This message was given at my meeting today:
God is One, and God calls us to be one people. God calls us together to worship not for our refreshment, but to serve God’s ends.
God permits us diversity of belief and various world-views, but God calls us to be of one mind. And God calls us to obedience. And God calls on us, in all our affairs, to seek unity.
In our gatherings for worship, no words are to be spoken but the words God puts into our mouth. All others are forbidden.
What one’s faith is – that, verily, is he.
– Bhagavad Gita 17:3
And the Apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith.
– Luke 17:5
I am a Christian Friend, with many of the beliefs you might expect a Christian Friend to have. I’m also, by the grace of God, a person of faith. I’m eager to share my beliefs with anyone willing to listen, but that eagerness pales next to my intenser zeal to help kindle others’ faith, a related but altogether distinct thing. Belief is a thing of air. Faith is fire.
Of belief it is written, “Thou believest that there is one God, thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble” (James 2:19). The One God, all-wise and almighty, is at the very center of my belief-system, a foundation stone for my sanity in a world where fate seems so capricious, the selfish and ignorant so powerful, and my own understandings so inadequate. But bare belief in God, as the apostle James and his devils knew, is not faith in God. Belief may say with Jacob, “Surely the Lord is in this place,” but only faith says, with Abraham and Samuel, “Here I am, Lord.” Faith stands always ready to show itself through works (James 2:17-18) and to do its works through love (Galatians 5:6). No love, no works; no works, dead faith. And faith dead, right belief is truth locked in a box whose key is lost.
But faith does need a belief system to support it, as the candle flame needs wax and a wick, and in this lies the value of right belief. And so let me tell you of the beliefs I hold most important:
1. God cares what we do and experience, and is willing and able to communicate with us. One day almost twenty years ago, as I was coming home from work, I heard a Great Voice in my mind say, “I give ear.” The majesty of the voice told me that it was the Lord’s, and the language – the English of the King James Bible – was perfectly chosen to sweep away all doubt about Who was speaking. So this belief of mine is grounded in experience. It was perhaps many years before I “got” the second meaning of those words. “He who hath ears to hear, let him hear!” the Jesus of the Gospels would say. I’d been given not only the assurance of God’s concerned attention, but also an “ear” to discern meanings God wished to convey to me. But if God gave such an ear to me, then why not to you also? Are you prepared to ask for such a gift? Are you prepared to clean the vessel that carries it, so that the mouth that declares God’s truth avoids untruth?
2. God wills the salvation of all. But there is no salvation without a radical shift in attitude, contrary to our natural inclinations, for which the traditional term is “repentance.” Unfortunately this term is sometimes confused with mere remorse for misdeeds, or disgust with the way one is, both of which one may live with for years, as I did, without undergoing the radical shift I’m speaking of. I believe that repentance comes only as a gift of grace; the Christians of Judea so spoke of it in Acts 11:18. It may happen dramatically, as with the Apostle Paul, or imperceptibly – and both to people that call themselves Christians and to those that don’t.
I believe that there is no salvation outside of Christ, the Word that was in the beginning (John 1:1-2), the Firstborn of all creatures, in Whom all things were created (Colossians 1:15-16), the but this does not mean that a Jew, a Muslim, or an agnostic has to throw away a precious existing belief system and accept Christian doctrine. God is the Savior, as Jesus’ mother prophesied so beautifully (Luke 1:47), and there is no god but God; Christ, having no will apart from God’s own, is the Great Being through Whom God saves, into Whom the saved are gathered back into one, to stand, purified, before God. Call Christ what you will, or live in Him without calling Him anything at all, as pre-verbal infants do; He will still see to your salvation, except for so long as you persist in deliberately choosing evil over good. For God respects individual choice.
