How to be a Quakerly Buddhist (maybe)

Normally I am opposed to mixing religious traditions. Whether or not this resistance is well advised, I tend to trust that a system of doctrines and practices that have grown up in an organic relation to one another have a greater coherence than any system of beliefs and practices I could develop in the course of a single lifetime. I trust the collective wisdom of the human race better than I trust my own wisdom, and I trust the process of correcting mistakes that human beings do collectively more than I trust myself to correct my own mistakes. Moreover, I am convinced that different religious traditions simply focus on different problems, and therefore have different goals and that their differences in practice and doctrine reflect those different perceptions on what it is about human life that is broken and in need of repair. It rarely works to take a practice out of one tradition and its perception of what is wrong and to put that practice into another tradition that is trying to be a solution to a different problem. Given all this, it is odd that I find myself believing (perhaps falsely) that I am both a Buddhist and a Quaker. And yet that is what I believe, and I guess I owe myself an explanation.

My first exposure to a Buddhist account of what is unsatisfactory about life as most of us know it seemed to me just about exactly right. So did the account of what could be done to improve life, or at least improve my own approach to it. My first reaction to hearing a Buddhist account of all this was to feel thrilled that others saw things as I did and that I was not alone. In a way, I was still very much alone, because I could not find very many people in my cultural setting who were as thrilled with Buddhism as I was. So I could find no human teachers. I learned as much as I could from books, and I read as many books on Buddhism as I could get my hands on, and I tried my best to arrange my life in accordance with Buddhist teachings.

One of the first Buddhist teachings I recall encountering more than forty years ago were these words from the Dhammapada:

“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.” Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred... Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred. Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal. There are those who do not realize that one day we all must die. But those who do realize this settle their quarrels.

These words said (and still say) just about everything that lies at the base of my attitudes toward war, toward philosophical disputes, toward partisan politics, toward religious sectarianism and toward community life. We are all mortal, and as far as we know this one life is all we have, so why waste this one life harboring grudges against those whom we perceive as aggressors? Why waste time passing judgment on those who think and act differently from how we were conditioned to act? Why invest time and energy and other resources in defending what I have been conditioned to believe is mine to own? Why not instead radically question the very idea that anyone actually owns anything? Why not see nations as dangerous abstractions that probably cause more harm than good and that stand in the way of healing festering ruptures in the body of the human race? Why not see being human as a dangerous abstraction that ruptures our relationship with plants and animals and the seas and the soil and the air? In short, why approach life hatefully, seeing myself in an antagonistic competition with others? Why not approach the world by being in love with it? Why not think and act like a Buddhist?

Christianity seemed to me as hopelessly muddled and confused as Buddhism seemed clear and insightful. Most of the Christians I knew about at the early stage of my adult life were mindlessly patriotic, and many were openly racist. Since patriotism and racism were as far from my own values as it was possible to get, I had no use for a religious ideology that tolerated, and perhaps even encouraged, those attitudes. I kept as much distance between myself and Christians as I could keep, thereby probably depriving myself of many a beneficial friendship. Looking on it now, I would have to say I acted as if I hated Christians, which was an odd thing for a person who was trying to live without hatred to do. I was young.

As luck would have it, the first group of people I encountered whose lives were obviously far more in harmony with Buddhist principles than mine was were Quakers. Were they Christians? I had a very difficult time figuring that out. They talked about Christ quite a bit, but it was obvious that what they meant by that was not at all what I had learned that most Christians believed. It has taken the better part of my adult lifetime to get some sense of what Quakers might mean when they talk about Holy Spirit and Christ and the Inward Light and “answering to that of God in everyone.” I think I have some idea what I mean by those things, but I'm probably not entirely sure about even that.

Here's a confession. When I first went to Quaker meetings forty-one years ago I mostly did Buddhist meditative exercises. The Quakers were for the most part silent, so meditating in their presence was not hard to do, and I quickly learned to put up with the fact that every now and then somebody stood up and said something. I listened to what was said and then got back to my Buddhist practice. I did that for years. I now believe that was a foolish thing to do and that I surely would have got much more from Quaker meetings if I had done my Buddhist meditations somewhere else on my own time and attended Quaker meetings with a more open heart and mind. I was young for a long time.

It cannot be postponed any longer. I really do have to say something about “answering to that of God in everyone.” As I see human beings, everyone who is alive and everyone who has ever been alive, has acquired, either through birth or acculturation or some combination of those, a mixture of drives and motivation, some of which make for harmonious and happy living and some of which make for disruption and miserable living. No one is purely harmonious, and no one is purely disruptive. In other language, no one is entirely good, and no one is entirely evil. Even the most depraved person has some wisdom and compassion and some capacity to love and to manifest some kindness. All those harmonious and productive and positive and ennobling drives—what some would call the good or the virtuous in a person—are what I call, for the sake of convenience, that of God in the person. And answering to that of God in everyone means focusing as much attention as possible on those bits of goodness in every person, no matter how feeble those bits of goodness may be or how rarely they may manifest. Focusing on those ennobling characteristics rather than on the more vicious characteristics is answering to that of God. Answering to that of God makes it possible for me to find something to like in everyone, and it dramatically decreases the chances that I will dismiss anyone as evil or useless or worthless. It increases the likelihood that I will regard everyone as a friend and no one as an enemy. To see everyone as a friend all of the time is my goal. As I get older, I am somewhat closer to that goal than I was as a younger man, probably because of so many others who have kindly answered to that of God in me.

A Quaker meeting, especially among unprogrammed Friends, is a ritual of sitting in silence and waiting for a Spirit-led communication. As one sits in silence, puts the business of life aside, lets the mind settle by setting aside beliefs and prejudices and presuppositions, one can become quite open to listening to those thoughts that percolate into awareness from somewhere by somehow bypassing the ego. A lot of those thoughts, of course, are only half-baked bits of fantasy, dreamlike fragments of impractical temporary madness. Best not to give voice to them. Every now and then, perhaps once every month or so, a thought may arise that feels coherent and perhaps even somewhat worth sharing. Such thoughts, having leaked in past the ever-vigilant ego, which wants nothing to seem out of character, often feel as if they came from someone else. Often before one has given the matter any further thought, one is standing up and speaking aloud, often with a racing heart and with trembling hands and voice. It is not for nothing that people who rise to speak are called quakers. The convention is to say that these thoughts that come from something like the unconscious and not from the ego are Spirit led. I don't mind using such language to talk about something I scarcely understand. I guard against the trap of thinking that by using an expression I am understanding what I am talking about.

The more one is sitting in a Quaker meeting doing a programmed Buddhist meditative exercise, the more one is shutting oneself off from the experience of being a Quaker. One cannot listen to the silence if one is filling the internal silence with mantras and prayers. This is not to say there is no use at all for silent recitation of prayers or for doing some mindfulness of breathing to still the mind. Usually at the beginning of every meeting for worship I go for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha and do a quick review of where I stand with respect to the ten Buddhist precepts. And then I look around to see who is present and who is absent, and I take notice of anyone who seems to be afflicted in some way, and I think of how they might be comforted in the affliction and assess whether I am in any position to take part in the process of offering them the comfort they need. And then I still my mind (which is rarely a difficult thing for me to do these days) and listen.

Aside from going for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, which I do out of lifelong habit and out of sincerity, I try not to let any Buddhist ideas or practices intrude on Quaker practice. It turns out, I think, that behaving as a practicing Buddhist ends up being pretty well indistinguishable when viewed from the outside from behaving as a practicing Quaker. When I refrain from killing a cockroach or say something to try to bring a bit of cheer to a weary heart, is there any point in deciding whether the cockroach was spared because of Buddhism or because of Quakerism? Is my attempt to be truthful a Buddhist or a Quaker attempt at truthfulness? Does anyone care what label to put on it? If so, let them do the labeling. It's not my job.

If following a path required me to kill or steal or tell lies or treat people abusively, it would obviously conflict with both my Buddhist and my Quaker practice. But nothing in my Buddhist practice conflicts with my Quaker practice, and nothing in my Quaker practice conflicts with my Buddhist practice. So why decide which practice is which?

That is as close as I can get to explaining to my own satisfaction how I can be both a Buddhist and a Quaker without mixing the two together.

In praise of melancholy

For most of my adult life I have agreed with the Buddha that the project in life is to eliminate unnecessary kinds of disappointment (dukkham), and I have understood that the best way to avoid disappointment is to reduce expectations. The principal teaching of Buddhism has always struck me as a comprehensive hypothetical claim: If one hopes to reduce disappointment, then it is a good idea to reduce expectations. Seeing the teaching in this way has given me the flexibility to decide which kinds of disappointment I am unwilling to have. There are some kinds I don't mind having. This raises the question: if one does not mind being disappointed about something, then is it possible to be disappointed about it? But that question does not interest me right now. What interests me now is which kinds of mental states usually called painful are worth the pain of having them.

