Why Quakers should be Vegetarians

This article appeared this month in FJ.   Here is the slightly longer unedited version.

Being a Vegetarian is a Climate Issue                                           By Lynn Fitz-Hugh

I would like to make the case for Quakers becoming vegetarian.  Quakers at one point wore black and white clothing so as not to create a market for dyed clothing because the dying process was so carcinogenic that those working in the industry died young.  Quakers also, over a process of many years came to unity on the practice of owning slaves as inhumane, unjust, and inequitable. Our testimony of simplicity has always called us to own less as a way of not being driven by material attachments or over consumption of our earth’s resources..  John Woolman called us to look to our possessions and removed the seeds of war (and I would add suffering.)  All of these ideas: caring for our ourselves, our fellow human beings, and the earth, lead me to conclude that the modern day application would be for Friends to become vegetarian. 

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I first became a Vegetarian while attending Earlham and I have been a vegetarian, of some stripe now for 4 decades.   I became vegetarian not for health or spiritual reasons or the issue of animal welfare.  (Although after reading Charlotte’s web in childhood I never again ate pork)  I became vegetarian for political reasons. I learned at Earlham that we could end world hunger if we stopped using food to feed cattle consumed by people.

I will briefly describe my journey with vegetarianism to illustrate the point that there are many ways to flexibly hold a witness about the effects of meat production on our environment, animals and our planet.  I grew up in a meat and potatoes kind of family where every meal was meat, carbs and over-boiled veggies. I therefore could not even imagine how someone could or would eat vegetarian.  The first time I had a week of delicious vegetarian meals when I was 21 I was instantly converted.  I knew then that it was possible to eat well without meat.  Nine years later I wound up in a situation where I had to travel a stretch of road dotted with one fast food restaurant after another during dinner hour and then enter a facility for three hours that had no food! The only thing I could find to eat was bean burritos at Taco Time. That was okay for a while but after three months of bean burritos three times a week I thought I would barf if I saw another one!  I reluctantly added fish back into my diet.

For the next 15 years, I only ate meat outside of my house and then infrequently . In order to welcome my meat eating step-son into our house I began to cook chicken and fish at home. My husband at the time, who had been 100% vegetarian for nine years, was amused that I describe myself as vegetarian.  I told him that so far, he had still eaten vastly more meat in his life than I and that would be true for years. After we divorced I stopped eating meat again.   Then I developed some health issues that the doctor said was from not eating enough animal protein.  Currently I eat fish and eggs each once a week which seems to be enough to maintain good health. Apparently, sometimes what we wind up eating is a series of events created by the landscape we travel.  

In my early vegetarian years, I learned quickly that simply mentioning that I was vegetarian brought a strange guilty/defensive reaction from others.  Without my saying anything other than “I don’t eat meat”, people would start offering explanations and justifications for eating meat.  I learned not to make a big deal about my choices because I got tired of listening to people’s guilt. I had not become vegetarian to assume a position of moral superiority over others.  I mention this because some of you as you read this may notice feelings of guilt or defensiveness.  I ask you to try to wrestle with those feelings.  I suspect that Friends who were first asked to give up owning slaves also wrestled with guilt and defensiveness.  I think that each of us will have to do the best we can with the moral issues present at this point in history that involve meat production and consumption.  

As my bumpy path demonstrates I have no morally superior position to speak from.  I am not trying to tell the reader how to eat.  I am however  asking you to exam the moral issues with meat consumption in the age of climate change.  I also think that this is not a black and white no meat no dairy or everything.  Some people choose to be vegan, some vegetarian, some eat no red meat, some are pescatarian eating only fish, and some just eat less meat than they used to.  Change is not easy, but if we hold this loosely we can explore and begin to shift.

Climate Change

The first reason that I would call Friends to vegetarianism is climate change.  Friends overall are well aware of and very concerned about the threat of climate change. Friends have earlier written to FJ about why climate change touches on every one of our testimonies.  Early in my climate activism I started making a comprehensive list of what people could do to lower their carbon footprint.  What blew me away was discovering that one of the biggest reductions people could make was simply cutting out eating meat!   The fertilizer used to create animal feed, the transport of the feed, the amount of feed to produce a comparable amount of animal protein, and the transport of the animal are all very energy intensive activities.  Eating lower on the food chain and eating foods grown organically produces far less carbon.  