Salvation implies that there is something to be saved from. And isn’t this world of impermanence, suffering and death painful enough to want salvation from? But there is also the kingdom of hell, which lies within us as the kingdom of heaven does, even as we walk this earth. If we cultivate the hellish side of our nature, fear, anger, greed – Beware! That’s what we’ll be left with when this outside world falls away at death. But Consciousness Itself is divine, cannot be destroyed in any sort of hell, and must ultimately return to its Source. And he shall wipe away all tears from our eyes. (Revelation 7:17, 21:4)
3. Everything I experience is for my spiritual education (cf. Hebrews 12:10). I’ve begun to see providence at work everywhere, for “all things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28), a truth more easily evident as one grows in purity (sattva), by which “one sees in all creatures a single, unchanging existence, undivided within its divisions” (Bhagavad Gita 18:20, Barbara Miller tr.). There’s nothing so small, trivial or random-seeming that God’s hand cannot be in it. But this applies to things that distress as well as things that please me. “What?” said Job to his wife (Job 2:10), “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and not evil?” Do unfeeling people threaten me? I can say with Jesus: “Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (John 19:11). Remembering this sometimes spares me fear, anger, and discontent. In The Imitation of Christ (3:46, Sherley-Price tr.) Christ tells the Disciple, “It is by My will and permission that events happen, in order that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Even when others’ hearts remain opaque to me, each event shows something about the thoughts of my own.
4. The impulse to pray is to be trusted; God will not ask us to pray for what God does not intend to grant. This becomes particularly crucial when we doubt our own worthiness to be forgiven our misdeeds and the condition of our heart. But if “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” (Matthew 6:12 ff, Luke 11:4) and “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13) are held up as model prayers, our sense of unworthiness is of no relevance, unless we’re actually blocking the gift by denying others forgiveness and mercy ourselves. Jesus would never have said “Go, and sin no more” (John 8:11) if the sinner had been incapable of living without sinning further; neither would He have told us to be perfect, “as our heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48), if such a goal were unattainable. God can be counted on to give us whatever we need to achieve what God wants us to do: even “a mouth, and wisdom” in situations of terror (Luke 21:15); even strength to resist any temptation that might be given us (1 Corinthians 10:13). But do we not know what we should be praying for? For this reason God has given us the Holy Spirit to intercede for us with “groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). In particular I know we would never have been given the yearning to know God, or to be united with God, if it were something we could not have.
Such are my key beliefs. But as I said, I’m more zealous to ignite faith than to preach beliefs. If souls whose faith God kindles into fire through my influence happen to have belief-systems different from mine, I care more that they cherish the flame of faith than that they think as I do about, say, the Resurrection of Christ or the authority of Christian Scripture. As the flame of faith continues to burn in them, it will bring them into right belief – the belief-system that God, knowing their cultural heritage and personal vocabulary of faith, deems right for them at this present stage of their development. It is faith that saves, and not the belief-system. It is faith that sooner or later leads all the faithful into repentance of ways with no life in them, and through repentance into the “righteousness, peace, and joy” (Romans 14:17), the sat-chit-ananda, of an eternally wakeful life, infinitely satisfying, in the bosom of God. Of the different beliefs that helped us get there, the Qur’an teaches: Whatever it be wherein ye differ, the decision thereof is with God: Such is God my Lord: in Him I trust, and to Him I turn. (Qur’an 42:10, Yusuf ‘Ali tr.)
O Friends: cherish the flame of faith you’ve been given; sweep away everything in your heart that might dim or quench it; and be thankful to the Giver. Beliefs are to reason with, and are useful helps; but faith is to die for.
God calls us to worship Him in Spirit and in Truth (John 4:23). This means that words and acts of our own choosing do not constitute acceptable worship, and do not bring us closer to God, unless God Himself is guiding us. Our innate moral sense tells us that this is as it should be, or else the unrepentant might win divine favor, with hearts still in unhealed bondage to error, merely by mouthing the right formula. Frail and ignorant as we are, we’re prone to indulge ourselves in things not good for us, assign ourselves vain penances that hope but fail to erase shame and guilt, and pray to false gods with the wrong part of our soul. It’s wisest to put ourselves in the hands of the heavenly Physician who knows what prayer, practice or correction best suits the state of our heart. “Pray without ceasing,” Paul counseled us (1 Thessalonians 5:17), but also “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26) This paradox, that we ought to be in worship constantly, but don’t know how to do it without God’s guidance (which may change course from moment to moment, and be different for different worshippers) is the very basis of Friends’ waiting worship and their historical rejection of other denominations’ customary “forms without life.”