Buddhist texts tend to have a standard list of disappointments: aging, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair. Modern psychology has other potentially disappointing psychological conditions: depression, anxiety, obsession and so forth. It could be argued that all these conditions are disappointing if one would rather not experience them. If one would rather not be old, then getting old is a vexation to the spirit. If one would rather not die, then the inevitability of one's death is unwelcome news—perhaps so unwelcome that one chooses to believe in eternal life. Of course, if that belief turns out to be false, and if one somehow learns that it is false, then one might be disappointed after all.

What I am interested in exploring here is a kind of painful psychological condition that is worth the pain or trouble of having it. It goes by various names, but the name I like best is melancholy. I use the term as it is used in one of my favorite books, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places by James Hollis. Hollis, a Jungian analyst, argues that some of our psychological conditions that feel uncomfortable are also the conditions that are in the long term most productive. Among these uncomfortable psychological states is melancholy, which he sees as one of the most lively of the dismal conditions.

Melancholy can be seen as the condition that comes from the realization that life could be otherwise than it is, that with some effort the world could be significantly better, but that we keep missing the boat. Paul Simon wrote in his song “Train in the distance”: “The thought that life could be better Is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.” That life is not better makes one sad. If the sadness is intense enough, it may put one into action to make things, or at least something, a little better.

If one does not feel quite a bit of melancholy during the election season in the United States, then one is perhaps not paying much attention. Perhaps no two people are melancholy for exactly the same reasons. My own personal melancholy comes from some of the following considerations.

• I have a conviction that it would be possible for politicians to campaign by simply discussing what they think they would like to do and how they would like to do it. That is not what most of them do, however. Instead, they talk about such abstractions as character and leadership style, with a special emphasis on how their opponent seems to have bad character, bad judgment and an unappealing style.
• Another thing that makes me melancholy is a strong suspicion that much of this campaigning, ugly as it is, is going to persuade people to vote one way or another, but their votes will not be counted accurately. (It may be worth taking a look at an interesting documentary called Uncounted). )
• This year it makes me melancholy that millions of people are struggling economically and much of this struggle is being made worse by the reckless policies of corporate executives who have been running corporations that are now being bailed out; our government is apparently more interested in tending to the needs of billionaires than in providing security to ordinary people.
• It makes me melancholy that there are still so many who believe that there is such a thing as winning a war. I would more content if everyone were capable of seeing that there are only losers in wars, that some losers are individuals who die or are injured or who can never look in life the same way after witnessing unspeakable barabarity, and some losers are nations, and that in some way or another every human being on earth loses something important every time there is an act of violence.
• It makes me melancholy that very few people on earth are living economically and environmentally sustainable lives, and the inevitable result of all this unsustainability will be disasters that might have been avoided if we were not as a species so motivated by greed, hatred and delusion.

It is said that Buddhism walks on two legs: wisdom and compassion. Compassion in Buddhism is defined as an active response to affliction. If one does not see the sufferings and afflictions and pain and despair all around the world, then there is no hope of anything being done to provide relief. Relief will come only when enough people find their sadness unendurable. Without melancholy there can be no compassion.

There is a Quaker dictum that there is no point in praying for anyone unless one is willing to do what is necessary to improve their condition. If there is a God, and if God is responsive to the sufferings of beings as insignificant as humans, then surely the only way God can respond is by using our arms and legs and bodies and brains. Therefore, the most effective form of prayer is to be active in relieving whatever suffering is close enough to be evident. It is rarely necessary to look very far to find someone in need of relief from their suffering.

Melancholy is to be treasured, at least until it is no longer necessary to motivate us into action. There is no reason to believe that suffering is in such short supply that melancholy is not necessary to motivate one to try to relieve it.

On being truly pro-life

One of the problems with using a label such as “Pro-life” is that it implies that others are in same way anti-life. It is not obvious to me who the anti-life people are supposed by those who call themselves pro-life to be. Even morticians, whose livelihood depends on people dying, are probably not accurately called anti-life. So if no one is really anti-life, then everyone is pro-life, and the label turns out not to be very informative. So perhaps what we need to do is to explore just what it means to be pro-life in a meaningful way.

The most meaningful way to be in favor of life is to be opposed to terminating lives, and to be opposed to the conditions that lead to premature death, and to support those conditions that improve the quality of the lives that are preserved. So a minimum criterion for being in favor of life would be to oppose capital punishment, war, and conditions that lead to war (such as doctrinal inflexibility, intolerance, hatred and lust for power, territory, markets, natural resources and cheap labor). And to be truly in favor of life would be to favor all forms of life and so would include opposition to killing animals for food or clothing or sport, since all such killing is unnecessary for maintaining human life. A pro-life political candidate, then, would naturally oppose hunting, fishing, and a carnivorous diet, in addition to those things already mentioned. A truly pro-live candidate would also be opposed to human activities that lead to environmental degradation and to the destruction of habitats that support wildlife.

Being in favor of enhancing the quality of the lives preserved by opposing those things that end lives prematurely would naturally include supporting a strong social safety net that would provide for those who have fallen into circumstances that make it impossible for them to earn their own livelihoods. Since human beings are born with very few instincts and therefore must learn almost everything necessary for their survival, being pro-life would also consist in being strongly in support of all kinds of educational institutions. In an ideal society, everyone considers everyone else as part of a large family. Caring for the members of one's family means providing them education, wholesome forms of recreation, nurturing in times of illness and injury, and security in old age. In looking for a meaningfully pro-life candidate, one would look for a demonstrably strong commitment in the form of a record of being effective in providing for the well-being of every member, without exception, of, at the very least, the entire human family, and, at best, of the entire family of living beings.

In the United States there are political candidates who label themselves pro-life who do not show signs of showing a strong commitment to desisting from war, from hunting and fishing, from raising animals for food and clothing, and from harvesting resources in ways that have a minimal destructive impact on the environment. It is not obvious that these people are significantly pro-life. What many of the people who call themselves pro-life really are is anti-abortion.

Not many people are enthusiastic about abortion. Nearly everyone would like to see some kind of limits placed on the procedure and would like to find a way of distinguishing between circumstances in which it is acceptable and those in which it is not. A question that everyone must answer is what is to be done when the procedure is done when the circumstances do not warrant it.

At one logical end of the spectrum on the question of warrantability are those people who believe that abortion is never warranted under any circumstances whatsoever and who regard all abortion as being tantamount to murder. People who take this position, that abortion should be regarded as one of the classes of murder, must be prepared to say exactly who should be seen as guilty of committing the crime, and what the penalty should be. Should the mother of the aborted foetus be charged with murder? Should the person who performs the procedure be charged with murder? If the person is to be charged with and tried for murder, should the sentence upon being found guilty be the same for the abortive mother and the abortionist as for one of first-class murderer? In states that still have capital punishment, should an abortive mother and an abortionist both be sentenced to death? Or, since demanding two deaths for one might seem an odd way to be pro-life, in these cases does “pro-life”mean being in favor of life imprisonment for the abortive mother and the abortionist?

Unless one has carefully sought out a response to the question of what a just sentence for a crime should be, one is unwise to be in favor of making an action criminal. Not everything that one finds immoral or inadvisable in some way can be translated into a reasonable law, a reasonable law being one that can be enforced and that offers some sort of penalty that can be justly opposed. When a reasonable law cannot be crafted, then we must be content with moral persuasion and argumentation. When, for example, the ethical vegetarian comes to the realization that it makes no sense to sentence someone who eats a Big Mac to be executed by a firing squad, or even to be incarcerated for the rest of her life, then that vegetarian must find a way to be content to a life of trying to persuade other human beings of the moral virtue in avoiding the taking of innocent life and the pursuit of a lifestyle that is meaningfully pro-life.

The most effective way to persuade others in matters of morality, I find, is to begin by creating an atmosphere or mutual trust and respect and love. When trust, respect and love are lacking, moral discourse loses all meaning. Unfortunately, in the time of political campaigns, mutual trust, respect and love are not in evidence. In their place we find accusations and recriminations, usually based on half-truths or even outright lies. Unless one has a conviction that truth is the bedrock of morality, it is difficult to make a convincing moral argument. Alas, it is a rare politician in our culture who demonstrates with his or her words and actions that truth is a high priority.

I would love to find a candidate who is pro-life in all the ways I have mentioned. I would gladly cast my vote for any woman or man who demonstrated impeccable and unflinching honesty, and who shared my core values of being opposed to war, the conditions that lead to war, the death penalty, hunting and fishing and the exploitation of animals and the destruction of the environment and who actively worked for providing everyone in the human family with at least basic education, health care and security in old age.

Why no one can deliver the change they promise

National political conventions always fill me with a dreadful uneasiness and make me ponder whether the planet earth will be destroyed before intelligent life is found on it. The group ritual in which people collectively arouse themselves into teary-eyed states by intoning platitudes and partisan slogans and by skillfully demolishing caricatures of their opponents' positions reminds me that in politics fallacy nearly always trumps intellectually honest argumentation. Even when on those rare occasions when I am predisposed to like a candidate, I fall away disgusted at the spectacle of that candidate speaking at a national convention as people jump to their feet and raucously applaud every half-truth until they are hoarse and wave placards until their arms rebel in fatigue. If any kind of good government followed these dismaying circuses, I might be able to face them with more equanimity. But good governance rarely ensues, nor can it be expected to come out of such mass displays of thoughtlessness.