There’s yet another drawback to eating animals such as cows and sheep.   Their manure, burping and flatulence deposits large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, and methane is 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon.  I know that sounds like a joke, but it is true.

I have seen various charts showing how much carbon per day/per year a person would save if they didn’t eat meat.  The data doesn’t agree exactly, but they all show HUGE savings.  By one estimation if you cut out eating meat one day a week for a year, you save 700 pounds of carbon, cut it out two days a week  you save 1400 pounds of carbon a year and cut out all meat and you save a whopping 4,900 pounds of carbon a year. By point of comparison switching out one 60-watt bulb saves 100 pounds a year.  

A more conservative chart showed the savings from giving up all meat to be equivalent to giving up driving a Prius. (Some of this depends upon how much meat you were eating to begin with.)  The UN list meat production as 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) production.   What would happen to climate change if we all cut out that 18% of GHS emissions in the next year? This is the point at which I went back to not eating any meat.  The newly released book Drawdown by Paul Hawken’s lists 200 ways for humans to reduce or sequester carbon.  The fourth solution is eating a plant based (non-meat) diet.

Again, if one holds flexibly the goal of eating less meat to achieve more social justice, it is helpful to know the following.  The production of lamb is by far the highest carbon footprint, two times that of beef which is also terrible.   After beef, cheese has a little less than half the footprint of beef (but still high because of how cows are raised in the US), then comes pork, salmon, turkey, tuna…with tuna being half the footprint of pork, and eggs just a bit less than tuna.    Yogurt or tofu has one third the footprint of tuna.  Inexplicably cow milk is lower than even vegetables. (See www.ewg.org       For chart) 

A vegetarian who did not eat cheese, but did eat eggs, yogurt, tofu and milk could get enough protein and produce relatively low GHG emissions. Forty percent of all energy used for industrial agriculture is for fertilizers and pesticides.  Thus organic food systems use 30 to 50% less energy and the soil sequesters about 28% more carbon than industrial-farmed soil.

Clearly being vegan would have the best carbon footprint, but there are significant health issues surrounding eating vegan.  (Hats off to those of you who put in the effort to do it safely.)  There are also vegans who feel that it is indeed perfectly safe and there are conflicting studies about this.  Like all the choices mentioned here eating vegan may work for some though not all.  Each of us needs to find our right choice.   

Peace Testimony

Not killing animals speaks to our testimony of non-violence. Even if you are comfortable with the idea that in the cycle of life some animals eat other animals, I would suggest that if you take even a cursory look at Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), you would be horrified.  The animals are raised and killed in inhumane, crowded and violent ways.   This, at a minimum, is reason to look to pasture raised animals.

Climate change is creating drought and resulting food shortages.  The argument has been made, I feel convincingly, that the war in Syria really began over food shortages.   So the issue of using food to feed production livestock rather than export it to other countries so more people can eat is a peace issue.

Social Justice, Equality and Simplicity

As explained above meat is an energy intensive way of producing protein. Seventy nine percent of farmland is for livestock feed and pastures.  Rich countries have higher levels of meat consumption (and resultingly higher obesity levels).  We could feed 2.9 billion more people if meat were not produced.  One acre of grain produces five times more protein than one acre used to produce meat, and feeds 25 people as opposed to one carnivore.  Meat production is also a much more water intensive way to produce food, and as water becomes more scarce it will also be increasingly more of a resource issue.  Both equity and simplicity testimonies always have been about not living in ways that deprive others of their quality of life.  The idea of “live simply, so others can simply live” is embodied here.

Earth Stewardship

Quite aside from all of the climate change issues mentioned above, CAFO’s (where most meat in the US is produced) are one the greatest contributors to the pollution of local creeks, ponds, rivers and aquifers due to the runoff from animal waste into these water sources.  The way mass crops are produced (most of which in the US are for animal feed) under agribusiness strip the soil of nutrients and do not sequester carbon like organic farming methods do.

So Friends I invite you to take up the challenge of reducing or eliminating your meat consumption!  I would like to see that for our Quarterly, Yearly and annual gatherings like FGC that we try working with our food providers to provide only vegetarian meals.   This would be a great way for Friends to experience delicious and healthy eating, and to support those who are working on such changes.  I invite you to this witness for peace, equality, stewardship and justice.

