Political discernment using Quaker testimonies

As a Quaker, I am helped in turbulent times by considering the five Quaker “testimonies.”

The testimonies are: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community and Equality. (You can remember them with the mnemonic “SPICE”)

Recently I’ve weighed the three major presidential candidates against the testimonies and tried to assign grades to them. ABCDF.

I found it difficult because media reporting on the candidates often fails to provide necessary information to make a judgment on these topics.

Then again, much of the news coverage is relevant and helpful.

I also realized that I first needed to revisit the “SPICE”s for myself, particularly with regard to politics and public life.

It was a humbling experience. The “grade” I gave myself was, at best, a “gentleman’s C.”

Here are some of the questions I pondered.

Do I measure “simplicity” guided by my spirituality or do I surrender to cultural/political norms?

Am I at peace with myself? Am I at peace with paying taxes to support American military involvement (which includes atrocities)? Am I at peace with our system of "justice"?

Do I understand the word “integrity” in all its meanings, “strength” being one of them?

What community, or communities, am I part of? What are my responsibilities to them. What are my responsibilities to other communities beyond my own?

Do I truly believe we are equal? If so, how?

Now to the presidential candidates....

How do the testimonies apply to being president of the United States? It's easier to answer for some ("integrity" for instance) than others ("simplicity"?) Or are the testimonies simply important as measurements of personal character? Should we consider the "personal" and "presidential" as one? Are presidents forced to make decisions they would never want to make as individuals? Decisions about life and death, for instance. What does personal/presidential bifurcation say about "integrity"?

In an earlier draft of this little essay, I actually assigned “testimony” grades to the three leading candidates. Now I realize that my assessment is helpful only to me. It is filtered through my unique experiences, values and discernment.

What’s most important to you is yours.

So have at it. Take your time….

Donald Trump

Simplicity?
Peace?
Integrity?
Community?
Equality?

Hillary Clinton

Simplicity?
Peace?
Integrity?
Community?
Equality?

Bernie Sanders

Simplicity?
Peace?
Integrity?
Community?
Equality?

The Parable of the Turnbuckle

Last weekend I joined Santa Barbara Quakers in worship. Before settling into the silence, I gazed around the meeting room with its gracefully arching windows and two skylights. As my eyes swept across the ceiling, they rested on two parallel stay cables poking out of the ceiling. Each had been tightened by its own turnbuckle.

The modest fixtures were essential to holding the building together.

I stopped to ponder the turnbuckles to consider just how they did their job.

Because Quaker meetings often are trying to shore up this or that, I sought to apply to Friends the simple mechanics of the turnbuckle.

The key to the operation of a turnbuckle is that it is tightened by rotating a collar that is threaded on both ends to fit attached threaded screws, which are, in turn, hooked to the cables.

The telling point is this: the threads at one end go in the REVERSE direction as those on the other.

Without the reversal, the turnbuckle wouldn’t pull inward to tighten the cables. Of course the collar needs to be turned in the “right” direction. Turning it the other way loosens the cables.

Friends are notoriously, but thankfully, “threaded” in opposite directions (MANY opposite directions!). If we were all threaded the same way, neither tightening (nor loosening) would happen. We’d just unscrew ourselves, as it were.

So, like the turnbuckle, we are stronger for our “oppositional” threading, just as long as we learn to agree which way to twist our collars.

Sometimes learning requires loosening first before we discover which way to turn to make ourselves stronger, but in the end, together, we get it right.

All of which may sound familiar to those familiar with the old hymn "Simple Gifts"...

"...To turn, turn 'twill be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right."

Life's final appeal: Don't delay, simplify

Since turning 70 last February, day by day I’m living slightly askew.

For instance, this afternoon I received in the mail — yes the REAL mail, the one with stamps — yet another appeal to join my alma mater’s alumni association. I have resisted all such appeals for nearly 50 years.

This particular pitch urged me to become a “life member” for a mere $595. Its headline read, “Your membership lasts a lifetime. Don’t delay!”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh.

At first I thought that it was just me reading morbid meaning into the words. Then I realized that the copywriter was having some fun with me, or at least trying to. The university’s computers no doubt had marked me as being in some existential “don’t delay” period of my life.

And so, I didn’t delay and immediately pitched the appeal into the recycling.

Life really is too short.

No question the eighth decade has a certain “don’t delay” aspect. You could start with all those unread books on my shelves.  It is now undeniable: There is no way on Earth I will read them. At least not “on Earth.”

And I’m absolutely certain that City Hall isn’t going to underground our utilities in my lifetime. (If the Europeans can bury their wires, why can’t we?) Once, in my late middle age, I boasted that I would see to it that the City of Portland would underground our utility wires before the fates undergrounded me. It was sort of a joke, but no longer.

The overhead wires, like the unread books, will outlive me.

Then there’s my cellphone, a relatively recent invention in my suddenly long lifetime. I have never mastered it. It has menus within menus within menus. It has menus FOR menus. The deceptively small contraption is a veritable thicket of lists with arrows pointing every which way.