The longer I live, the more plain it is to me that individual human beings have no fixed nature but instead are mostly chaotic bundles of social and biological conditions over which no one has any control. As human beings we fancy that we choose our beliefs and practices with care and for all the right reasons, that we select only the best of friends and influences, but in fact none of us has more control over our behavior than a fallen leaf going over a waterfall. No evidence has yet presented itelf to me to incline me to believe that there is any intelligent force that has any more control than we feeble human beings have. As human beings we invent plenty of deities, but they all turn out to be as self-absorbed, foolish, cruel and petty as the worshipers who invent them.

If the individual human being is foolish, then a collection of human beings is folly multiplied. Families, clans, tribes, nations, intensional social groupings, congregations, sanghas, gangs and corporations are rarely more than small-minded individuals who temporarily band together in hopes of magnifying their capacity to carry out ill-conceived schemes without much regard at all for the negative consequences that collective folly can produce.

There is hope for some individuals to make small improvements in their character by an intense and protracted turning inward to face their own inner demons. Some people who are engaged in such efforts can derive some degree of encouragement from others engaged in a similar effort, and one is fortunate to find such encouragement—and tends to find more of it as it is less needed.

Revolutions fail and turn sour because people usually seek liberation from the wrong things. They believe they need more freedom to do what they want to do. Usually they would benefit from less of that kind of freedom. The sort of freedom they need is freedom from their own longing, hankering and striving.

Society as a whole will never improve until a critical mass of individuals gain freedom from their own inner beasts. Do not expect change to come to the political arena until people are so transfromed that they no longer require governance from outside.

Praying for everyone's troops

On a car parked in the lot of a mega-church near my home I spotted a bumper sticker that said “Want Our Troops Home? Then PRAY!” That seemed like good enough advice, so here is my prayer.

May every nation that has any troops stationed on foreign soil bring those troops home immediately so that no nation has any military personnel anywhere but on its own soil. May every nation that has any military installations on any foreign soil close those installations. May every nation that has military vessels at sea outside its own territorial waters bring those ships back to its own harbors or at least within its own waters.

May all military personnel be returned safely to their countries, and may they be joyfully reunited with their families and loved ones. May all artillery, missiles, warheads, land mines and explosive devices be safely dismantled. May all lust for territory and for the leverage of power over human beings and other sentient beings be eliminated from the mentalities of those who govern and of those who are governed.

May all those who undertake military service in order to free themselves from poverty, debt and systematic social and economic disadvantage find alternative ways of rising to positions of safety and dignity and the esteem of their neighbors and fellow citizens.

War is a condition of collective incompetence arising from the failure of individuals to be contented. Therefore, may individuals learn to be contented. May those who succeed more quickly than others in finding contentment teach others what they must do to find their own forms of contentment.

War often arises out of a fear of those whose ideas, practices and values are different from one's own. Therefore, may all people learn to embrace variety rather than to fear and loathe it. May all we human beings learn to tolerate everything except governments who would lead us into war. May those who would lead us into war be gently removed from positions of decision-making power.

I am not sure whether this is exactly the prayer that the owner of the car in the parking lot of the mega-church had in mind, but it is my prayer. And I thank the person who put that bumper sticker on his or her car for taking the time to remind me of the importance of taking the time to pray for what is truly important. May all beings be contented.

John Adams versus the Quakers

Recently I have been watching the excellent John Adams (HBO Miniseries). I am enjoying it as much as I enjoyed reading the book (John Adams by David McCullough) on which the series was based.

John Adams famously had a dispute with a Quaker named John Dickinson over the issue of whether it was wise for the American colonies to declare independence from England. Dickinson favored a cautious course of negotiation that he thought would avoid war. He said he could not endorse a declaration of independence that would surely result in British retaliation and armed conflict from one end of the colonies to the other. Adams acknowledged that war would inevitably follow a declaration of independence, but his passion for freedom and justice made such a conflict, in his mind, justifiable. Indeed, Adams argued that in the face of British injustices, a declaration of independence was morally obligatory; if such a declaration resulted in war, then the war also was morally obligatory.

It is common, when one reads about history, to ask oneself where one would have stood in the sort of controversy between Adams and the pacifist Quakers of Pennsylvania. (Not all Quakers, of course, were pacifists. Some fought in the war for independence, just as some fought in the American civil war.) In this particular instance, no sooner do I ask the question, than I know exactly what my answer would be, given my current beliefs. I would have been firmly with the Quaker Dickinson and opposed to those in favor of taking the risk of a bloody war. Even knowing everything I know now, from a 21st century perspective, about the consequences, I would be opposed to a declaration of independence that would result in war.

The American war of independence was bloody and brutal. It is impossible for me to see the result, independence from the British, as being anything near worth the horrible price of bloodshed that was paid. In gaining independence, the newly independent Americans went on to be every bit as savage and unjust as they had been while they were British colonists. Slavery continued unabated. Wars against the native Americans continued and even increased. Independence changed almost nothing. Moreover, it would surely have come about on its own anyway, just as it did for Canada. The British were far less interested in the Americas than they were in their other colonies, the ones in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. America was small potatoes in the British Empire.

Given my current way of thinking, I would have opposed the war of independence, and even the declaration of independence that, as all rightly saw, was sure to result in that war. There has not been a single war or conflict that the United States of America has participated in since 1776 that I would have endorsed, given how I now view the world. I would, of course, have been in the minority most of the time, for the United States has long been addicted to violent solutions to problems that might have been solved peacefully.

What is not clear to me is whether I always would have had the courage of my convictions. I can only hope that in the years I have before me, I will not falter.

Learning from Granddaddy

A couple of years ago I had the unexpected pleasure of going to a social event in an apartment that was right above the apartment where my grandfather lived when I was a child. He lived in the apartment from 1935 until his death in 1964, and I spent many of my most joyful moments there. I have been past the apartment building many times over the years but had never been inside. The apartment immediately above his had almost exactly the same layout, so being in it was almost like returning to childhood for a few moments. As in all returns to childhood, everything had changed almost beyond recognition.

As a child, I learned a lot of important things from my grandfather. He taught me how to play solitaire, an important skill for an only child. He also taught me how to cheat at solitaire, which he said was an acceptable thing to do, since no one was really being cheated except an ornery deck of cards. Any other kind of cheating, of course, he strongly discouraged. He also taught me how to read the baseball statistics in the sports page, and eventually he taught me how to keep track of a baseball game on a scorecard. He also taught me how to use a typewriter and let me practice using his old Smith-Corona, the machine on which during my childhood I composed a number of stories about improbable heroes. I learned all that and more from him when I was a boy, soaking up knowledge of the world around me like a sponge left in the kitchen sink.

This year I'm the same age my grandfather was when I was born. I find I'm learning from him again. I'm learning from his example as I recall them, and I find a great deal of what he taught me through example is something that not only I, but many people I know, could benefit from mastering.

My grandfather was born in 1982 and spent his early life on a farm in Kansas. The electric light bulb was invented just four years before he was born, and he did not have electrical lighting for much of his early life. He was seven years old when Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz made the first automobile, and he was 26 years old when the first Model-T Ford came out in 1908. I have no idea when he starting driving a car, but I know he never trusted an automobile as much as a horse, or at least that's what he said. As long as he lived, he preferred to walk any distance less than about three miles. It didn't make much sense to start up the car to go any distance that could be walked to in less than an hour.

My grandfather had a telephone, so people could contact him. He initiated no more than about four calls a year. A telephone conversation with him rarely lasted more than thirty seconds, just long enough to make arrangements to meet somewhere in person so that one could have a proper conversation.

Perhaps because he never quite got over the feeling that electricity was a miracle, and a darned expensive one at that, he never turned on a light switch until it was pretty nearly impossible to see which cards were laid out in his solitaire game. The lights were never on during the day, of course. When he ate lunch in the small dining room of his apartment, he never turned on the overhead light, even though there were no windows in the room, and precious little light came through the small window in the adjacent kitchen. Electrical lights were to use after the sun was well down, and even then they were turned on only when there was really something one had to see (such as the cards in a solitaire game.) To my great shame, I probably use as much electricity in a day as he did in a few months, despite the fact that I use compact fluorescent bulbs and have formed the habit of turning lights off when I leave a room. Like most people I know, my house is full of appliances and gadgets that never existed when I was a child. All of them, strictly speaking, are unnecessary. It's a shame that I've become accustomed to having them.

People of my grandfather's generation never used credit cards, and they never bought anything for which they hadn't saved up the money. If my grandfather did not have enough cash in his savings account to make a purchase, he reckoned he had no real need to make that purchase. If there was a need, he saved up until he had the money to make it. As a consequence of those habits, he was a frugal man. He used a deck of cards until at least have the cards had broken in half and were held together with cellophane tape. When it was no longer possible to make out whether a face card was a King or a Jack, it was time to start thinking about getting a new deck, but not before. He wore a pair of shoes until it was no longer possible to repair them by having another sole and heel put on them.

