Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
When my mother went into skilled nursing care with Alzheimer’s dementia, my grouchy alter-ego Walhydra crawled under the bed, saying, “How can I writing sarcastic humor when real life is shutting me down with grief and depression? It isn’t funny!” Mom died in January 2011.
This post is the next to last one from my blog Walhydra’s Porch. It was written after a certain national catastrophe that may still have consequences a generation from now.
I think modern Quakers and people of other religions have a lot of confusion about what “membership” means.
I am a “convinced Friend” because in my faith and practice I choose to follow the Quaker way of worship, decision-making, and witness in the world.
I am a “member” of a particular Meeting if I have chosen to take responsibility for the support and well-being of that particular Meeting.
By analogy, one can be a Muslim or a Jew or a
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My morning practice often includes reading from American Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chödrön. Here is this morning’s reading from The Pocket Pema Chödrön.
…Loneliness
Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. Its restless and pregnant
and hot with the desire to escape
Just Us: An American Conversation, by Claudia Rankine (2020)
Excerpts from Ismail Muhammad’s review in The Atlantic
In 2016, African-American poet and scholar Claudia Rankine was not sure that her Yale students “would be able to trace the historical resonances of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant demagoguery.” She wanted them to connect the current treatment of Mexicans and other Hispanic people with America’s 19th century treatment of Irish, Italian, and Asian immigrants.
…It
Continuing my series on Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973).
Epigraph
The Gospel of Mark frequently demonstrates the typically human ways in which Jesus’ followers misunderstand his words and deeds. One pivotal story that speaks to William Stringfellow’s concern about modern American Christians and other people of faith is usually titled “the transfiguration” (Mark 9:2-8, New New Testament).
…2 Six days later, Jesus took with him
I spilled tomato juice on my
flannel shirt my
first year in kindergarten
in a new town with
kids I didn’t know
and they laughed.
It felt like they laughed
at me but
who knows?
When at age four you’ve
just spent weeks in a hospital
and months taking
hot baths and castor oil
but they tell you how lucky
you
Continuing my series on Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)
Events in Sacred Story
It is worth repeating that in William Stringfellow’s language of biblical discernment, “nonempirical” connotes belief systems based on abstract concepts and notions, whereas “empirical” refers to the actual experience of biblical teachings working themselves out in the world.
The Bible is a sacred story collection. Contrary to our modern Western notions, sacred story is about
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How can a virus travel
and not love?
Or are we not now all infected
with shame
at our human nakedness?
We don’t want to know our own evil
so profess good, pretending
to smile without hurting.
So painful.
The Tiananmen butterfly warns us:
cyclones we’ve stirred with our grasping
While the world shudders.
Continuing my series of excerpts from and reflections on Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973).
Empirical and Nonempirical
Here is where William Stringfellow begins to hold our feet to the fire, we who are often proud “professors” of our religious traditions yet feeble “practitioners.” He challenges us with his special use of the term “empirical” as he applies biblical political ethics to present-day America.
For Stringfellow, “nonempirical” connotes belief
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Occasionally people wonder where I got the totem name Bright Crow that I use in my email address. Here’s the story I wrote to explain it in the voice of Walhydra’s amanuensis in 2008.
Walhydra likes to tease her amanuensis about a typo he makes occasionally with his totem name, Bright Crow.
Since he’s been typing for forty years, often to earn a living, he just shrugs and laughs. Nonetheless, she thinks the question
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