Mary Dyer's husband

I have a personal sort of relationship to Mary Dyer.   The above famous statue of her was created by Sylvia Shaw Judson, a member of the meeting I grew up in.   A small 2 foot high study that Sylvia had made sat in the entry way to my Meeting.  When I went to Earlham College there was 1 of 3 bigger than life size sculptures of Mary outside the Meeting house - allowing me to get a picture of myself in her lap.  When I look in her face I see Mary Stickney, a member of my Meeting who was the model for the sculpture.  A few years later while in Boston I had this picture taken with Mary. The third and last statute of Mary is at Quaker Center in Philadelphia.  So it has always felt like I  had a personal appreciation for Mary for her courage and as the most famous Quaker martyr in our history.

For those not familiar with the story of Mary Dyer.  Mary was a convinced friend in Puritan Massachusetts during colonial times.  Massachusetts forbade any form of worship but Puritanism, but Mary and many Friends continued to meet for worship.  Eventually she and William  Robinson and Maraduke Stephenson were sentenced to die by hanging for persisting in this practice.  On the gallows the governor stayed her execution and ordered her banished while hanging her two companions.  Mary, feeling still under the command of the leading returned to worship in Boston and to her most likely death.    She was again sentenced to hang and this time did.   This story is well known to most Quakers (and even most American's who paid attention in HS US history class.)

Part of why it is so well known is the amazing quotes from Mary.   She is widely quoted as saying to the marshalls who came to take her to the gallows: "Yea, and joyfully I go. My life is not accepted, neither availeth me, in comparison with the lives and liberty of the Truth and Servants of the living God for which in the Bowels of Love and Meekness I sought you; yet nevertheless with wicked Hands have you put two of them to Death, which makes me to feel that the Mercies of the Wicked is cruelty; I rather chuse to Dye than to live, as from you, as Guilty of their Innocent Blood."

This of course is what always grabbed me about Mary, the joy in her faithfulness, the calm in the face of her own death, the witness to a truth greater than her own life, and a groundedness in the power of God to cause her to go in this spirit to join God.  In fact, I recently heard a Quaker who went to see this statue on the Boston commons, ran into other tourists who were the descendants of Edward Wanton, one of the marshalls who was from their account (and history's) was so moved and awe struck by the power of the palpable spirit present in Mary at her death that he was lead to explore Quakerism and eventually himself become a Friend.

So I must confess that until this month the only thoughts I have had about Mary were admiration for her courage and powerful life of the spirit.  I had a similar reaction to stories about Tom Fox, the modern day Quaker who was traveling with Christian Peacemakers in Iraq with two companions and was kidnapped by Al-Queda and eventually beheaded.   Tom was a peacemaker acting on a leading for peace in the middle east.  He was also deeply loved in his yearly meeting and especially among the Young Friends for whom he had served as a Friendly Adult Presense for a decade.  While horrified, like most people, by the fact that he was beheaded, and deeply saddened by what seemed like the misguidedness of killing what was in reality one who came to help.  I felt primarily proud of the way this Quaker had lived his life.  Later, I came to know some of those who grieved deeply for him and did think about the unintended fall out of one faithfully following a leading.

I have in the past looked more seriously at this "underside" of a leading in the case of Norman Morrison who self-immolated himself at age 31 underneath Robert McNarma's office window in 1965 in protest of all the loss of innocent life in Vietnam.  This caused quite a stir at the time in national media because while people had started getting use to Buddhist monk's immolating themselves in protest of the war, no American had before or after.  I was too young to be aware of his death at the time, but Quakerism was still talking about it when I was old enough to understand. Norman was a Quaker; there had been no clearness committee.   Was this an act of witness or an act of suicide?  But most troubling to me, always, was that Norman had the youngest of his three children, Emily a toddler with him, who he had at the last moments passed off to someone before lighting himself on fire.    As a therapist I can only be horrified at the trauma that surely had to create for his youngest even as she was too small to fully understand the event, and the pain that I instinctively understand was caused to a widow and her three small children.  His wife Anne refused to speak publicly about it for years, not wanting to diminish the witness that he paid for with his very life, but eventually writing a book about it that revealed her deeply conflicted feelings about it and the pain and loss that she lived with.  As a therapist I cannot help but notice the similarities to suicide completers who are wrapped in their pain to the point that they cannot consider the impact and pain caused to their family and friends left behind.

