A Marathon – Not a Sprint

Thirty years ago, a friend and I took our toddlers to watch the first Olympic Time Trials for the Women’s Marathon.  With babies in backpacks, we hustled to various points along the twenty-six mile course to witness the field of 238 women make history. Two-and-a-half hours after the starting gun, we cheered Joan Benoit as she crossed the finish line.  Three months later, she’d shave seven minutes off that time to win a gold-medal in the first Women’s Marathon at the Olympics in Los Angeles.

1984 - Joan Benoit

Getty Images / Tony Duffy / Allsport

At the time, I was a nursing graduate student at the University of Washington and was parenting a twin son and daughter.  Often I felt as though I was running a marathon and wasn’t sure I could maintain the pace of both of these arduous endeavors.  Like Joan Benoit at the time trials, though, I couldn’t quit. There was too much at stake.

Kate Gould, lead lobbyist on Middle East Policy for Friends Committee on National Legislation (FNCL), knows about marathons, too.  She ran her first one a year ago in Baltimore, MD as a fundraiser for FCNL's work to prevent war with Iran.  Over that 26-mile course, Kate and six other FCNL runners spread the message that successful diplomacy requires patience and perseverance—just like running a marathon. The back of their t-shirts carried the slogan, "Diplomacy—It's Not a Sprint, It's a Marathon."

In early September, as President Obama and the U.S. Senate planned military action in Syria in response to chemical weapons attacks there in August, FCNL urged people to ask their Senators to take a different approach and to adopt the motto on Kate’s t-shirt. Other peace groups around the world put out the same call, and thousands of us answered. By the second week in September, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he would postpone the first vote on the Syrian strike resolution.

A few days later, FCNL organized a conference call to update supporters.  Kate Gould and other seasoned lobbyists made comments like this about the changed U.S. strategy away from the brink of war in Syria:

Historic victory

Something to celebrate

Never seen anything like this.

Then came the reminder:

Diplomacy is a marathon, not a sprint.

As always, FCNL has tools for this work ahead, such as a tally on where lawmakers stand on Syria.  Those from my state are still undecided, so I’ve written again to my Representative, urging him to support the slow, deliberate pace of negotiators like U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.  I’m working on similar letters to my two Senators.

It’s kind of like the cheering on that my friend and kids and I did for Joan Benoit and the other women who trained for years and persevered with the hope they’d someday run at the Olympics.  That’s what friends and family did for me when I juggled parenting and studies. Unlike the marathon, though, we don’t know how long this run will take, so I continue to hold all the leaders involved in this marathon of diplomacy in the Light. There’s so much at stake.

FCNL website 

Taking Action in Syria

At the end of worship in my Quaker meeting, we take a few moments to offer names of people we’d like others to “hold in the Light.”   In some faith traditions, the request would be to pray for someone. What I’m hoping when I hold someone in the Light is that he/she/they will listen for wisdom, both within and outside of themselves, and will feel a supportive, loving presence to guide their actions.

Last Sunday, I asked that we hold in the Light the 535 members of the United States Congress as well as President Obama and his cabinet as they seek ways to respond to the chemical weapons attacks in Damascus in August.

My hope is that these leaders, as well as others around the world, WILL act, but that they will choose nonviolent approaches rather than a military response.  Late last month, Yes! Magazine editor Sarah van Gelder succinctly spelled out "Eleven Reasons Why We Should Not Attack Syria."  It’s worth reading her entire article, but here’s a list of the reasons:

1.     We don't actually know who is behind the chemical weapons attack.

2.     A military strike would be illegal under the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution.

3.     It would violate international law, too.

4.     The American people oppose it.

5.     Violence begets violence.

6.     There are no logical targets.

7.     It will be impossible to control who benefits from Western intervention among the rebels.

8.     Civilians will be killed and maimed.

9.     There is no apparent exit strategy.

10.  There IS a better way.

Courtesy, Yes! Magazine

In fact, there are LOTS of better ways, and van Gelder spelled some of them out last week in another article, Six Alternatives to Military Strikes. Here’s a summary:

  1.    Bring those guilty of atrocities to justice through the International   Criminal Court (ICC).

  2.   Stop the flow of weapons from around the world into Syria through a United Nations embargo on arms and military supplies.

3.   The U.N. Security Council should hold an international peace conference such as those that resolved the wars in Southeast Asia through the Paris Conference on Cambodia, and in the Balkans through the Dayton Peace Agreement.

