Friends in San Antonio
7052 North Vandiver, San Antonio TX78209
March 2009
1 Sunday ............... Modern Bible Scholarship: Gospel of Luke and Matthew, 9 a.m. Potluck lunch at 11.30. 6, Friday ............... Film – 7 p.m. "Into Great Silence." 8, Sunday............... Forum – Quaker Mysticism. 15, Sunday............. Forum – Rex Ambler's Experiment with Light - Gary Whiting, 22, Sunday ............ Meeting for Business. 29, Sunday ............ Forum – Rex Ambler's Experiment with Light - Gary Whiting
Forums begin at 11.30 and last about an hour. All attenders are welcome and encouraged to join in all events. Each Thursday, at 4-5 pm, a silent peace vigil is held at the NE corner of Main Plaza (Commerce and Dwyer or Commerce and Soledad , which is the same thing) near the San Fernando cathedral.
Clerk: Bill Wilkinson, e-mail: billwilk3@att.net
Newsletter Editor: Ken Southwood e-mail: jksouthwood@grandecom.net
Website: http://www.sanantonioquakers.org
Donations may be made to Friends Meeting of San Antonio, P.O. Box 6127 , San Antonio TX78209. Meeting telephone for meeting times or to ask for other information: (210) 945-8456
The following was presented to the Interreligious Council on February 9th: |
Them and UsDavid Zarembka, African Great Lakes Initiative:I recently came across some comments by Robert McCoy, a Quaker relief worker, titled "Inconsistency". "For some time several of us have been talking among ourselves about the inconsistencies of our position here. We came here to show a friendly way of life, show that the spirit of Brotherhood of Man and all that. Yet we still accept special privileges. The other evening at the Community Center, I was with some of the young people in the kitchen. I saw that they were stirring up cocoa, which we usually have. In an offhand manner I laughed that I was good and hungry for it. One of the young people turned to me with a scathing eye and said, 'You, with your 4000 calorie diet, are hungry? You know we only get 1200!' “I don't intent to reduce to 1200. It just emphasizes the fact that you cannot try to make them feel you are one of them; you can't identify yourself with them when you are so far apart from them in a material way. It comes down to this--why are we here? Is it just to distribute goods like a dozen other agencies? Or is it to bring a message of friendship and hope to these people? It seems to many of us that it is more the latter.” I suspect that every AGLI volunteer and workcamper that comes from the US , Canada , Australia , or England has given much consideration to this dichotomy between wealth and poverty, advantage and disadvantage, race, nationality and social class. Much of AGLI's pre-service orientation for workcampers covers how to handle the dilemmas that arise. Yet this, I think, is the main benefit of being an AGLI workcamper/volunteer; it requires that the person step out of their comfort zone and interact/relate on a personal level to people whose situation is so different! As I go around giving talks in the US, I frequently meet people who explicitly say that they have no desire or intention of leaving their comfort zone and who then view me as some kind of "hero". Frankly I think that I am the greatest beneficiary of this interaction. My situation, of course, is also very different in that I am married to a Kenyan Luhya Quaker. (Gladys's grandmother became a Quaker sometime in the early 1920's and their favorite story is that one Sunday when she was walking to Meeting – founded in 1917 – she came face to face with a lion!) The result is that I am related to hundreds of people here in Western Kenya , all kind of people, for better or for worse. Moreover since I am living here, I have to negotiate the cultural expectations that are sometimes thrust upon me. For example, the head of the household is supposed to get the best part of the chicken – the gizzard! So I am always given the gizzard (fortunately it is not the liver). Americans are frequently upset that Africans ask them for money. This happens to us all the time, but it is our relatives who are asking. I then cop out by throwing the responsibility of whom we should support and who we shouldn't onto Gladys's shoulders. . . I must admit that I cut out a few relevant words in the quote at the beginning of this report. It was written in 1946 by an AFSC relief worker in the aftermath of World War II. He was working in Austria so the poor "them" were Austrians. There are two lessons from this: First, it is only thinking that makes it so that people are turned into "them" and "us." Second, perhaps sixty years from now the material differences that are so prevalent now between this region of Africa and the US will no longer be so stark.