A dark confession: I’ve been known to curse aloud at the damnable thing when I’ve been trapped in its maddening electronic labyrinth. That’s bad enough, but recently I had occasion to discover, to my horror, that, labyrinth or no labyrinth, the devilish “little black brick” was working all along. It was carrying my anguished profanities to an innocent friend on the other end of the line.

“Rick,” she asked aghast, “is that you?”

Shamefaced, I confessed it was. I begged her forgiveness and, to her credit, she laughed it off. I hope she meant it.

I now have one of those “senior-friendly” cell phones which is only moderately so. It still has one or two menus tucked inside other menus. But he nice thing about this “simple” phone in addition to its big keypad and extra loud volume, is that I can “block” the menus.

There’s really no need to be led down the maze of “feature” roads, at least at my age. I don’t need an alarm clock in my phone. I already have an alarm clock — and a radio and a calculator and a calendar and a compass. Putting them all in one device has not made my life simpler.

High blood pressure doing what it can do, “smart phones” threatened to simplify my life by simply ending it.

Then again, if that happened, my alma mater’s alumni association, at long last, could quit warning me that I shouldn’t delay about joining.

Death is beyond delays and delaying.

A message for Quaker non-Quakers

I have many friends whom I consider to be Quaker non-Quakers. By that I mean they hold the values of Quakers without knowing it.

There’s part of me that would like to whisper, “Pssst. You are a Quaker non-Quaker.”

There’s another part that tells me to let it be.

First what are the values we share? Quakers call them “testimonies” and they are usually listed as Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community and Equality. They happen to create the acronym “SPICE." Some add Stewardship or Sustainability to the list. Make that “SPICES.”

In these times, each deserves long, deep contemplation and consideration. We need to consider whether we, Quakers and non-Quakers, truly live by these testimonies.

But for me, as a Quaker, there’s more. Quakers add a spiritual dimension to the testimonies. We believe we are “spirit-led” to these values and that the spirit will lead us to incorporate them into our lives.

So while I share the Quaker testimonies with many non-Quaker friends, I also want to explore the spiritual dimension with them as well.

Our secular culture does not invite such exploration. To push into matters of the spirit smacks of unseemly proselytizing. I hear the voice again, “Let it be” (The voice, by the way, sounds suspiciously like John Lennon’s.)

Quaker author Robert Lawrence Smith “speaks my mind” (as Quakers say) when he writes in the introduction to his illuminating and highly accessible book, “A Quaker Book of Wisdom”:

"It is my ever-growing conviction that the compassionate Quaker message badly needs to be heard in today’s complex, materialistic, often unjust, and discriminatory society. Every day brings new public debate over issues Quaker have always addressed: war and peace, social justice, education, health care, poverty, business ethics, public service, the use of world resources. The list goes on....”

Later he says, gently touching on the timeless leadings of the spirit, “To me, Quaker values of simplicity and silent contemplation, truth and conscience, seem more important now than ever before....the basic humanistic Quaker precepts of valuing racial and gender equality, promoting social justice and nonviolence — and, yes sometimes civil disobedience —seem to me to me so modern, so relevant to today’s society, that when I thought about writing this book I was suddenly surprised that no one had written one like it. What particularly struck me is that the Quaker ideals formulated in the Seventeenth Century remain contemporary in every sense, and the basic injunction to ‘let your life speak,’ to live each day in accordance with these beliefs, seems totally untarnished by the passage of time.”

That is exactly the message I want to share with you, Quaker non-Quakers.

For more, much more, on Quakers, go to www.quaker.org.

On emptying pockets

Recently I’ve been trying to decide whether I have too many pockets or too few.

Over the last five years my pockets have bulged beyond baggy with the paraphernalia of my technology-captivated, urban existence.

Cell phone, PDA, credit cards, business cards with their own container, a pen or two, a coin purse, keys (my God, the keys! Two for the house, one for the car, one for a jointly-owned motor scooter, one for my classroom, and one for…well I’m not sure what it’s for but I carry it ‘just in case.’), an old pocket watch and a miniature yet utilitarian Swiss Army knife with tiny, but excellent scissors, plus toothpick, plus tweezers, plus small screwdriver, and, I almost forgot, a knife blade.

Oh, and a small pouch for my hearing aides and batteries. It turns out the infirmities of age require pockets.

Keeping all these items straight can be a minor, verging-on-major, production. I do a lot of pocket checking throughout the day.

Which has led me to wonder what it would be like to have no pockets, or at least empty ones.

Imagine leaving the house for a 30-minute walk empty-pocketed.

Surely this must be some form of modern nakedness.

No keys. (Relax. What are the odds of the house being burglarized in the next half hour?)

No wallet. (No shopping list. Nothing to buy.)

No identification. (I imagine a neighbor finding me sprawled out unconscious in the street. He is scratching his head: “It sure looks like Rick but it can’t be—he’d have some ID on him….”)

No cell phone. (Just like 10 years ago. I did it then, I can do it now.)

No knife. (I’ll trim my toenails later)

No business cards, no PDA. (This walk is for leisure and experimentation, not business)

No hearing aide/battery pouch. (A short walk, well within the life of my batteries.)

Such radical pocket pruning would put me in a very different place…right here in my neighborhood.

One day soon I’ll chance it.

And pocket the experience.