As much as he approved of me, and even doted on me as only a proud grandfather can do, he did express his concern about how wasteful youngsters of my generation had become. Not wanting to dismay him too much, I developed the habit of keeping things rather than throwing them away, just in case I would someday learn to repair them or find some other use for them than the use for which they had been invented. I had several shoe boxes full of pencil stubs too short to sharpen further, eraser crumbs, and rusting paper clips. For about ten years I held on to a spark plug that I had found in an alley way. Unfortunately, I never did find a use for most of the contents of those shoe boxes. The only effect that came from keeping them was a habit to hang on to things that no one could use. That habit does have one good effect. It reminds me how many of the habits a person forms are really pretty useless, if not downright destructive. That's a good thing to be reminded of.

These days, as I look around at homes and offices filled with electrical and electronic equipment, gymnasiums filled with exercise machines that use electricity to tell people who many calories they are burning off, driveways with several vehicles parked in them, people ambling along talking into mobile telephones to tell people the stupendously important news that they are in a shopping mall and are thinking of buying a beef taco, and people using fuel-consuming machines to blow leaves instead of raking them or to mow a patch of turf that a push-mower could take care of in ten minutes, I wonder what on earth my grandfather would think of the world we now live in. If asked what is wrong with this picture, he would know the answer right away. Everything.

Pretty much everything has gone wrong. The average American family, I just heard on a news program, is $16,000 in debt, not counting mortgages for living accommodations. People are going into debt to buy things that make them lazy and sick. Our economy is no longer based on the manufacture and sale of goods and necessities. It is based on the manufacture of bads. People spend far less on needs than on their many addictions. Civilization has been destroyed and replaced with a pseudo-culture of delusions and fantasies. The American dream has turned into the world's nightmare. It needn't have turned out this way. But it did. Or at least it has so far. We cannot continue on the course we're on. Reality will not allow it.

Some of the damage done to civilization and the environment is irreversible. Some of the destructive habits we have let ourselves fall into might be unlearned, if we have the will to do things in ways that at first feel a little awkward and uncomfortable. Learning how to live a sensible and sustainable life might be possible if we study the ways of some of our ancestors. I have a grandfather to remember. You probably have someone, too.

Why our electoral process breeds presidential monstrosities

The United States is nearing the end of what has been without a doubt the most destructive and morally bankrupt presidential administration in our history. Many people believe that the next president, whoever is elected, will be a significant improvement over what we, the citizens of the world, have endured for the past eight years. I am not among those who hold that belief. I believe we are destined to continue a moral and cultural decline, and therefore a political and economic decline, for the foreseeable future, no matter who is elected. Our system of government, and especially our way of choosing who will govern, is incapable of producing anything but moral dwarves. (I say this with apology to dwarves, who do not deserve to be compared with American politicians.)

The American form of democracy was devised at a time when candidates for public office rode around on horseback or in carriages. It was a time when candidates met with voters in meetings small enough that the voters could take a reasonable measure of the candidate. Candidates announced their positions in broadsides and other written publications. When votes were submitted on election, the results were often not announced for weeks or even months. The process was slow and deliberate and conducive to reflection.

The American form of democracy that exists today has little in common with its ancestor. Results come in and are analysed at lightning speed. Hours before the polls close in California and Oregon, there is a strong indication of who has won in Maine, Pennsylvania and Florida. Some people still vote after a careful reflection on the positions of the candidates on issues that matter to them, but it is safe to say that everyone is to some extent influenced by factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with actual issues. People spend billions of dollars encouraging Americans to avoid thinking altogether or, if they must think, to think as superficially as possible about tangential matters that have little bearing on the character or the policies of the candidates. The candidate who is most successful in manipulating the irrational emotions of the majority of voters tends to win the election. The candidate who spends the most money tends to be the most successful in manipulating the irrational emotions of the voters.

In today's society election campaigns are conducted in such a way that the winner of an election is almost guaranteed to have bad character. It could hardly be any other way. Our current way of conducting important campaigns makes it unlikely that anyone will enter office except for moral monsters. It is worth reflecting on why this is so.

Character is the sum total of habits that a person has developed. Habits are the consequences of choices that a person has made. Every deliberate, voluntary action reinforces a habit. Everything we have done increases the likelihood that, given similar conditions, we will do a similar thing in the future. This is elementary moral theory and something very much along these lines has been spoken about in detail by the ancient Greeks, by thinkers in India, by Chinese sages, and by elders in traditional oral cultures. If anything can claim to be a universal principle that holds for all human beings, it is something along the lines of what has just been said about the relation between choice, habituation and character.

If we now give a thought to the way that campaigns are conducted in technologically advanced nations in present times, we observe that the pattern followed by almost every candidate—I say“almost” even though I really cannot think of any exceptions—is that the candidate exaggerates his or her own strengths, usually quite dramatically, and magnifies even the smallest (or even the most imaginary) blemish in his or her opponent. The decision to distort the truth through hyperbole is made again and again as the candidate tours the country attending political rallies, and as the candidate approves the contents of televised paid political advertisements. Presidential campaigns in the United States nowadays go on for well over a year, during which time every candidate reinforces the habit many times every day of speaking in a way that is neither balanced nor in accord with reality. Such virtues as truthfulness, fairness, courage, compassion and humility are weakened, perhaps even obliterated. Vices such as pride—regarded in many cultures as the most vicious or sinful personal characteristic of all—and vanity and narcissism begin to rule the candidate's character. No matter what kind of character she or he may have had at the beginning, when candidacy was declared, is bound to have undergone a steady and dramatic turn for the worse by the time the last votes have been counted and the candidate has won.

During my life there have been twelve presidents of the United States. Of these there has been only one that I would allow into my house or welcome into my circle of friends. The rest I would not be willing to have in my company or to have contact with anyone I love for more than a few moments (and then only with plenty of chaperons on hand).

I do not believe this is a matter of bad luck that the United States has had men of such demonstrably inferior character in the White House. I think it is an inevitable consequence of democracy as we know it and as we have let it become. As long as we embrace the status quo of money-driven superficiality and persuasion through fallacy, we will never see anything but more monsters in the White House. I use the word “monster” advisedly. It comes from the Latin word for “warning”. We have been warned repeatedly. Still we seem, perhaps because of the bad character that results from our own educational institutions, unwilling to heed the warnings.

Memories of Hiroshima

There was part of me that hoped Hiroshima would still be a pile of rubble when I arrived there in November 1977. Of course I knew it would not be. I was going there to study for two academic years at Hiroshima University, and I knew from the people there and from friends who had visited the city before me that Hiroshima is a beautiful, modern city. Somehow I did not like the idea that a place destroyed by an atomic bomb could recover so well in a couple of decades. Knowing that cities can eventually get over atomic bomb attacks, I thought, might give people the idea that attacking enemies with nuclear weapons is not as dangerous as all the disarmament people claim it is.

Before going to Japan I talked to a friend in Toronto whose parents had died in the atomic bomb attack of Hiroshima. His family had lived in the suburbs of Hiroshima, and they had, as usual on a working day, gone to the downtown area to work on August 6, 1945. My friend was about five years old at the time. He remembers being taken downtown to search for the remains of his parents. Where their workplace had been, nothing was left but a vacant lot filled with rubble. Everything less solid than rock had been atomized. There were no human remains at the site. His parents had apparently turned to vapor almost instantly. One moment they existed, and the next they did not. My friend was eventually adopted by Japanese Canadians in Toronto and lived a pleasant and safe life there. As long as he lives he will never forget the fruitless search for his parents' physical remains.

We were standing in the Asian Studies library when my Japanese-Canadian friend told me about his memories of the days after the atomic bomb attack. Our conversation was overheard by a Chinese woman. When my friend and I parted company, the Chinese woman came up to me and said “I'm glad his parents were killed. They deserved nothing better.” She then told me of her childhood memories of nearly starving to death as Japanese soldiers who had occupied her village ate almost all the available food. She remember seeing Japanese soldiers toss a Chinese baby high into the air and impale it on a bayonet as it fell back to earth.

What can one say when people report such memories? All I could do was listen and wonder how on earth people who have witnessed such horrors can go on with their lives and eventually recover enough to spend most of their waking hours in banal pursuits and superficial conversations. I had had hundreds of other conversations with the Chinese woman. Her favorite topic of conversation was barbecue chicken. Talking about food seems to have pushed all those memories of starvation deep into the shadows of her subliminal mind, just as talking about baseball banished my Japanese friend's memories of the atomic bomb far into the background.

A few months before going to Hiroshima I read a book about Paul Tibbets and the flight crew of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb used in a war. Tibbets eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier General and lived to the age of 92. The book I read about him focused a lot of attention on the remarkable finesse Tibetts manifested in the complex and dangerous bombing mission. It also dispelled the myth—one that I had heard dozens of times—that the pilot of the Enola Gay had gone insane from guilt. General Tibetts never, so far as I know, expressed any regrets about his role in the mission. Indeed, he talked as though he was proud of it. One member of the flight crew did eventually end up in a mental hospital, but the story is that he was considered so unstable toward the end of the war that there was a question whether he should take part in the Hiroshima mission. In other words, said the book, he was well on the way to being crazy before the mission and did not get much crazier after the mission.