I have always been a big fan of leadings and looked at them as gifts from God and important missions to be carried out in the world.  However, recently when my 18 year old daughter has been called to a series of civil disobedience actions that if gone text book would involve nothing more than an arrest, but if gone wrong could involve serious physical injury if not death....I began to notice the underside of leadings.   There is no promise that God makes that we will be safe, or even alive.   If we are content, as Mary was, to go to our death in God's arm than there is that blessing, but there is no certain protection.   Somehow as I have realized this something has gone a bit upside down in me regarding leadings and the admiration of faithfulness.

Suddenly I have asked myself "what about Mary Dyer's husband?"  I knew Mary was married, but it is with surprise that I realize I had never considered what did he go through? how did he feel?  In the two more contemporary cases mentioned above, I have given it some thought because of hearing Friends who knew the individuals talk of the pain of the families.   In Tom's case I still felt it was faithfulness, in Norman's I have more questioned whether mental illness wore the cloak of leading? So I was moved to do some research about Mary's husband.  William himself was not recorded as a Friend.  I learned that the first time she was sentenced to hang he wrote the Governor begging for her life, and it is widely believed that this is indeed why she was spared.   He did indeed write the gov. the second time as well, but this time his request was not granted.   Interestingly, in the second letter to the govenor he said of his wife's actions  "it is a kind of madness".  Which has left me to wonder: martyr or crazy person? Two sides of the same coin?  Simply a point of perspective?  It is after all often said that the line between spirituality and madness is a thin line.   Emotion and spirituality dwell in the same part of the brain.

As my daughter said:  "but the families are not given the same leading"   Thus I am left to wonder why we never talk about William, Mary Dyer's husband....and how do we as Friends given adequate attention and support to the loved one's of those who are lead into dangers way.  Among early Friends when one was called to ministry outside of their community, in confirming the leading the Meeting was agreeing to provide support to their family: to come bale the hay and watch the children, etc. Meetings gathered funds for suffering for those who were arrested for worshipping in the manner of Friends.   But what support could possibly be have extended to a martyr's husband that could mend his wounds?

However, the reason Mary is so famous in American history is that it widely believed that it was the two forks of those who had come to the colonies to escape religious persecution in their countries of origin, and then the playing out of this same persecution against other American in the Massachusetts colonies, against Mary and her 2 Quaker companions, that lead the founding fathers to include freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights of the American Constitution.   So it is not a hard argument to make that the Mary was lead to an act that would change history for the protection of thousands over centuries to come.  Something to take joy in indeed and a rich accomplishment of a lifetime.   Maybe it does take a certain kind of madness to over come the survival instinct and to make one's entire life's meaning about a certain witness?

Corporate Witness

"There is a journey that some follow by starting in prayer and others follow by starting in action.  It is the witness of our tradition that those who are naturally inclined to begin in prayer will eventually feel led into outward action, and those who are naturally inclined to begin with action will eventually feel called more deeply into prayer.  However, it is sometimes the case that those who pray do not act, and those who act do not pray.  There is an unfortunate tendency among some Quakers to separate prayer and action rather than to integrate them."
Daniel Snyder   Quaker Witness as Sacrament p.22

I encountered this quote recently in a worship sharing.   I am reminded of the idea: does something arise from an inward motion or an outward motion?  When said this way it is clear that either motion can be the motion towards a leading.   That certainly has been my experience.   At age 16 when someone handed me a flyer describing the despicable conditions of farm workers, I thought: "Someone should do something about this".   Then I heard a voice that said: "And who is someone?" which resulted in several years of activism on this issue. This would be the example of an outward motion.

When I was 21 walking through the Smithsonian museum, having somewhere on a back burner a wonderment about whether I should take part in an act of civil disobedience designed to testify against cutting the safety net from under the poor, I had a sort of mystical experience walking through the museum.  Panorama after panorama showed the lifestyle and technology and struggles and advances of Americans throughout its history.  By the end I sat down on a bench and felt as if I was in a covered Meeting- I felt powerfully the eternal struggle of humans to provide a better life for the next generation and that at its base was a struggle for goodness and for uplifting fueled by Love. Somehow in that same Centeredness I knew I would act the next day in solidarity for the struggle for people to have basic needs meet and lives of dignity.   This was an inward motion.