On this same principle, only God can tell us how often we should set aside time to give ourselves over to a spiritual activity He’s chosen for us. It’s one thing to float through each day’s activities in a mild, pious haze, “praying without ceasing” in a general sort of way, smiling to ourselves over how nicely we’ve lived up to the Yearly Meeting’s Advices and Queries. It is another to bring our will and attention to a sharp point at regular intervals, and put all of ourselves at the disposal of the Divine as we understand It. This bringing to a point may be a small, split-second thing, as when recovering alcoholics wake in the morning and resolve to spend the next twenty-four hours sober. It may involve short verbal utterances like “increase our faith” or “heal me, Lord” or “there is no god but God.” It might be purely nonverbal, like a sending of blessings in the six directions, or prostration, or a few minutes’ exercise in bare mindfulness. It may be a fixing of intention to speak and think about God, and our covenant with Him, “as we walk by the way” (Deuteronomy 6:7), or to call repeatedly on His name (Psalm 91:15). But I could not guess what God would call you to do. My own daily practice, given to me at my request, is to say the Lord’s Prayer every morning, slowly and thoughtfully. For others, it may be something shorter – or longer. And, under God’s ongoing guidance, one’s daily assignment may change or expand over time.
Is God calling you to a daily spiritual practice? Ask Him – or “Her,” or “It,” if those pronouns strike you as more fitting for the One who created you; and God will answer you.
Did you formerly have a daily practice that you fell away from and never went back to? Is that because the Holy Spirit did not support your continuing with it, or because you let yourself be discouraged? Do you discern that God wishes you to resume it? Might you need the support of a group of friends?
Committees of Ministry and Worship, or Ministry and Counsel, may wish to consider whether they are called to encourage the adoption of daily spiritual practices, and the shared discussion of daily-practice experiences and problems, among members of their meetings.
I’m passionate about this. I long wished for a daily practice that I knew was right for me and that I could keep to. I’d tried other things, but they’d fallen away from me. Eventually I read an extraordinarily good book, Turning Suffering Inside Out: A Zen Approach to Living with Physical and Emotional Pain (Shambhala, 2002), by Darlene Cohen, a Zen priest, which she ends by suggesting to the reader that one be one’s own Zen master, so to speak, and pose a koan for oneself. The koan I posed was: why can’t I keep to one daily practice? And within days I knew that my daily practice was simply to say the Lord’s Prayer. I knew it was a calling, not a whim, the day I omitted it and soon felt the Lord’s gentle rebuke.
Daily practice makes me rich. I see spiritual poverty all around me, and I want my friends and neighbors to be rich, too. And this costs nothing.
“The best help you can have from a book is to read one full of such truths, instructions and awakening informations as force you to see and know who and what and where you are; that God is your All; and that all is misery but a heart and life devoted to him. This is the best outward prayer book you can have, as it will turn you to an inward book and spirit of prayer in your heart.” So wrote William Law (1686-1761) in The Spirit of Prayer (1749; excerpted in Robert Llewellyn and Edward Moss, eds., Daily Readings with William Law, Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1987, p. 68).
I have found such a book; it’s a little 120-page book by the early English Quaker William Shewen, first published in 1683 and just now reprinted by Inner Light Books in San Francisco (Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-9797110-0-8, $25; paperback, ISBN 978-0-9797110-1-5, $15; http://www.innerlightbooks.com). Its title is Counsel to the Christian-Traveller: Also Meditations & Experiences. Among the short works in this slim volume is “A Treatise Concerning Thoughts & Imaginations,” which deserves reading by every person of faith that’s ever endured mental anguish.
Let me share a few sample passages here from Shewen’s Meditations & Experiences:
From No. XVII: This one word or sentence may try all the sects in Christendom, and others who profess themselves lovers of the law of God, yet have not peace in their dwellings; these have not the answer of a good conscience, which keeps void of offence towards God and man. They have not that peace which passes the understanding of man in the fall; they know not their hearts and minds kept by it; but are found in the evil-doing, where the tribulation and anguish is, and in that fear which brings torment. (p. 42)
From No. XIX: This is my testimony, that none can receive the joy of God’s salvation, enter into the Sabbath of rest, or keep holy-day to the Lord, further than they know a ceasing, and a being saved from thinking their own vain thoughts, following their own wills, and obeying their own wisdom…. So it is a blessed thing for people to meet and wait together, and walk in this heavenly light and day of salvation, which discovers and judges every vain thought and foolish imagination, subdues them, and brings them down into the obedience of Christ. In this, as they walk and abide, they truly differ from all other families of the earth…. In this stands their happiness and safety: Out of this, they are as weak as other people. (pp. 44-45)
From No. XXX: It is a very blessed state, to be found true waiters for, and witnesses of the second coming of Christ, which is without sin unto salvation; for true happiness does not consist in … being witnesses of his first appearance, wherein he convinces and reproves for sin; but in waiting for the witnessing his second coming to cleanse, save and redeem from sin: herein is the joy of God’s salvation felt and enjoyed. (p. 50)
From No. XXXV: It is a blessed thing, and a high and heavenly state, for every individual to be witnesses within themselves, that self is made of no importance. … Denying of self, and taking up the Cross, are inseparable, and must precede Discipleship; yet this state is short of being a friend of God, and co-heir with Christ, bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh; and short of sitting down with him at the right Hand of God in the kingdom of heaven; …short of knowing it meat and drink to do the will of God, and his fruit sweet to their taste, and to sit under his shadow with great delight, glorified with that glory which Christ had with the Father before the world began. (pp. 55-56)
In the past few days I’ve experienced both a touch of the unspeakable sweetness of God and immersion in the angry nastiness of my own offended self-importance. I’ve also been given a clear warning against the familiar detours from the right way that bring me into those patches of thorns and nettles. In the midst of all this, with his book riding with me on all my travels, I’ve found William Shewen to be a sensitive and faithful friend who’s very familiar with all the territory I cover, and I’ve been hearing my Shepherd’s own voice in his. Higher praise to a book I don’t know how to give.