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Bric-a-BracHomer Jacobson, a chemistry professor, recently retracted, 52 years later, a paper he had written in 1955. In it he had said that conditions on early earth made it difficult for compounds essential to life to survive. He had discovered the paper was being quoted by creationists in favor of divine intervention. Rereading it, he discovered mistakes which made it no longer relevant. “Religion,” he said, “is OK as long as you don’t fly in the face of facts.”We are delighted to see that the New York Times is now featuring an arithmetical puzzle called KenKen, which, with the twofold repetition, apparently, and loosely speaking, means “cleverness squared.” “In 1978, President Carter chided Mr. Khan for warning in his speeches that the country risked ‘deep, deep depression’ if inflation continued to soar. So Mr. Kahn replace the term with ‘banana.’ Everybody knew what he was talking about.” (Eduarto Porter in the NYT). Politically incorrect words for “old” people : ”biddy,” “codger,” “coot,” “crone, ”fogey,” “fossil,” “geezer,” “hag,” “feisty,” “spry,” “feeble,” “eccentric,” “senile,” “grandmotherly,” “80 years young,” and especially “golden years,” “senior citizen,” (where are the junior citizens?), and . . . “elderly,” according to the International Longevity Center, (quoted by Jane Gross in the NYT). We, of course, have our own term – “weighty Friend.” But this refers more to spiritual weight than that of years, and there is a real question as to whether the two coincide.
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A Listening MinistryA family came to visit an elder Quaker minister who was renowned for his powers of discernment. They were surprised to find him in the road in front of his farm, stretched out on the pavement, his ear firmly pressed to the blacktop.The father of the visiting family asked the elder what he was doing. In response, the minister said, “ . . . a woman, late thirties, two kids, one barking dog, in a late model Toyota wagon, traveling about 60 miles an hour.” The visitor was astonished. “You can tell that just by listening to the ground?” “No,” the minister answered, “they just ran over me three minutes ago.”
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Parker with BillFriend Parker Palmer was on Bill Moyers’ Journal on the 20th. Parker was speaking about holding the tension in “the gap between what's really going on around us, the hard conditions in which our lives are currently immersed, and what we know to be possible from our own experience.” If we don’t do this, we flip out on one side or the other. Flip out into too hard reality and you get corrosive cynicism, which destroys hope and action. Flip out into too high possibilities and you get irrelevant idealism. Both take us out of the action.He referred to the punctured illusions about America's essential goodness as an economic system, the notion that we always get it right. Today a lot of people are being affected by what's happening. Reality can no longer be denied. Our capacity to deny reality is huge. Who didn't know the current economic collapse was coming? We don't want to know what we really know because if we did, we'd have to change our lives. He is fascinated with the Camp Obama phenomenon, which generated huge enthusiasm on the part of newcomers to the political process, circles of people gathered together for two or three days and invited to tell three stories. The important story is of us so that the self-story doesn't end up in narcissism but gets connected to the larger fabric of community. It's precisely in hard times that we start to learn new habits of the heart. “If you don't have a capacity to hold the tension in your heart between reality and possibility then you're just going to give up eventually.” If we had held the tension between 9-11, that horrific criminal attack, “and this possibility of connecting and deepening compassion. . . I think we would have opened a new possibility in American life. . . toward a heart that grows larger, more capacious, more open to. . . the suffering and the pain of the world.” We need to be repairing a broken economic system. Part of the heartbreak is around things that never should have happened, like the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. We're seeing that in our faces now. And it's good that we are. We have to learn a new set of habits of the heart. “I'm a Quaker,” he said, “ And one of my great mentors was Douglas Steere, a great Quaker teacher.”
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A False DistinctionHence little account [among Friends] is made of the popular distinction between things secular and things religious; all work, all times, every employment that is not wrong may be accounted holy.
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PersonalOne Sunday, Ken, greeting, forgot to make the coffee and left meeting for worship early to do this. After, he found there were no refreshments. Aah, Michelle had not come that day. But she arrived, in time, bearing Sal’s cookies. Did you know Sal bakes cookies for us every week?Bill O’s father continues to need care and Bill and Karen must stay to care for him. We shall miss his work for the Building Committee and we send our sympathy. An editorial in the NYT supports Friend and State Representative Lon Burnam’s impeachment resolution against Judge Keller, “accusing her of ‘gross neglect of duty’ and ‘wilful disregard for human life.’” Judge Keller refused to allow her clerk’s office to stay open 20 minutes beyond closing time to allow an appeal by a death-row inmate to be lodged. The US Supreme Court was considering whether lethal injection was constitutional and the inmate’s lawyers were asking for time for the US ruling to be made. The inmate was executed the same evening. Leaving in a hurry for Chicago on emergency, we apologize – the newsletter is rushed.
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A Marine Dies“Guitar in hand, audience in place, Bill Brennan drew a deep breath. He was ready to sing. In the front row sat his family, all but one, Julian Brennan, who grinned from a display of photographs.”Julian was dead, killed in Afghanistan . “Oh me, oh my,” his father sang, ”The moon is huge, it’s yellow, and it breaks your heart.” He sang about forgiveness and how the drive for revenge can twist the soul. Julian was raised partly in Baltimore Friends Meeting, then, later, had drifted on the Lower East Side until, “it ultimately felt hollow to him” and he joined the Marines. “I have a hard time wrapping my head around thinking that my son is being trained to kill people,” his mother had said. His father said that Julian was listening to his own “inner voice, and following that. In his heart of hearts, Julian wasn’t a pacifist.” Just before the end he said that he had no regrets, something that comforted his mother, who said that if he’d had regrets it would difficult for her to live with it. (From the New York Times 2.4.09) |
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"Learn to be quiet enough to hear the sound of the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in other people."