The book also explained why Hiroshima was chosen as a target for the first atomic bomb. It was chosen because it was not an important military target. It was chosen because it had never been bombed by conventional bombs. Hiroshima had managed to get through the war almost completely unscathed. Why choose such a target? Because the United States military wanted to know just how much damage an atomic bomb would do, so they needed a target in which no damage had been done by anything other than the atomic bomb itself. One might say it was chosen out of scientific curiosity. One might also say that it was a target populated by hardly anyone but civilians. The only military there were those needed to operate a small prison in which about a dozen American prisoners of war were being kept. The American prisoners of war, like the thousands of Japanese civilians were what a later generation of American military people would call collateral damage. The death of innocents is just part of the cost of doing business when the business is warfare. (This is nothing new or especially modern. The Bible is full of stories of Israelites and their enemies putting thousands of women and children to the sword.)

Eventually I worked up the nerve to visit the atomic bomb museum in the Peace Park in Hiroshima. Like most visitors to the museum I stumbled silently through the exhibits, numbed by the horrific photographs, stunned by a chunk of a stone wall that had melted into liquid in the unimaginable heat of the atomic bomb and then resolidified in a grotesque caricature of stone. No wonder so many human beings had essentially been turned to gas by the heat.

When I got home after seeing the atomic museum I tried to put my thoughts down on paper. The moment I tried, I began to sob. Once I began, the sobbing lasted for hours. I sobbed until my ribs hurt and my lungs burned. I have rarely felt so exhausted. Never had I been so aware of the cruelties of war. Never had I felt so ashamed of being human. Never since then have I recovered. Never have I been able to understand why human beings are so willing to inflict pain on others for the sake of getting a bit of land and control over others, so eager to visit magnified suffering on others when others have hurt them.

In August Japanese people commemorate the deaths of their ancestors. In Hiroshima this special religious holiday has a special significance. It is a day for remembering all those who died in the atomic bomb attack, and of those who have died since then of radiation-caused diseases acquired most probably as a result of being in the vicinity of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The deaths are commemorated by putting candles into paper lanterns and letting them float down the river past the Peace Park. I watched the lanterns come down the river on August 6, 1978. At first just a few came. Then more and more came. It was beautifu as a sight. It became terrifying only when one stopped to remember that each beautiful lantern represented the soul of a victim of the atomic bomb. So many beautiful lanterns! So much pain. Once again I was overcome with shame at being human.

During the time I lived in Hiroshima, I talked with many Japanese people about the atomic bomb. I was amazed at how many Japanese people I met who told me the atomic bomb had probably been a good thing that had saved both American and Japanese lives in the long run. Some added that if the Americans had not stopped the war when it did, the Soviets would have invaded Japan and demanded at war's end that Japan be divided as Germany and Korea were into Soviet and Western zones. There is, of course, no way of knowing what would have happened. All one can do is speculate about what might have been if things had not turned out as they did. All one can know for sure is that Americans managed to convince themselves, and quite a number of Japanese people, that killing many tens of thousands of people was unavoidable and ultimately had good consequences.

Since 1979, when I left Hiroshima and returned to Canada, I have heard many times that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many lives. Interestingly enough, the report of lives saved has climbed steadily since 1945. The figure climbs in proportion with estimates of the number of people who died as a result of those attacks. The more we learn of the long-term effects of radiation and adjust the death toll upwards to account for all those who died lingering deaths in years and decades after the atomic bomb attack, the more lives we become convinced were saved by the attack. It is obvious that most of the people in the only nation in history to use nuclear weapons against innocent civilians are not yet capable of coming to the conclusion that the attack was unjustified, let alone possibly an unconsionable evil. Americans, after all, don't do evil. That's not part of the American self-image. Tragically, it is not part of any nation's self-image. And so the evils continue without interruption.

Coming to terms with Biblical brutality

In a previous squib I confessed to wondering how pacifist Quakers such as George Fox came to terms with all the violence and aggressive behavior depicted in the early books of the Bible. I was pretty sure there was an answer, but I did not yet know what it was. Since then I have been reading George Fox's Journal, and some hints have emerged. The one I'd like to focus on now is this passage:

I saw the state of those, both priests and people, who, in reading the scriptures, cry out much against Cain, Esau, Judas, and other wicked men of former times, mentioned in the holy scriptures; but do not see the nature of Cain, of Esau, of Judas, and those others, in themselves. These said, it was they, they, they, that were the bad people; putting it off from themselves: but when some of these came, with the light and spirit of truth, to see into themselves, then they came to say, I, I, I, it is I myself, that have been the Ishmael, the Esau, &c. For then they saw the nature of wild Ishmael [Gen 16:12] in themselves; the nature of Cain, Esau, Corah, Baalam, and of the son of perdition [John 17:12, 2 Th 2:3] in themselves, sitting above all that is called God [2 Th 2:4] in them. (For context, see George Fox's Journal on line

George Fox chooses a slightly different set of villains than I would choose. Cain, of course, killed his brother. But that villainy is as nothing compared to the genocidal brutality inflicted by Joshua on the peoples living in Canaan. In the book of Joshua we read of entire towns being levelled to the ground, and all the human beings and their livestock killed, and their holy shrines desecrated. Similar abominations are found in two books of Samuel, as Saul and especially King David continue the conquest of the Philistines and other inhabitants of the land of Canaan. Acts of horrible cruelty follow one another with tedious succession, all of them justified with the claim that the god of the Israelists had promised this land to the descendants of Israel and had grown disgusted with the Canaanites because of their wicked behavior, about which we are told almost nothing except that these people worshiped gods other than the god of Israel. In the relations between Saul and David, and then between David and his own sons, and among the various offspring of David through his many wives (one of whom he acquired through an adulterous affair and an aborted attempt to have her lawful husband killed in battle), we find few examples of anything morally uplifting. We find plenty of examples of ugly, uncivilized, aggressive, self-centered, anti-social behavior, none of which a person would wish to emulate.

The paragraph in Fox's Journal cited above helped me to realize that looking for anything admirable or heroic in the Bible may well be looking for the wrong thing. Perhaps what one ought to be looking for is simply a description of how human beings behave, and how they find a way to justify doing to others the very things they would find loathsome and unconscionable if those things were done to them.

Is the story of the brutal conquest of Canaan by the Israelites not the history of everyone who had built a nation? It is certainly the story of everyone who has built, or tried to build, an empire. It is the sad and disgusting story of how Europeans (and their African slaves) took control of North America, and of how native North Americans dealt with each other before the Europeans came along with horses, sharper swords, and gun powder. One looks in vain for much to admire in the building of a continental empire justified by the self-serving ideology of manifest destiny. As the descendants of Israel did to the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Perizzites, the Girgashites, the Jebusites and the Philistines, so the Spanish, French and English did to the Cherokee, the Lakota, the Arapahoe, the Comanche, the Apache, the Ute, the Haida, the Inuit and the Hawaiians. The same story continues with new locations and a new cast of characters from one century to the next.

It is not primarily in looking for inspiration that one reads the Bible wrongly, says Fox. The greatest mistake in reading the Bible is to read all these accounts of hideous human conduct and to think that barbarism and savagery belongs to others and not to oneself. The wrong way to read the story of David's oldest son Amnon's rape of his half-sister (2 Sam 13) is to see rape as a vicious act that other men (they, they, they) do and that one would never do oneself, as if testosterone is toxic only to others but an ambrosial nectar in one's own bodily chemistry. (I speak as a man, because I have experienced being a man. I am sure women have their own toxins to contend with.) Similarly, the wrong way to read the story of Absalom's vengeful killing of his half-brother Amnon is to see vindictive anger as a vice that afflicts others but not oneself. The wrong way to read the story of Absalom's rebellion against his father, King David, is to think that others, but never oneself, are driven to dethrone their fathers out of jealous impatience.

The wrong way to read the bloodthirsty rampages of the Bible is to pin such labels as “terrorist” and “insurgent” on those who fight back against empires that have taken their land or imposed their cultural standards on the colonized, not realizing that military and economic imperialism is itself terrifying to those who are subjected to it. Folly gives way to wisdom only when self-righteousness gives way to humility and blaming turns into confession.

I admit that I was on the verge of giving up reading the Bible, so distasteful did I find the conduct narrated in it. I longed for something inspiring, something sacred. I had forgotten the observation of David Elkins in Beyond Religion: A Personal Program for Building a Spiritual Life Outside the Walls of Traditional Religion that the sacred is made up of two components: 1) what he calls the spiritual, which aspires to lofty heights and nobility and transcendance and triumph; and 2) what he calls the soulful, which dives into the abysmal depths of the human experience and into the pain and suffering that we inflict upon ourselves and others through our short-sightedness and moral blindness. There is plenty of soulful material in the Bible—enough to keep one going for a lifetime—but only if one remembers that the constant failures are not only the failures of them, them, them, but also (and more importantly) the failures of me, me, me.