4.     Offer aid and support to the nonviolent movements within Syria.

5.     Provide desperately needed humanitarian aid to the millions of displaced people.

6.     Live within the rule of law by refraining from launching into a war that violates international law.

These are actions that I believe offer the best hope for peace. Fortunately, organizations like the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) make it easy for us to not only hold our leaders in the Light but also to contact them to let them know we support these better ways to act in response to the attacks in Syria.

I’m heartened that my own U.S. Representative Rick Larsen e-mailed constituents asking for help in his decision about how to vote on the authorization of military force.  I was happy to respond.  And according to the latest FCNL Action Alert, as well as President Obama’s speech on Sept. 10, leaders are listening.  It does appear that our country has moved, at least for now, a few steps back from military action and toward diplomacy as a response. Staff at FCNL are working hard to support this effort and remind us that “diplomacy is a marathon, not a sprint.”  They’ve organized a conference call for tonight, Sept. 11, to talk about the most recent information from Capitol Hill and what the U.S.'s decision to back away from bombing Syria means for prospects for peace. To join the call set for 8 PM Eastern Time, dial (712) 432-1500 and then the access number 380565#.

I plan to call in.  In the meantime, I’m continuing to hold in the Light world leaders and the people of Syria.

Closer to Each Other Than Language Allows

Photo by Claire Phipps - clairephipps.com

People think of Quakers as loving, peaceful, friendly types (our full name is, after all, the Religious Society of Friends).  And we are all of those things. We’re also human—full of imperfections, confusion, and fear. We don’t all see things in the same way, and our history shows that sometimes those differing views have torn us apart. This week, one branch of the diverse tree of Quakerism—Indiana Yearly Meeting—is considering such a break. For those Friends, the issue that is dividing them is homosexuality.

I’ve just returned from my own North Pacific Yearly Meeting (NPYM) annual gathering. For five days, Quakers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana worshiped, sang, and played; remembered Friends who died last year and welcomed newcomers; learned about local, national, and international Quaker efforts to promote peace and justice; and reconnected with old friends and made some new ones.

For many, these annual gatherings are a time to take a break from life’s daily demands and to renew spiritually. With the theme of “Listening in Tongues,” we were encouraged to “prepare ourselves for seeing, feeling and hearing unaccustomed perspectives with the tenderness we would wish for our own.” Our Friend-in-Residence, Benigno Sánchez-Eppler, urged us to listen beyond words, beyond the “limited monolingual comfort of our own monthly meetings,” for the similarities of our common Quaker ancestry. We heard from Friends in Pullman-Moscow Meeting that listening in that way can be healing. They reported that as they’ve dealt with conflicts in their meeting, “We are closer to each other than language allows.”

We faced our own challenges with language that separates us as we considered whether to affiliate with Friends General Conference (FGC). After a year of examination of what “affiliation” would both require and offer, we still stumble over that word as well as what it means to be an “independent” yearly meeting.  We decided to discern further over this next year, setting aside the idea of affiliation and instead exploring what kind of  “relationship” we want with the varied branches of Quakerism, including FGC.

As we left our gathering last Sunday, another branch of Quakers in the West, Northwest Yearly Meeting, began its annual session. Their agenda was to include consideration of the current state of affairs in their Yearly Meeting in the area of sexual ethics and same-sex relationships. As with Indiana Yearly Meeting, these conversations likely were fraught with conflict, just as they were twenty-five years ago in North Pacific Yearly Meeting. It took us eight years, but in 1993 we came to unity to revise our Faith and Practice to state that Quaker meetings could take the relationships of same-sex couples under their care (translation of Quaker-ese: same-sex couples could get married) following the same processes as for heterosexual couples.

This week, Indiana Yearly Meeting (IYM) has been considering a split as a way to deal with its members’ differences regarding not only same-sex relationships but also the full participation of gays and lesbians in the life of their monthly meetings and churches.  I first learned of IYM’s proposal to separate into two groups in an article by Stephen Angell in the June/July 2012 issue of Friends Journal. Angell outlines the timeline of the “Indiana Yearly Meeting Schism” there as well as in the Winter/Spring 2012 issue of Quaker Theology - The Impending Split in Indiana Yearly Meeting.  From my reading, it appears that differing views on homosexuality are being cloaked in questions about the authority of the Yearly Meeting over individual meetings.

I’m holding these Friends from Indiana Yearly Meeting this week as they meet to discern how God is leading them.  I hope they can, as Benigno suggested, listen to differing perspectives with the tenderness they would wish for our own.