Although as the last example shows the world may take us to prayer, and the deep seatedness of the testimonies, of basic values that point us towards the Truth as we currently understand it, makes even the encounter with the outward injustices of the world, a nudge to return to deeper truths.

I have to say growing up inside Quakerism I saw that Friends I knew fell easily into categories: the social justice Friends for whom that was always what motivated them and the spiritual Friends who gave beautiful ministry but seemed never to take social action.   It is unfortunate that in modern day Quakerism that which was bound inextricably in early Quakerism is so easily divided.  However, in those Friends who have most deeply touched me and who are often found to be "weighty Friends" I find that those to threads are interwoven.

Recently, I have heard people from many different Meetings lamenting that many Friends within the Meeting do "good works" but that the Meeting has no shared social witness, or action that it does together.   Sometimes this is accompanied with a wondering of how they could get this?  (With a wistfulness that I liken to wondering how one could get some of those magic beans that Jack got?)  My feeling is that we are forgetting our own history.  If one examines the history of  Quaker corporate witness: to worship freely, to not swear oaths, to oppose slavery, to support Women's equality, and to support Civil rights within the US - you will notice that each of those things began with the witness and leading of one or a small handful of Friends.  Those Friends were NOT always happily received by their fellow Friends, and were controversial in their time, and yet they also did exert substantial influence which grew with....well the power of Truth, until a 100 years later Friends could stand in unity against slavery, or support a 100 year movement for women to get the vote, etc.

It strikes me that once again the influence of American liberalism within Quakerism is a sort of tolerant "We all have the freedom to do whatever we want, and we don't have to require anything of anyone else".  So therefore we are free to pursue our individual good works but it is considered annoyingly inappropriate and perhaps self-centered to insist that others MUST/SHOULD unite with our view of the truth.   The problem with this is that early Quakerism believed there was A Truth, one that God called us too.  They saw themselves as in community for the purpose of raising up that Truth to the general society.  Thus corporate witness meant not giving a member a pat on the back for good works, but having to discern with that Friend if they were bring Truth for the whole group.   I am not sure that in our current use of clearness process or business process that we still expect to find corporate Witness.

"For one thing, the legacy of John Woolman invites us to be open to recovering more fully the collective dimensions of meeting for worship.  We are summoned to "dwell deep".  For another, we are invited to see our activism as a species of worship.   For activists, this is an invitation to root our activism more fully in the transforming power of meeting for worship and the love of God we encounter there.  For those who are more contemplative than an activist orientation, it challenges us to broaden our understanding of the boundaries of the meetinghouse, and the boundaries of worship itself."
Michael Birkel  "Mysticism and Activism: On learning from John Woolman  a talk at SEYM

 I close with this quote also from the worship sharing (special thanks Christine Hall) because I love Birkel's phrase activism as a species of worship - because I think of the times like on the bench in Smithsonian where my activism brought me into worship or the recent EQUAT action where 100's of Friends sat in PNB banks and prayed that they stop funding mountain top removal. And I know that without my community choosing to serve as an anchor to my activism, I am in danger of being swept into the ego, strategy, power plays, etc that can live in the world of activism.  I am challenged to keep foremost in me the Outward Motion of God's Love as the energy from which I act.   This also challenges me to think about which of the many faces of the Divine that I know: Creator, Lover, parent, Shepard, Comforter, am I connecting with and witnessing to when I act in the world for truth and justice?

Hat Honor

It is fairly well known among Quaker's that early Friends refused to doff their hat to those of higher class an offense for which one could be jailed. Friends did this, as well as using differently thee and thou, as a way of making the point that we are Children of God and equal in the Creator's eyes.

I think that mostly modern Friends think of this as another cool or exemplary piece of Quaker history.  However, I wonder how many of us have stopped to actually feel out what this really would be like.  Imagine standing in front of someone who in these modern times has way more status than you and then imagine deliberately doing something which you know will offend them, and in fact will probably get you arrested.  Yeah, you may notice as do I, that this takes some nerve!