Dare I say it? George Fox read the Bible as a Buddhist might read it.

Winning the Buddhist Quaker vote

The news analysts I regularly watch on television—I admittedly watch nothing other than PBS—keep saying the 2008 presidential election may be the most important election in American history. I disagree. I think the election of 2000 was the most important. That election was so disastrous, and the consequences so damaging to the United States and to the world, that the election of 2008 amounts to little more than a contest to see who gets to stand on the bridge while the ship of state sinks. The ship has taken so many hits that she is no longer seaworthy, and she has been pretty much beyond repair since the current captain took the wheel for his second watch after proving to everyone except for 62,040,606 (51% of the) American voters that he was unfit for public office.

Even if it were still possible for anyone to salvage the wrecked ship of the American state, it would not be easy for me to decide for which of the surviving candidates to vote. Like many other voters, I watched all the debates among the presidential candidates of both parties and sank deeper into dismay at the superficiality of the questions and the answers, and the adolescent coverage of the race. We viewers learned a great deal about how countless experts expected the various sociological divisions of the American electorate to vote in the primaries.

One still hears a fair amount of discussion about who is likely to win the evangelical vote and the Jewish vote. One does not hear quite as much about which candidate is mostly likely to win the Unitarian vote, the Buddhist vote and the Quaker vote. And so, as a service to election watchers everywhere, I have compiled a modest list of issues that may be decisive in determining who gets the vote of one fellow who comes from a Unitarian family and who is now a practicing Buddhist Quaker. Whether this one fellow is representative of the Buddhist Quaker segment of the American population, I leave it to pollsters to determine. So here is a guide to what a presidential candidate has to pledge to do to earn my vote. The guide, of course, can be used to figure out who will get my vote for congressional representative and senator of my home and native state.

1. Close all US military bases outside the 50 states, and reduce the military to a size no larger than what is needed to deal with domestic issues, such as providing disaster relief after storms, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. (The Canadian military would be a good model to follow in reforming the US military. Worth considering is the Canadian model of a unified military service rather than having a navy, marine corps and air force separate from the army.)
2. Dismantle all nuclear warheads and chemical weapons and find a safe way to dispose of the toxins contained therein.
3. Open the borders to all citizens of every North, Central and South American country so that all people living in the Americas can move freely throughout the two continents of North and South America.
4. Make Spanish and French official languages along with English.
5. Enforce strong environmental laws. Make sure those already on the books are properly enforced and pass new standards and regulations in consultation with scientists.
6. Build an infrastructure for generating electrical power by harnessing solar power, wind, geothermal energy and tidal forces.
7. Start a national campaign to reeducate the public to use their own muscles for many tasks now done with the help of energy-consuming machines. Thus, instead of only seeking new ways to provide artificial forms of energy, reduce dependence on all forms of energy not generated by the human body.
8. Bring in a system of universal health care in which no citizen or legal resident alien is deprived of basic medical coverage.
9. Begin a national campaign to reeducate the public in preventive health measures. (Worth considering is a policy, similar to those in Singapore and Japan, of offering annual cash incentives to citizens who maintain their weight within healthy limits and who pass fitness tests, and fining those who do not.

10. Abolish the death penalty throughout the country.
11. Decriminalize narcotics and other recreational drugs and make available clinics in which those wishing to break addictions could receive effective therapy and where others could procure regulated drugs administered safely rather than having to rely on illegal sources.
12. Take all prisons (and, ideally, hospitals and clinics) out of the hands of private ownership and for-profit management.

13. Require the registration of all firearms and the licensing of users of firearms, who must prove their ability to operate them safely and who must provide proof of carrying sufficient liability insurance to compensate anyone they may injure through improper use of firearms.
14. Make provisions for giving massive amounts of food and educational aid to struggling countries.
15. Work to make the United Nations and world courts strong and effective.
16. Balance the budget. Raise sufficient revenues by taxing corporations and investment earnings and the purchase of luxury items and by imposing a modest tax on salary earnings, and then keep expenditures lower than the revenues so gained.

In short, all anyone needs to do to get my vote is embrace my politically moderate values and run the nation by the bodhisattva standards of love and compassion toward all sentient beings. If any of the readers of this blog know of any candidates who meet all, or even most, of these criteria, please leave a comment.

Struggling with the Bible

At this year's meeting of the InterMountain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends there was a workshop entitled “Top 10 Quaker Bible Verses.” The purpose of the workshop was to enable Friends to explore their attitudes toward the Bible to become more aware of just how large a role the Bible played in the journals and epistles of George Fox (1624–1691) and other early Quakers. Among the resources available for this kind of study are on-line annotated versions of the letters of George Fox at Earlham College. Scholars have gone through the journals and epistles of Fox and noted the many direct quotes from and allusions to the Bible. A look at a randomly chosen letter will show how extensive Fox's use of the Bible was. Every paragraph has several quotations; indeed, nearly every sentence has at least an oblique reference to the Bible. There is no doubt that George Fox knew his scriptures very well.

Many of the people of the seventeenth century, including most Quakers, followed a lectionary in their Bible studies. A typical lectionary suggests one psalm, one passage from the old testament, one passage from a gospel and one passage from an epistle for every day of the year. Some lectionaries are designed to guide the reader through the entire Bible every year, while others are designed to take three years to read the entire text. Anyone wishing to experiment with a lectionary can find one on the web site of the Presbyterian Church of the USA .Never having approached the Bible through a lectionary, I chose one a few weeks ago and plunged in. I also began reading the Bible from the very first page, just to see how far I could get. So far I have made it through the five books of the Torah, Joshua, Judges, Ruth and most of 1 Samuel. My bookmark seems barely to have moved from the front cover. Clearly reading the entire Bible is going to take a good deal of time, and there's a good chance I'll lay the task down for periods of time, making it take even longer.

Reading the Bible has been quite a struggle for me. I have not yet found much that I like or find in any way inspiring (except for the heartwarming book of Ruth), and I have found a great deal that I strongly dislike and find disgusting. As I read, I find myself growing increasingly curious about how the early Quakers reacted to what they read in the so-called Good Book. For example, given that most of the early Quakers were committed to some version of the peace testimony, which is based on these well-known lines in George Fox's journal:

I told [the Commonwealth Commissioners] I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars and I knew from whence all wars did rise, from the lust, according to James's doctrine... I told them I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strifes were. (See the Wikipedia article on the Quaker Peace Testimony.)

Early Quakers fashioned a testimony that included the phrase “we do certainly know, and so testify to the world, that the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight any war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world.” So the question that has begun to rumble in my mind is how the people who testified that they would wage no war against anyone with outward weapons understood all the passages of the Torah and the books of Joshua and Judges in which the Israelites are slaughtering tens of thousands of men, women and children belonging to the peoples who inhabited Moab and Canaan before the Israelites waged what can only be described as a genocidal campaign against them. Not only do we read that YHWH did not disapprove of the slaughter, but we read that he encouraged it, even demanded it. Not only were all the people residing in those lands to be killed (with an occasional exception made for women who had not yet slept with a man, whose lives were spared so that they might be forced to become the wives and concubines of Israelites), but often their animals were to be mutilated, and all their holy places were to be demolished and scattered to the winds. How did Quakers square this bloodthirsty deity, who commanded brutally aggressive actions against people who had never done harm to the Israelites, and who ordained the death penalty for Israelites who failed to honor the sabbath, or who committed adultery, or who disobeyed their fathers and mothers, or whose eyes fell upon the sacred objects around the altar on which countless animals were burned after their blood was poured on the floor–how did they square this deity with the observation in the gospel of John that God is love?

One approach to this problem might be to say that YHWH, who plays such a central role in the lives of the descendants of Israel, is just a different character from the God who inspired the Jews at the time of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, there is such an apparent different in “personality” of the YHWH of the Torah and the God of the gospels that one might as well say they are not identical to one another, perhaps do not even have the same essence. A modern reader of the Bible might well approach scriptures as a phenomenologist of religions and say that the deity of the early descendants of Israel is just plain a different character than the deity of the gospels and the letters of Paul, and one might say the angry, jealous, almost petty YHWH of Exodus makes a comeback in the Book of Revelations, where once again there is no shortage of smiting promised for the enemies of God and Christ. This strategy, however, would clearly not have worked for the early Quakers, who were strongly committed to the story told in the Bible itself, a story in which the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Moses and Joshua is the very same God who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son as an atonement for the sin of Adam.

I do not know how the early Quakers managed to find a way to find the Bible inspiring; I expect this is a topic for considerable research in the writings of George Fox, Isaac Penington, William Penn, Margaret Fell, John Woolman and other early Friends. Whether I will muster the curiosity myself to do this research, I don't yet know. What I do know is that for me, as for many other liberal unprogrammed Quakers, it is much easier to search elsewhere for inspiration than in the Bible. When I attended Quaker meetings forty years ago, it was not uncommon to hear Friends quoting the Bible in their verbal testimony in meetings for worship and giving inspiring oral commentaries on them. As I recall (after forty years!), there were rarely any passages cited of the sort that I have reported finding so challenging. I don't recall hearing much about the smiting of enemies of God and the stoning to death of adulteresses and disobedient sons.