And I hope that NPYM can do the same as we explore the nature of our relationships with the wider world of Friends. 

Walking in Circles

Carved labyrinth at
Whispers of Nature

            

           “Our lives are an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn. That there is no end in nature but every end is a beginning.” 

                                 ~  Ralph Waldo Emerson

             I spent part of May 5 walking in circles. Sometimes such circuitous movement is a result of confusion    and frustration, or it’s evidence of procrastination. But that day, my circling was intentional.

Three years ago, the Labyrinth Society, an international organization founded in 1998, designated the first Saturday in May as World Labyrinth Day. I learned about this commemoration from friends Susie and Nick Teague.  In 2006, they founded Whispers of Nature and since then have been developing an outdoor labyrinth. In honor of the global labyrinth event, Susie and Nick invited the public to walk the unique maze they’ve created.

Path surrounded by
herbs & flowers

While the precise origin of the labyrinth is unknown, the earliest datable labyrinth was built in Greece around 1300 B.C. This ancient tool for walking meditation can be found in schools, prisons, parks, hospitals, spas, churches, and retreat centers.  Many labyrinths around the world replicate the one laid in the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France around 1200 A.D.  It has eleven circuits, or concentric circles, with a twelfth, at the center, in the shape of a six-petaled rosette. The labyrinth at Whispers of Nature has seven circuits, surrounded by a medicinal herb and flower garden. 

Whatever its design, the labyrinth is viewed as a metaphor for life’s journey.

There is no magic formula, no “right” way to walk a labyrinth.  It’s a mystical practice of the simple action of putting one foot in front of the other, following the labyrinth’s unexpected turns, and ending up at the center. A sign at the Whispers of Nature labyrinth offers simple instructions:

“Follow the single path in and out.  You may use it as a walking meditation, play music, or sing.  Your walk may be joyous, quiet, thoughtful or celebratory.  Choose your intention each time you walk.”

On World Labyrinth Day, I walked with intention and attention for three friends who are on their own walks with cancer, visualizing them held in a circle of love. 

Sculpture at the center of labyrinth

Sunshine glistened off the glass ornaments in the garden, and the wind whispered through the lavender, poppies, calendula, tulips, mint, and dozens of other plants I couldn’t identify. As always happens for me when I walk a labyrinth, I had moments of being uncertain of the route, of thinking I’d missed a turn, and then resting in the knowledge that the path would guide me if I trust it, slow down, and let go.

When I returned home, a copy of Western Friend waited in my mailbox; the issue’s theme – “Friends on Aging and Dying.”  The magazine fell open to “Every End Is A Beginning,” an essay by Susan Tweit, recounting her husband’s death from brain cancer.  The title is taken from the Emerson quote above.  I can’t imagine a more fitting thought to carry forward from my walk on World Labyrinth Day—and every day.

Remembering Manzanar

Exclusion Notices (from NPS website)

Today, March 21, 2012, marks the 70^th anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Manzanar, a concentration camp in southern California. Grace Ito Coan, a member of Sacramento Friends Meeting, was among the U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry imprisoned there from 1942-1945. I wouldn’t have noted this day if not for Grace’s story, “Manzanar: Forever in the Past?” in the current issue of Western Friend. Her account put a personal face on a sad and painful time in U.S. history.

Manzanar was the first of ten camps authorized on February 19, 1942 when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This action, in response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, moved nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans into isolated relocation centers in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming as well as Manzanar.  

Grace Ito Coan writes of Manzanar’s transformation from a fruit-growing colony in Owens Valley on the east side of the Sierras to a desert when water was diverted to Los Angeles. After the government’s relocation order, that desert became home to 10,000 people in a  “…city one mile square, enclosed by barbed wire and guarded from towers by military police with search lights and guns pointed inward.”

Ansel Adams photo, 1943 - Manzanar Relocation Center from the Tower 

Often with less than a week’s lead-time, people were ordered to the temporary, tar paper-covered barracks. Grace describes, “…dust seeping through the knotholes and cracks. We were to sleep on metal cots, and we filled our mattresses with straw.”  She and thousands of others were forced from their homes, businesses, and communities simply because they were of Japanese ancestry. Nearly three-quarters of them were U.S. citizens.

I live on a thirty-square-mile island with about 2200 people. I try to imagine five times that number squeezed into an area about the size of our village center. I can’t. But Grace’s story in Western Friend and many more stories and images of Manzanar at a National Park Service website bring attention to a shameful time in history.

