a "neglected" Quaker concern...

You may not have heard of what severe weather is doing to the lives of Native Americans currently living on reservations on the plains.  You may well right now be living with a lot of snow, too, but your plight is likely not as dire.

Read it and mourn. 

As you mourn, click and join in helping both the short and the long term infrastructure development.  In the short term people are in life-threatening physical peril, in the long term infrastructure development will create jobs for those living in the some of the highest unemployment in the world.

There are still Friends engaged with Native American issues, but for most of us the historical Quaker concern over the plight of those the European (ancestors of so many of us)  "settlers" displaced is a vague piece of history that, when we are reminded, we are proud to claim as part of "our" spiritual heritage.

This was once a very big deal for our religious Society although, much like the moral high ground upon which we like to place ourselves in regard to racial and sexual equality, it's a complicated historical picture.  Some of what Quakers did was very good and some things were misguided and put weight on the other side of the scale.

This opportunity, though, is always there for us to put more weight on the very good side of the scale and now is a time more of that very good is critically, urgently needed.

You are not going to be donating to merely maintaining people in a bad situation.  American Indian tribes are making strides forward notwithstanding the lack of resources at their disposal. Supporting this effort is always timely and prevents set backs to progress.

Do not be fooled, by the way:  gambling--the "white buffalo"--has not and will not reverse the poverty into which so many Indians have been locked by our culture's historical genocide.  In so far as it has bestowed "prosperity" on Indian tribes it has not spread that to all tribes, only a few.

Those in the Society of Friends who are still actively engaged with Native issues deserve the long run support of our churches and meetings as American Indians begin to emerge from the dark night through which they have lived the last few hundred years.

Thank you.

Where are you taking me, Little One, Little One?

Shortly after my first daughter was born I realized that she was not something new that was added to my life, on top of what was there, in addition to the rest.

Becoming a parent was not like becoming a stamp collector. It did not indicate a new interest but a new center.

Parenting was now the center of my life and, actually, I also came to know, it was the center in a way my life never had a center, before.

My life was taken apart for me and around this child I had to re-collect and re-structure all those scattered pieces--at least the ones that could be adapted to fit--around this new center. If it didn't fit then out it went. Lucky I was not alone in this.

It was, in the words of a contemporary prophet, about "...what to leave in, what to leave out."

Some of what got "left out" was hard to turn loose of, but that baby was easy to hold on to, necessary to hold on to--for all of the struggle and the difficulty. Putting the baby aside was just not an option.

My father said a time or two that he thought being in the Marine Corps made a man of me but he lived to hear me say that it was really the babies. Whatever I might have looked like before, I become a grown up (insofar as I really have) when the babies showed up.

This is no recent opening to me.

What is new, though, is how this perspective is broadened now that I realize that in a less dramatic and more gradual way the center of my life has become that daily, abiding grace called, by some, Christ. As my children grew so, too, did the "intrusion" of the Spirit into my consciousness, so too did my engagement with and submission to the Inner Light--showing me what needed to be changed in my life, giving me strength to do it and gentle but unremitting grief when I fell (and fall) short.

Just like the babies did.

Slowly, gradually but relentlessly and with a momentum not dictated by me, things that are not consistent with this divine principle that is transforming me are being eliminated--some of them going kicking and screaming and tearfully and painfully. These things just become harder to hold on to than the guide who is at the center of things for me, now, just as turning over and going back to sleep became harder for me to do--less appealing, even--than getting up to tend to a vomiting child.

The work in me is not over, by far. But the list of that which must go is clear to me and the sound of the chipping away is constant. And in joy I can look back at what once I was and forward to that which I can expect to become once God is "done" with me, when there is no "me," at all.

I once heard someone say that it's not about making God part of one's life--it's about making oneself part of God's life.

Little children will show the way, indeed.