent two years studying theology at Chicago Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago Divinity School. Midway in the course she found 57th Street Friends Meeting, and came to feel she was being called into the Religious Society of Friends for a non-professional ministry embracing all of life. For many years she worked in Chicago with a concern for race relations, the long-time job being with a community organization in a changing neighborhood. In 1972, the Watsons moved to Long Island, where George accepted the call to be Moderator (President) of Friends World College at Huntington. Since that time Elizabeth has been a free lance writer and speaker, and a curator of Walt Whitman's birthplace, a New York Historic Site in Huntington. The Watsons had four children, and four foster children, three of whom are sisters from Germany. They now have eleven grandchildren.
The Carey Memorial Lecture. The lectureship is the gift of Millicent Carey Mclntosh in memory of her parents, A. Morris and Margaret Thomas Carey, who all their lives were active members of Baltimore Monthly Meeting (Homewood). The first lecture was given in 1947 by Rufus M. Jones.