Although these imprisonments occurred years before I was born, I’m embarrassed by my limited knowledge of them. It wasn’t until I moved to Seattle and started attending University Friends Meeting (UFM) that I learned more of this history.

One of UFM’s founders, Floyd Schmoe, among others in the Meeting, kept these concerns before us. Schmoe’s son-in-law, Gordon Hirabayashi, had defied the government curfew and evacuation orders, calling them a gross violation of Constitutional rights. He was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned, and eventually appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the Supreme Court initially upheld his conviction, efforts to overturn it resumed in the 1980s, culminating in his judicial vindication in 1987 and redress for the victims of internment. Hirabayashi died earlier this year at age 94.

Each year, over 1,000 people from diverse backgrounds, including students, teachers, community members, clergy and former incarcerees, make a pilgrimage to Manzanar to commemorate the unjust imprisonment. This year’s pilgrimage also marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Manzanar National Historic Site. Dr. Mitchell Maki, the lead author of Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress, will give a keynote address on the topic, “Why Remember?” Grace’s story and her urgings that we remain vigilant so Manzanar never happens again give ample reasons to remember.  

The Western Friend article moved me to honor this anniversary.  The word anniversary is from the Latin anniversarius ‘returning yearly,’ from annus ‘year’ + versus ‘turning.’ Today, I’m turning my thoughts to Manzanar and Grace.

For more information about the pilgrimage, visit -http://blog.manzanarcommittee.org/category/manzanar-pilgrimage/

Other resources about the internment:

http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/index.html

http://afsc.org/story/celebrating-life-and-work-gordon-hirabayashi

A Cost of War

I heard a story recently about a woman, Jackie, who was an Army nurse in Iraq. She told her story to Brian Doyle, editor of Portland Magazine (Boots). Or rather, Brian caught Jackie’s story and then told it to his co-workers, his readers, probably his wife and kids, and to me and a bunch of other writing students in my MFA program. And now I want to tell you something that Jackie’s story taught me.

Jackie turned 27 this summer. Until recently, she was known as Lieutenant, and she was in Kirkuk. Now she lives near a beach and has a dog. I do, too—live near a beach and have a dog. But I’ve never been a Lieutenant, never been to Kirkuk, and I don’t know anyone else who has either.  I’m so opposed to this war, to any war, that I avoid talking to anyone who is involved. That’s not hard to do in my small, rural community. We’re a peace-loving clan, I can count on one hand the number of young people who’ve joined the military during the 15 years I’ve lived here, and there are limited jobs here for someone looking for work after leaving the military.

Brian cried as he read Jackie’s story, and I cried as I listened. I’ve cried every time I’ve read it silently to myself or out loud to others. Her story is simple and eloquent about the costs of war for her­—the emotional toll of being surrounded by fear, killing, and loss.

Like many Americans, I’ve spent time in these early days of September reflecting on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the aftermath during this past decade.  As a nation, we’ve paid dearly for responding to violence with more violence, and there are big numbers to prove it. The Eisenhower Research Project based at Brown University assembled economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts, and a physician to quantify the domestic and international costs of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Their analysis (http://costsofwar.org/) yields staggering figures including an estimated $3.2 to 4 trillion spent, the deaths of more than 6,000 American soldiers and nearly 100,000 wounded, and at least 137,000 civilians killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. James Dao reported more stinging statistics about the current wars in the New York Times on Sept. 6 (They Signed Up to Fight): “More than two million sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. One in five returning with post-traumatic stress, major depression or traumatic brain injury. More than 1,000 missing a limb.” 

I can’t comprehend numbers like this, but now I know that a woman named Jackie is one of the people included in them. So are identical twin brothers Ivan and Christian Bengsten, Bonnie Velez, Joel Almandinger, and others named in Dao’s story. I followed the link in Dao’s article for traumatic brain injury and read even more heartbreaking histories, like the one about Sergeant Shurvon Phillips and his long-term brain damage following exposure to neck-snapping, head-shaking mine explosions in Iraq’s Anbar Province in 2005.