He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? – Psalm 94:9
Yesterday morning I sat to do my morning practice, which is to say the Lord’s Prayer slowly and thoughtfully. At that time I invite Him to guide my mind and spirit where He will, as I navigate my way, or let Him navigate it, through the great prayerful thoughts that make up the Our Father. I hadn’t gotten through “Hallowed be Thy name” before I found myself wondering whether God truly experienced all the suffering of all His sentient creatures, or merely inferred it. Or perhaps experienced it through some sort of filter that allowed His eternal bliss to remain unruffled. But if so – Oh, my God, I thought, I’m sitting here in the comfort of my living room couch, asking for the attention of the Experiencer of All Suffering! – and the thought, by His grace, made me start to weep. It wasn’t a deep cry, but the sobs lasted at least through “give us this day our daily bread,” because I remember imagining our daily bread coming to us wet with tears, His tears. For this first time in my memory I’d had the experience of pitying God.
I won’t talk here about the range and variety of suffering in creation. You can find reminders in every newspaper; you can contemplate the crucifixion of Jesus, the torture-deaths at Abu Ghraib and the Tower of London, the vivisections of animals, the Nazi death-camps, the cases wheeled into the Emergency Room down the street. Then there are the mental sufferings of the terrified and the mad. Read the story of Job, or read the warning descriptions of damnation in the Qur’an. Search your own memory, or tune into the ongoing pain in your own bones, the despair in your own heart. God suffers all that pain, and more. No matter that He also tastes every pleasure had by every creature. No matter that He may be in such an unimaginably high, detached state of consciousness that creaturely pleasure and pain alike dwindle to insignificance. He remains the One Tormented.
Can it be true? On the answer hangs our faith that God fully understands us. The alternative is that God is one Self and we are all separate, independent selves – bare consciousnesses, uncreated, timeless, changeless and without qualities – that experience a “world” of created nature that includes both things and processes going on within our body and mind (including the illusion of doership) and those thing-events going on outside. Such, as I understand it, is the world-view of the Indian Sankhya philosophy, whose best-known classic is the Yoga Sutras attributed to the ancient sage Patanjali. Patanjali’s God is a special self, a particular self (Y.S. 1:24) who enjoys omniscience (1:25). In Patanjali’s system, one consciousness can come to know fully the experience of another (3:19-20). But you and I will never be each other, and while we may one day experience a liberating awakening to our true, timeless nature as pure being, nowhere does Patanjali promise us union with God. We seem to be eternally separate. If this is so, then God may peep into my brain or lurk in my heart to spy on me as often as He likes, but when the going gets rough, He can parachute out of my suffering and turn His back on me forever, for He is He and I am I.
Against this Sankhya world-view stands the equally venerable Indian tradition known as Advaita-Vedanta, which asserts the essential oneness of us all. But more to the point are the words of Jesus: I and the Father are one (John 10:30). And his prayer for His disciples, and all their converts to come (John 17:21), That they all may be one, as thou, Father art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. Lest the reader suspect that these were not Jesus’ own sayings, but ones “planted” in the Fourth Gospel by some redactor with Advaita-Vedanta sympathies, look also in the Gospel of Matthew (25:40), where Jesus prophesies that the King shall say at the Last Judgment, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. This could, of course, be mere metaphor rather than plain truth. If it were mere metaphor, then God might not have said to Moses, I am who am (Exodus 3:14), but perhaps “I am one of those who am.” The Creation Story might not have had the Lord God breathing His own breath into Adam to give him life (Genesis 2:7), but rather pressing a button to connect the first man’s clay body to an eternally pre-existent, uncreated spirit of Adam’s own.