Nowadays, I find Biblical citation less frequent than it used to be. Judging from things Friends were saying in the workshop at this year's IMYM, it is not hard to understand why. A good many liberal unprogrammed Quakers these days admit to finding the Bible unpalatable. Many who have a taste for reading early Christian writings at all would rather read Gnostic texts such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Mary. Elaine Pagels has become their scholar of choice. Others have pretty much abandoned Christian writings altogether, preferring instead to read Thich Nhat Hanh, Swami Vivekananda, Rumi and Laozi. (I myself get almost all my inspiration from Buddhist sources, so how can I blame them?)

Here is my concern: as liberal Friends turn increasingly away from the Bible and toward the vast body of inspirational writing in the rest of world literature, they may slowly be dissolving the very glue that has held Quakers together for the past four hundred years and that gives context, shape and meaning to the testimonies on peace, integrity, simplicity, community, equality and ecological stewardship. In a postmodern Quakerism I fear the prophecy of William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Winter of My Deep Content

During my youth I was in the habit of letting important decisions make themselves, with as little interference from me as possible. So when my wife and I left Argenta in search of gainful employment, we had a decision to make when we got to Revelstoke: go west toward Vancounver or head east toward Calgary. Both sounded appealing. We flipped a coin. The toss sent us east toward Calgary.

When we got to Calgary, the Calgary Stampede was still on, and there was hardly a bed to be found. A kind-hearted hotel clerk put us up for a night on a couple of air mattresses in a hallway near the kitchen, and the next day we headed south for Lethbridge, Alberta. Within a day, I found a job working on a dairy farm. The work was hard, and the pay was awful. It was just the sort of thing I was looking for.

The farm work lasted until December. The Canadian immigration authorities sent my wife back to the USA for medical reasons in September, so I was on my own as I faced my first Canadian winter. Work proved to be very hard to find. I headed back to Lethbridge and got a cheap apartment in a dark and depressing basement. It seemed like a perfect place to write a novel. So I did. Writing a novel proved to be just what I needed to think through the jumble of thoughts and emotions that were blowing through my heart and mind like an Alberta blizzard. The cold, the loneliness and the tedium of having no job were hard to take, so I took to drinking hard. (That, I learned, is a Canadian solution to many a problem. I've heard rumors that Canadians are not unique in seeking refuge in this particular solution.)

Fortunately, before going too far down that road, I got an unexpected call sometime in early 1968 from a man named Larry I had met briefly as he was passing through Argenta in June. He had heard I was in Lethbridge and might need a friend. He invited me to his home for a meal and told me I'd be welcome to join the handful of Quakers who met in his home for meetings for worship. A lifeline was thrown to me, and somehow I managed to catch it.

Larry knew I had too much time on my hands, so he invited me to join him as he made calls connected with his work. He worked for the John Howard Society, an organization that helps people just released from prison find suitable housing and work. By attending him on these calls I met several remarkable people who had been imprisoned for various crimes. Most of them were First Nation people, because, as I learned, native peoples make up a disproportionately large percentage of Alberta's prison population. White people tended to be given suspended sentences on first convictions. Native people tended to be sent to prison on first convictions. (There is a book entitled The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison that chronicles how social class is correlated with sentencing in the USA; the same pattern exists in Canada.) The more I saw of Larry's world, the more I saw that there is not much justice in the justice system, and the more I saw that prison does not do most people who go there much good. A few people manage to acquire skills that they can eventually use for honest work, but the majority come out worse than they were when they went in. About all that more will be said in other posts.

Living with Larry's family was an old man known only as Duke. Duke had had a stroke and could speak only with great difficulty. He read everything he could get his hands on. I got into the habit of going to Duke's room after meetings for worship, and he and I would spend hours together. He wanted me to read aloud passages from books he found inspiring. As time went on I learned that Duke considered himself a Buddhist, although he pointed out that Buddhism teaches that there is no I, and therefore it is, strictly speaking, impossible for a Buddhist to say “I am a Buddhist.” Like me, Duke had also dabbled in Communism. He fancied himself to be an artist, a painter. I fancied myself to be a novelist. We both knew we were destined to be unknown. We had a lot in common.

Another thing Duke and I had in common was that we both loved the Quakers we knew, but we both felt uneasy about their Christian roots. Larry quoted the Bible quite a lot in conversation and obviously spent much of his time reflecting on the life of Jesus. Duke and I approved of Jesus; he was, in our minds, a sort of honorary Buddhist. We liked the Quakers we knew, because they seemed to be trying hard to live as much like Jesus as they could. They helped the poor and the weak and the downtrodden. They worked in every way they could to remove the root causes of systematic violence, such as is provided by the military and the criminal justice system with quite a bit of help from taxpayers. Like Jesus, the Quakers won approval from Duke and me for being very much like Buddhists.

Conversing with Larry, spending time with Duke, and going to Quaker meetings for worship helped me shape a novel, and writing a novel helped me make sense of my life and got me started on the road to making sense of religion. Duke lent me a book on Buddhist meditation, and I taught myself to do mindfulness meditation and loving-kindness meditation. Despite being allergic to labels, I begin to think of myself as a Buddhist. And a Quaker. A Buddhist and a Quaker. I wondered what Jesus would have to say about all that.

One night, one very cold night in the dark basement where I spent the winter of 1967–1968, I had a troubled dream. I awoke from it full of terror. I was afraid to go back to sleep, for fear of having another nightmare. As I lay there in that state of being neither fully awake nor quite asleep, I sensed a stirring in the room. I bolted upright just in time to see a man in white robes walking through the closed door of my bedroom closet. He came toward me. He placed his hand on me. He said everything would be fine. I recognized him. He was the honorary Buddhist that men call Jesus. No sooner did I recognize him than he was gone.

I can never be sure that I am not being a complete fool. Like everyone else, I take my chances. That night I took a chance on interpreting that dream, or vision, or hallucination as confirmation that Jesus took no offence at Duke and me for making him an honorary Buddhist, a bodhisattva instead of a Christ. I also took it that he thought it was just fine that I continue practicing Buddhist meditation and going to Quaker meetings for worship.

The teachers and the hippies

Argenta, British Columbia is pretty far away from almost everything that most people have heard of. One way to get there is to drive along the Trans-Canada highway until you get to Revelstoke (population 7500, located about six hours east of Vancouver and five hours west of Calgary). Head south on road 23. Argenta is 237 km (142 miles) to the south of Revelstoke. Figure on taking about four hours, averaging about 35 mph but often going quite a bit slower. Part of the journey involves taking the world-famous Shelter Bay Galena Bay ferry for about three miles across a wide spot of the Columbia river.

There is a Quaker Meeting in Argenta. It was established in the 1950s by three families who had been school teachers in California during the McCarthy Era. During the height of the paranoid dread of Communism that grabbed hold of the United States, the state of California required all school teachers and other employees of the school system, including janitors and bus drivers, to swear an oath of loyalty to the United States. Quakers do not swear oaths; to know why, read the Gospel of Matthew 5:33–37. People who did not swear oaths during the McCarthy era were not allowed to work for the public school system. So John and Helen Stevenson and George and Mary Pollard and their families moved to Canada and eventually settled in a tiny settlement on glacier-fed Kootenay Lake. They were joined by four other Quaker families and eventually founded the Delta Co-operativeand a small Quaker school.

I met John and Helen Stevenson at a Yearly Meeting of Quakers in the late spring of 1967, just a few months after arriving in Canada as a draft-dodger, and somehow an invitation to visit Argenta was offered and accepted, so my newly acquired bride and I drove from Winnipeg to Argenta, via the route that involves taking the Shelter Bay Galena Bay ferry. When we arrived, we were warmly welcomed and told we could stay for as long as we liked in any one of the unoccupied cabins.

Being accustomed to the ways of the world, I was uneasy about moving into a cabin before knowing who owned it and how much rent I would be expected to pay. I was stunned to learn that most of what was there did not belong to anyone in particular. Things belonged to the community as a whole. If a cabin was empty, we could stay there. Of course, it would always be appreciated if we pitched in with whatever work that needed to be done. I learned to milk the community cow and took on the responsibility of doing that twice a day, and I worked in the community garden for a couple of hours every morning. That seemed to be the only “rent” that anyone expected in return for having a place to sleep and joining the community for three meals a day, all cooked on a big wood-burning stove. As drawn as I was to theidea of radical communism, I never did get over being uneasy with the practice. I thought I needed money, even though there was no need to buy much of anything. I was used to making around $80 a week doing menial labor, and I could not adjust to the idea that the average annual income for the citizens of Argenta was around $600, about 15% of what I was used to making.