There are at least three military bases within a couple hundred miles of where I live, and it’s a rare week that Navy jets don’t do training flights over the south end of my island. There probably are lots of Jackies not that far away. Her story led me to look beyond the numbers and beyond the anonymous people at the controls of the fighter planes practicing in the skies over my home. Her story also fortified my commitment to nonviolence and an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I know of no easy path to peace, though I’m clear that war is not the answer. Most of the time I feel that my letter writing to Congress and President Obama is futile, but I keep doing it (Friends Committee on National Legislation continues to be a place I can add my voice to influence U.S. foreign policy). Since hearing Jackie’s story, I’ve also committed to hold her in the Light, a Quaker practice some people think of as intercessory prayer or of joining with God’s constant love for a person. Compared to the costs to Jackie and thousands of others, it doesn’t seem like much. Yet even though I don’t understand it, I do believe that such holding is a powerful act, and I’ll keep doing it for Jackie.

Held in the Light

Candles burn bright and long in my small community these days, even when summer asserts itself for a few more sunny hours. Many of us have turned to these flickering flames to symbolize what Quakers call “holding one another in the light.” The one we’re holding is a beloved man, husband, father, brother, teacher, mentor, friend, neighbor, storyteller, juggler, pilot, sailor, hiker whose world was turned upside down two weeks ago when a doctor told him he has a brain tumor. Now, Greg has a giant half-parentheses incision spanning the right side of his head, and he and his family and a wide circle of friends have been awaiting results of the pathology report.

Two days before Greg’s surgery, our Quaker meeting gathered around him and his wife, Nancy, for worship with an intention to “hold them in the light.” Marcelle Martin writes in the Pendle Hill pamphlet, Holding One Another in the Light, that this is the term Friends use for intercessory prayer—prayer for another person—and that it comes in many forms. “It may involve lifting up specific requests on behalf of someone else, or simply joining with God’s constant love for that person. It can be done when we are alone or with others,” she explains.

On that Sunday, about forty of us gathered. Our clerk lit five candles (one for Greg, his wife, and their three daughters). Out of the silence of worship we expressed our love for Greg and his family; our appreciation for his surgeon and other caregivers; and our hopes for healing, courage, strength, and Greg’s vision that what the doctor would find was a glob of blue jello and marshmallows. Two days later, another group of us met at Greg’s home at the hour he went into surgery at a hospital 100 miles away. Again, we lit candles and spoke aloud our requests that Greg be well cared for and that his tumor be released.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been holding, praying, pleading, and questioning almost constantly. I’ve lit and re-lit candles on my desk and the kitchen table, in the living room, and in the meditation corner in my bedroom. This candle lighting is such a tangible act for something I don’t understand.

Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, I prayed to the God of the Bible stories I read in Sunday school. God was an all-knowing, all-powerful man who, I believed, listened to my every word and might just do or give as I asked. As I matured and my faith at times wavered, but mostly deepened, my mental picture of God became less human-like. Now I experience God as a presence, mystery, an essence of love and wisdom far beyond my human comprehension and constructs.

So when I hold Greg and his family in the light; when I pray for healing, strength, and courage for him; to whom or what am I praying? I no longer believe there is a Great Listening Ear hearing my cries for peace, justice, and restoration of the earth. I don’t picture a white-bearded man nodding thoughtfully or shaking his head in response to my requests (though that doesn’t stop me from chanting silently in my airplane seat during take-off and landing, “Please, please, please keep us safe”). And yet I believe in miracles. And I believe there is a mystical power that receives and responds to my outpourings of love, fear, rage, and hope. A presence that hears my desire to serve and be light in the world. A force that guides my actions when I open myself to its cues and signals.

Earlier this week, Greg wrote on his Caring Bridge website of his anger about this threat to the hopes and dreams he had for the future. He’s mad and asking why this is happening at a time he was looking forward to retirement from a teaching career, just as he was anticipating alternative work, new adventures, and telling the stories he’s collected over 61 years to future grandchildren. That anger and those questions are understandable, seem healthy and right. And I suspect God, that great lover of life and joy and peace, is asking them, too.

Yesterday, Greg got a phone call from his doctor that the cancer cells he cut out of my friend’s brain are stage 4 glioblastoma. Greg has a difficult road ahead living with this tenacious cancer. I don’t know who or what has heard my prayers for a tumor that responds well to radiation or chemotherapy. It’s tempting to believe my prayers were ignored. But as heavy as my heart is today, I know that Greg, and his family, and all of us are being held by an ever-present love and power. And I continue to light candles.

Blogging journey update – One of the finest uses of blogs is Caring Bridge (www.caringbridge.org), a site to help people “stay connected with loved ones during a significant health challenge.” Or as we Quakers say, it’s a way to hold someone in the light – electronically!

Comments on my last post led to a bit of dialogue and connection to other Quaker bloggers finding their way with this spiritual discipline; I don’t think these exchanges would have happened without this technology.