But if it is the plain truth that God’s experiencing Self is the very same Self as Jesus’ Self (as Jesus knew by direct experience) and also as our own Self (as we cannot know experientially unless God shows us), then it makes sense that Christ Jesus could have died for our sins (1 Corinthians 15:3), really taking them on Himself (Romans 5:6 ff, Hebrews 2:9 ff.). If we are not doomed, by the very nature of reality, to eternal separateness and otherness, then we might be baptized into Jesus Christ, dead with Him and risen again with Him (Romans 6, 1 Cor. 15:22, Colossians 3:1-3), and incorporated into the very body of Christ (Romans 12:5), who now lives in us (Romans 8:10, Ephesians 3:17). If the possibility of interpenetration or identity of selfhood between God and His creatures is once admitted, then it becomes possible that God the Father shall gather all things, including ourselves, into Christ and unto Himself (Ephesians 1:10, Colossians 1:19). It no longer has the uncertain sound of a breakable promise, but the ring of a necessary truth, when Matthew’s Gospel ends: lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. This is the voice of One who cannot parachute out of our suffering and leave us alone in it. Let us therefore bless all suffering that draws us closer to God, mindful that it is God who suffers through us, and cheerfully sit alongside Christ the Crucifixion Survivor, offering our hands and hearts to serve as adjuncts to His own as He ministers to all the suffering creatures He brings to our awareness.
A statement to be filed with my 2008 Federal Income Tax Return, along with payment in full
This is to make known that I pay only a part of my taxes willingly, namely the part that serves the common good without inflicting violence. The part that finances arms, armed forces and warfare is taken from me against my will, and comes into the United States Treasury only because the government has the power to compel payment. However, I would cheerfully give an equivalent amount for peaceful purposes. I note that colonial and later state governments (East New Jersey, Constitution of 1683; State of New York, before 1841), as well as the U.S. Congress during the Civil War, allowed for the redirection toward non-military purposes of “war taxes” collected from Quakers and other conscientious objectors to war. Why, then, can’t the same accommodation to conscience be made today?
I make this protest because I count myself a citizen of the peaceable kingdom of Jesus Christ, who said He was come to save people’s lives, not destroy them (Luke 9:56). He taught His people to love their enemies, and not to resist evil (Matthew 5:39, 44) – certainly not by force of arms, but at most with spiritual weapons (as His apostle Paul stated in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5). But this same Jesus, pointing to a coin stamped with Caesar’s image, also bid us render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s (Matthew 22:21), and urged non-resistance to those in power (John 18:36), setting an example by disarming Peter at the occasion of his own arrest, when he warned that those who take the sword would perish by the sword (Matthew 26:52). Paul likewise encouraged a respectful obedience to whoever held the reins of secular government (Romans 13). In fact Jesus even had Peter pay tribute money on his behalf to the Roman occupiers “lest we should offend them” (Matthew 17:27).
Jesus having been so compliant with the civil authorities, there might be no reason for me to bear this witness against paying taxes for weapons and war – not if I were merely a subject of the United States Government in the way that Jesus and His disciples were subjects of the Roman Empire. For then I might just comply without protest, with my heart saddened but my conscience unburdened, so long as the government did not ask me to disobey commandments of God myself (Acts 5:29).
But I am also a citizen of a democracy that claims to act in my name, and that makes all the difference. The United States was founded on the assumption that governments derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed” (Declaration of Independence, paragraph 2). I must therefore protest that the United States Government does not have the consent of all its governed, and does not act in my name, when it arms men and women to take human life; and I hereby give notice that I would not and do not choose to have any part of my earnings used for a purpose so contrary to the spirit of my rightful king Jesus.
A friend recently sent me a film clip of a brawl between monks of different Christian communions over turf rights at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Fighting had broken out on First Day, 11/9/2008, when Greek Orthodox monks blocked a procession of Armenian Orthodox. My friend had titled her e-mail “One more reason I don’t like to be called a Christian.”