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The Dream is His“Shuffling leaves in disarrayupon this stern chill night, what winds blow my Fine Fair maid, as to cause you fright?”
“The winds that howl,
“What news by land,
“He wanders far from any land
“What dream is this,
“The dream is his,
They lay not long
I wait
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Yearly MeetingThe 2009 South Central Yearly Meeting will be held at the Greene Family Camp in Bruceville , TX on April 10-12, 2009. Chuck Fager, whose book Without Apology was read by San Antonio Friends in a book study two years ago, will be the keynote speaker. Yearly Meeting will focus on the theme of Refining Our Witness: Peace, the Military, and Us. Information about SCYM should appear at www.scym.org in late January.
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Our Health. . . ours is an economy that is sinking under the weight of a health-care system that costs twice as much as any in the world while delivering poorer health outcomes. The cost of health care has crippled entire industries, disadvantaged our companies in international competition and brought millions of families into bankruptcy. Worst of all, in denying vital medical services to the 40 million Americans without health insurance, we engage in the most immoral kind of medical rationing imaginable -- rationing by the ability to pay.
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Friday FilmWe will show "Into Great Silence." A film of austere beauty, it follows the lives of Carthusian monks as they spend their days in silence, devoted to God. Phillip Groening waited 16 years for permission to film for a year in the Grande Chartreuse monastery, nestled deep in the postcard-perfect French Alps. It is “a rare, transformative theatrical experience for all.” (Zeitgeist Films)
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Books for ChildrenFor several days last summer, e-mails about favorite children's books swarmed through AFSC in response to a request for recommendations of favorite children's books, especially ones related to peace, justice, and other Quaker values. They were for use in AFSC's Quaker Action magazine, but space was limited. Only a small selection of the books could be included. So they compiled a comprehensive electronic document and put it on the web at www.afsc.org/kidsbooks. Ages range from one to young adult.
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Meeting CalendarA new computerized Meeting calendar has been prepared. It will contain all events planned for the Meeting as well as all bookings of meetinghouse rooms by Friends and other groups. The topics of all the forums will be announced in the calendar. Copies three months ahead will be placed in the meetingroom lobby as well as distributed by e-mail. Any changes and proposed events should (preferably) be e-mailed to Ken S.
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Meeting for BusinessThe clerk opened meeting by reading the advice, “Come to Meeting with hearts and minds prepared to be open and faithful to the leadings of the Spirit. Then the conduct of business will lead to truth, unity, and love.”He reported that the Ad Hoc committee was arranging for a professional appraisal of the value of the salon building in front of the meetinghouse. He reported also that Bill O was unable to say when he would be able to return to San Antonio and had therefore resigned from the Building Committee. Meeting approved his request that Meeting for Business in March be held on the fourth Sunday as he will be out of town the previous weekend. The Adult Ed committee reported that its goal is to help Friends gain knowledge and understanding of: – the history and experience of the Society. – practicing Quaker faith in everyday life. – Christian faith and its literature. – deeper understanding of oneself and others in human relationships. – other faiths. The committee welcomes Friends who feel led to present a session on these topics. Gary W will present three forums on British Friend Rex Ambler’s “Experiment with Light” in March and April. A group will meet on the first Sunday of the month at 9 a.m. to learn of modern scholarship on the New Testament, which involves critical comparison of the gospels taking account of the time and setting when each was written. The Nominating Committee’s proposal that Janet W join the Adult Ed Committee as co-clerk with Carol B was approved. Christine read the first draft of the State of the Meeting report for Yearly Meeting. Copies will be placed in the lobby and suggestions for amendments should be sent to Christine. Outreach reported that it was seeking a volunteer to greet on the third Sunday each month as it was now short a member. Janet S volunteered on the spot, putting Ken S on the spot, as he didn’t know. There will be a Meeting craft show on March 27 and a picnic at Guadalupe State Park on May 16. The committee is preparing a board with photos of regular attenders at meeting, and will display basic and other recommended Quaker books outside the library. Further showings of films will be held on the first Friday of each month. The treasurer gave the first report of the year. A very high water bill was produced by a faulty tank in the handicapped restroom. It has now been replaced and SAWS will refund some of the payment if assured that the problem has been solved. The mortgage will be paid off in April of 2013. It is still too early in the year to pay much attention to the current balance.
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A Zoroastrian Prayer for PeaceWe pray to God to eradicate all the misery in the world: that understanding triumph over ignorance, that generosity triumph over indifference, that trust triumph over contempt, and that truth triumph over falsehood. ^P^P |