On First Day (which expression Quakers used to prefer to Sunday) we attended the unprogrammed meeting for worship in the Meetinghouse the Friends had built in the 1950s. It was roughhewn and simple, and it served several functions. It suited my tastes perfectly. The people who attended meetings for worship were delightful. When they spoke, it was always worth listening. One regular attender named George rarely spoke, but on most weeks he would stand and whistle a hymn. I had never heard anyone whistle so beautifully. George was a nudist. He wore a shirt and trousers to meetings for worship, but most of the time he walked around the wooded mountains wearing no more than he was born with. That feat amazed me, especially as I became acquainted with the thick clouds of aggressively hungry mosquitoes that drove both human beings and animals frantic. George did not mind them at all. He fed them with the same loving kindness that he manifested in everything he did.

Sometime during the summer of 1967, a van full of hippies pulled into Argenta. Like me, they were evading the draft and seeking sanity and refuge in Canada. They were lively, full of interesting conversation and open to experimenting with Quaker meetings for worship. The Quakers were every bit as hospitable to them as they had been to me—at first. It did not take long, however, to learn that the hippies also liked to smoke marijuana and use LSD, and—more alarming—that they were quite a bit more casual than the Quakers about sex. It was not long before some of the Quakers were expressing concern about the students attending the Argenta Friends School. It would not do, they reasoned, to send pregnant daughters and drug-using sons back to their parents in Philadelphia. Quaker parents, said the concerned Friends, do not send their children to Quaker schools to be turned into hippies. A crisis had emerged within the community.

A special business meeting was held to work through the crisis. Some Friends expressed the concerns outlined above. Others pointed out that Quakers have always struck mainstream society as radical, experimental, non-conformist seekers, and Quakers have a long history of landing in jail for their non-conformist ways. Hippies were not so different from the radical Quakers of the past and the present. Besides, they were in favor of making love, not war, and Quakers ought to embrace everyone who is dedicated to cultivating the virtues that are the occasion of harmony and peace rather than conflict and war.

The disagreements that arose at that meeting were expressions of deeply held convictions that seemed at first irreconcilable. And yet no tempers flared. People spoke. People listened. The atmosphere was charged not only with disagreement but with love. The love triumphed. A solution was found. Unity was reached. Now, more than forty years later, I have completely forgotten the details of the solution, but I shall never forget the love with which it emerged. The hippies continued to live nearby and to come to meetings for worship when they pleased, but somehow they were gently persuaded to keep some of their behavior to themselves, at least until the more cautious Quakers had a chance to make a more considered assessment of ways that struck them as a little too worldly and un-Quakerly.

Being in the presence of Quakers striving to reach unity on a perplexing and potentially divisive problem allowed me to witness a process that became for me a paradigm of how conflicts should be resolved. Even in years when I had almost no contact with Quakers, the Quaker process remained my model.

Turning points in one's life can be astonishingly brief. When I look back on the Argenta experience, it feels as though it had such a profound effect on me that I must have been there for years, perhaps decades. In fact, I think the stay in Argenta was not much more than six weeks. By mid-summer my bride and I were taking the Shelter Bay Galena Bay ferry in the opposite direction and heading back to Revelstoke and heading from there in the direction of Calgary. I have never been back to Argenta. There has been no need. Argenta has never left me.

The Comrade and the Friend

One bitter-cold night in late March 1967, I arrived in Winnipeg, Manitoba by Greyhound Bus on a one-way ticket from Chicago. I had no need for a return ticket, because I had decided to stay out of the United States forever, or at least until I was no longer eligible for military service there. I checked into a hotel around midnight and thumbed through the telephone directory, not having any idea where to begin making a new life in this city I had never even visited before. My eye was caught by an entry for the Communist Party of Canada. I jotted down the address and determined to visit them the next morning. After all, I reasoned, I like the idea of Communism, and surely Communists will be sympathetic to a refugee from the United States who refuses to go to Vietnam to fight Communists there.

I never did find my way to the Canadian Communist Party. I did, however, discover a Communist bookstore in the same neighborhood. I browsed the shelves and discovered a couple of titles that looked interesting and took them to the bookshop owner, a lean and hungry-looking young man with wild hair and horn rim glasses. He looked the part. I told him I wished to purchase these two books and to have information about people who might be willing to help an American draft dodger get established in Canada. He seemed quite uninterested in my situation, but he gave me two names of people he thought might be willing to help me. He also said he thought I had chosen two interesting books, pointing out they were published in the Soviet Union and were quite authentic.

I got in touch with both of the two men. One said he was a Communist and would be willing to billet me in a spare room in his small apartment. The other said he would be happy to see me and gave me a location where I could meet him on the campus of the University of Winnipeg. I made arrangements to meet him the following day, then found my way to the billeting Communist. The Communist made me tea and introduced me to his family and his ferocious German shepherd. The dog later bit me twice, grabbing onto my knee so firmly that I limped for several days afterward, but his wife and daughter were more hospitable. Shown to my room, I read one of the books from the Communist bookstore. The contents horrified me. I began to think I might not be a Soviet-style Communist.

The next day I went to see the university professor. Right away I told him that I was a Communist of sorts and asked if he was, too. No, he said. He was a Quaker. Naturally, I was somewhat disappointed at the prospects of being aided by some kind of Christian, but at least I knew enough about Quakers to know that they were opposed to war.

There is no need to go into further details about my first encounters with a real live Communist and a real live Quaker. Suffice it so say that after a week my disillusionment with what I had seen of Canadian Communism was matched by a new fascination with the gentleness, good humor and intelligence that I was encountering in Canadian Quakers. Although my flirtation with Communism continued on and off for several more years, my attraction to Quakerism proved much deeper and more durable. About it, more will be said in subsequent posts.

Thy saving health among all nations

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969) wrote “I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind would comprehend it.” While I am inclined to subscribe to that sentiment, there are mysteries that I would not at all mind having unraveled. One of the mysteries I would love to see solved is why the United States of America has allowed itself to have the most expensive but the least efficient health care system in the industrialized world. A related mystery is why the people of the United States are as a rule so resistant to the models provided by various other countries.

In debates about the state of health care in the United States, I have heard people say firmly that they would not at all like to see the USA have a Canadian-style health care system. It is difficult to know exactly what that means, since Canada does not have a health care system. Each of Canada's provinces has a health care system, and each province has a different model. The only thing they have in common is that a person can receive higher-quality and more-affordable health care in any of them than one can get in the United States. So part of what Americans who reject Canadian models are rejecting, it seems, is quality, efficiency and affordability. Apparently, these Americans prefer overpriced mediocrity.

One of the arguments I have heard some of my fellow Americans use is that the United States simply cannot afford to provide universal coverage. Those who cannot afford health insurance policies must therefore either go into personal debt to get medical care, or they must do without medical care. This raises the question of why so many other countries can provide health insurance to every adult and child without going broke. Why is the United States alone among wealthy nations in being unable to provide reasonably priced health insurance to everyone, and to provide subsidized policies to those who cannot afford them?

Let me suggest a few speculative answers. One reason might be that the United States spends far too much revenue on maintaining a military that it really does not need, including military bases in around twenty nations around the world. According to The Arithmetic of America's military,

Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers….

The expense of maintaining all these unnecessary bases does not include the cost of waging wars that contravene international law and that do far more to endanger the American people than to protect them. It is estimated that the war in Iraq costs around $5000 per second. Supposing a health insurance policy costs $10,000 per year, the money being spent in Iraq could provide one year's worth of health insurance to 43,200 people for what it costs to finance one day of war in Iraq. For the cost of about three months of war, more than 4,000,000 Americans could be provided with health insurance.

Were it not for a bloated military, the United States could easily provide health insurance to all those who cannot afford it. But that still would not address the extraordinarily high costs of medical procedures and pharmaceuticals. The cost of those is held within reasonable bounds in Canada, most European countries and many Asian countries by simply putting a cap on how much profit a health-provider can make. Physicians, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies are allowed to make reasonable livelihoods in Canada, Europe and Japan, but one will find no billionaires, and perhaps not even many millionaires, among health-care providers.

The United States has for a long time been married to an abusive ideology, an ideology that leaves Americans of all walks of life battered, bruised and impoverished. The principal dogma of that ideology is that unrestricted and unregulated competition keeps prices affordable for all consumers of every kind of product. Therefore, say those who propagate this dogma, the best way to keep costs reasonable is to make sure that providers of goods and services must compete with one another, and the best way to make sure of robust competition is to minimize government regulation and interference.

The argument may sound good, but it is demonstrably flawed. This is the system we have had since at least the time of President Reagan, and it has not worked at all. First of all, companies that are forced to compete in a free market are also forced to advertise in expensive media. Watch television for one evening and count how many advertisements you see for pills, salves, creams, ointments and powders. Who pays for those advertisements? The people who are persuaded that they need the product being sold. Who pays for those advertisements in other countries? No one. Medical providers usually do not advertise in other countries. Products there are plentiful and affordable. And the providers of those products are regulated. Their system works. The system in the United States does not work. It is perhaps time for our policy makers to stop preaching and to begin learning.

What we need to do to fix our broken health care system is no mystery. The only mystery is why we don't do it.