This was not the first time I’d heard such feelings expressed, but it always grieves me to see people of high ideals distancing themselves from “the Christians” because of the low behavior of some who call themselves Christians. The effect is to denigrate either Jesus Christ Himself (from whom, ironically, they may have learned those high ideals) or millions of men, women and children who, over the past two thousand years, chose forgiveness over revenge, faithfulness over treachery, truth over deceit, love over hatred, and their own suffering and death over making others suffer – precisely because they were Christians following Christ. I allow that others may have done the same because they were Buddhists following the Buddha, or Jews following Moses and the Prophets. But you cannot deny that a river of spilled Christian blood cries up from the ground, witnessing that to be a Christian is an honorable thing.
My friend wrote below the link to the film clip, “But I will answer to: Student of Jesus.” I answered her:
“…if the followers of Jesus don’t answer to the name of Christians, and in Christ’s name rebuke and disclaim unchristian behavior, from ‘Christian’ militarism, racism and imperialism to ‘Christian’ squabbling over turf rights at the so-called Holy Sepulcher, then other Christians suffering shame and pain over these things won’t have any strong Christian elders to turn to for comfort and encouragement. And Jesus, our Teacher (and to some of us, our Savior and Vine, our Prophet, Priest and King) will find His cross surrounded only by [politicians that tell lies to start wars, media demagogues that persecute gay people,] and the Ku Klux Klan. He deserves better representatives on this earth than that, I think. And the Truth He witnessed and witnesses to requires them, too.
“But I call myself a Christian only because I feel He wants me to. I regularly turn for Christian counsel and encouragement to godly companions who call themselves simply Quakers, or Buddhists or Muslims or Jews, as their Divine Inward Witness directs them. As far as I’m concerned, their Divine Inward Witness is Christ, and Christ speaks to me through them. I have to respect the faithfulness that leads them to persist in referring to their Divine Inward Witness as the Light, the Buddha-mind… or Allah, or Adonai Elohenu. I’m not humoring them. I’m respecting God’s wisdom, and their discernment.”
I ended by saying “don’t call yourself a Christian unless He tells you to.” I was thinking of Paul’s saying “no one can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3b), and Jesus’ answer when Peter acclaimed Him as the Messiah, “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17). Taught since childhood to recognize ”Jesus Christ” as a name and a common swear-word, we easily forget that recognition of Jesus as the Christ is a gift, a charisma. On the other hand, those who’ve received it may not lay it aside just because they’re embarrassed to be seen with other people that call themselves Christians.
I wasn’t prepared for what happened to me in the voting booth.
I’d thought it out carefully. I’d vote around 10:30, after the people who worked in offices had had their morning chance. It was a good plan. My polling place is in the lobby of a high-rise housing project in Manhattan. There are about six electoral districts that vote there. My ED had two voting machines. (There was only one for the primary.)
Things looked pretty well organized. First you gave a worker your street address, and she told you which ED you were and what table you had to sign in at. That line was my longest wait–but only ten minutes. I was voter number 388. Spirits were high. One family was there with their children, taking them into the voting booth.
The line for the booths was only a few minutes. My card was collected and the machine was set for me by a fiercely focused African American woman who called me “dear” as she held the curtain for me.
I always forget that I have to cock the machine by throwing the big red lever to the right, so at first I couldn’t get the small toggle by Obama’s name to go down. A moment of panic until I remembered the lever thing.
Click, click, click, click, down the list of candidates, my congresswoman, judges, my state assemblyman–an impressive young man I’m happy is running again.
I stood there for a moment looking at what I had done, looking at the toggles that were turned down beside the names and the Xs in the boxes. I felt two things at once. I felt both deeply centered inside myself and standing outside space and time. It was a moment like no other. I took a long breath and swung the big red lever back to the left.
And then I began to sob. Wracking, shaking sobs welling up from that center I’d been inhabiting, as tears poured from my eyes.
I steadied myself against the lever, as I recall, inhaled, and turned to leave the booth. As I pulled the curtain aside, I met the eyes of the woman who had let me into the booth.
She looked at me. She more than looked at me, she took me in. ”Did you do it?” she said. I nodded. She nodded, too.
And the rest of my tears began to flow. Outside the building, in the sun, I leaned against the brick wall and cried some more until I was able to collect myself.
I spent this spring and summer working on Oxford University Press’s Encyclopedia of African American History from 1896 to the Present. (In other words from Plessy v. Ferguson to Mos Def.) I’ve worked on many of OUP’s African American titles in the past ten years. The set is locked down and ready to go to the presses, except for the open sections that an editorial team is waiting to fill in based on what happens today.
I have worked, as I said, on many of these projects, on the biographical dictionaries, on other encyclopedia sets, on the collected works of W. E. B. Du Bois. It’s been a privilege and an honor and so humbling to learn the life stories of so many astounding men and women. But this encyclopedia of events, half of which happened in my lifetime, sunk me deeper and deeper into despair as I absorbed how pervasive and unacknowledged, unseen, and unknown the racism of this country is.
This morning I got to push back at all that. This morning I got to say–despite what I absorbed growing up with de facto segregation in the public schools of Pennsylvania, where the black kids sat in the back row and rode in the back of the bus–No. This is the person who is best for the job. This is the person I want to represent me to the rest of the world.
“Did you do it?” she asked. I nodded.
I write this on the evening of August 28, 2008.
It’s the birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and my late aunt, Josephine.
On this day, forty-five years ago, I was in summer school at the University of Pennsylvania. We were hearing a lot, in the women’s dorm, about this big march on Washington. We watched clips of it on the network news in the TV lounge that night. I remember seeing speeches . . . and Joan Baez singing.
Eight years earlier, on August 28, 1955, I would have been about to enter seventh grade in Chester County, Pennsylvania. But down in Mississippi on that day, a young black boy named Emmett Till–he was about six months older than me– was being beaten to death. I have no memory of that murder.
I’ve informed myself about it since then. I’d like to give you a YouTube link where you can see some images of Mississippi while you listen to Bob Dylan’s song about Emmett Till. The last line of the song is the title of this post. (For those with slower modems, the printed lyrics are here.) I felt it necessary to look them up and reread them after I turned off the television tonight. After I’d watched tonight’s speech. After Barack Obama spoke.
I write now, and I don’t understand why I’m not dissolved in tears. Is his gaze holding me steady, I wonder? I couldn’t take my eyes from him. Savior? Celebrity? Another Adlai Stevenson, too smart to be elected president? He looked so vulnerable standing out there on that platform. And he looked so clear about who he is and what he means to do.
I’ve never known this country to be so low–not through the cold war, Korea, or the Vietnam War. Not through Watergate. Not even through Watergate. This is the worst. And yet the young people, the young people (or so I call them) who started moveon.org and talkingpointsmemo and so many other of the blogs and Web sites I depend on and who are representing me on my own city council and in my state assembly–how did they get so good?
I have no kids of my own. I don’t know. I’ve heard it said that we hippies blew it. Maybe we did. But it’s beginning to look to me like some of us parented a generation that’s taking charge. Could they have possibly taken us at our word?
“The system’s broken,” we said in the Sixties. “Everything’s got to change.”
That’s what I heard tonight.
Here’s the text.
This is for my cousins, my aunt Josephine’s granddaughters, Jennifer and soon-to-be-born Baby Girl, Susan and year-old Sailor, and Sarah, and their husbands Rob, Giles, and Ben; and for Josephine’s grandson Jonathan and for her two grandkids, Ben and Marisa, who will be voting in the next presidential election.
The quilt made by Iowa Quakers
I just got the following e-mail from Ann Nichols in Iowa. It looks like a beautiful quilt, and I thought you’d like to know about it. It’s an interesting idea to fund-raise on eBay.
Ann Nichols displays the “Out of Africa” quilt which will be auctioned to raise funds to support a nurse at the Kaimosi Friends Mission Hospital in Kenya, Africa. The multi-colored fabric in the quilt is African fabric donated by Eden Grace, of Friends United Meeting (FUM) Field Staff serving in their Africa Ministries Office in Kisumu, Kenya.
The quilt, a mission project of United Society of Friends’ Women, was made by women from five Iowa Friends’ Meetings: Bangor Liberty, Hartland, Honey Creek-New Providence, LeGrand, and Marshalltown First Friends.
The “Out of Africa” quilt will be auctioned on eBay in mid-September. The ten-day auction will end September 26 with the auction proceeds donated to the Adopt-a-Nurse Program for Kaimosi Hospital.
To learn more about the quilt and see it on auction, go to ebay.com after September 16 and search for “African Fabric Houndstooth Quilt.”
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