Actually it takes faith.  It means that in a non-creedal, non-doctrinaire way that one takes action not as an expected ritual action, but as active witness to a Holy One that you are in active communion with.  I am reminded of the feelings I had while taking part in an active civil disobedience on the White House lawn during the Reagan administration.  I had felt lead to this action and felt engulfed in Light in a most intense way as we sat praying on the lawn.  It felt literally sort of amusing to me when the secret service men read us an ordinance against sitting on the law and ordered us to leave.  I was amused that mere mortal men thought they had any power over me as I sat literally covered in Divine Light.  It seems to me that in the Peace Testimony when it says "we act in the Life and Power that takes away the occasion of all war" that it is this same intense Life and Power that they are describing.  And I think that when early Friends refused to doff their hats that they were faithful to that same Presence.....otherwise it was just a lot of nerve!

Recently I was at an action that was some thing between a demonstration/street theater and an arrestable act of civil disobedience.  A group of twenty entered Ameritrade bank which has funded the XL pipeline and inflated an pipeline replica (made of black garbage bags) and read a declaration condemning the bank for its part in destruction of life as we know it on this planet and imploring it to stop.  One person had to keep reading while the security guard literally jumped up and down in his face, while another person had to try to reason with the guard asking for time to finish reading.  The rest of us sang or chanted to distract or emphasize the point and we all left before the police arrived (although standing out side legally protesting as they arrived and left.)  But as the reader continued to read while the bank manager freaked out I was reminded of hat honor.

On one level if you think of it as getting arrested for not taking your hat off it seems ridiculous.  On another level if you think of it as making the point that all people are equal it is an extremely important point to make where ever that arises.  And yet today, in the totally non-arrestable action of simply what we buy and what we don't buy we are confronted with: bananas, teas, coffees, sugars and chocolates which are planted and harvested instead of food for the citizenry in the countries that provide them to us for dirt cheep.  Also our chocolate and the metals mined for our cell phones are made by child labor (sometimes slave labor) and yet we still buy these items.

We read in the papers the slow chipping away of our civil liberties, our right to privacy, workers rights, etc.  Are any of these important to us on  a level of our testimony's for social justice?  Corporations continue to heat our planet in a thousands ways.  What feels important enough to you to stand your ground for?  To not doff your hat for?  To risk arrest for?  For what will you be Holy Obedient?

Living in that Life and Power

I have long felt the most fascinating phrase in the peace testimony is not the famous part of "All bloody Principles & Practices, we do utterly deny, with all outward wars & strife, & fightings with outward Weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever. And this is our Testimony to the whole world."  but rather the phrase, "We live in that Life and Power which takes away the occasion for all war."   This second phrase to me speaks so powerfully a real testimony of faith, a witness to the whole world of a transformative and overwhelming power and rock upon which early Friends found the strength not just to refuse conscription but to stand non-violently in the face of harms way in any number of other witnesses to the world.  It also describes the peace of living in God's Life.  It calls the listener forward to want that life.  And I have sometimes wondered, feared, whether we modern Friends have lost hold of that Life and Power.

Recently an email came into my inbox entitled: "Towards a testimony on Gun Violence." Oh how exciting I thought.  I opened it in anticipation of something that calls out in a similar way to the listener to forsake the violence of Guns.   Imagine my surprise when instead I read what I can only describe as a policy proposal for Friends to endorse existing proposals for gun registration.  I was quite disappointed.  Now mind you I have no objection whatsoever to gun registration; it is a logical and much overdue step.  Certainly it is strategically the next step this country could/should take.  But is it a Quaker Testimony? Certainly not.  In fact I was moved to write the committee writing the minute saying if it was presented at Yearly Meeting that I would most probably rise to oppose it as long as it used the word testimony because as such it violated my sense of what a testimony is.

I was raised with the understanding that our testimonies are different than creedal statements because they are statements of "the truth as we know it now."  I was told that the Truth is known experientially and that we struggle as a community to hold up to each other the truth and to find it together and reach unity on the Truth, that we act as a corporate body when we recognize together a shared Truth. Well Friends, it cannot be that the greatest truth we have after 350 years as pacifists is that guns should be registered!  When we say that we live in the Life and Power that takes away the occasion for all war...do we not also feel it takes away the occasion for violence?  Do we not feel that while we may fail, that we are called to live as nonviolently as we can?  I assume that means that little ol' Quaker ladies are not packing pistols in their purses, nor do Quaker men keep guns in the bedside table.   I think we are called to put our faith in God for safety and to live in ways that make no one intent on hurting us, and to speak to that of God in the stranger who may come with ill intent, and to suffer an injury if need be rather than to inflict one.  This, I believe, would be consistent with the Peace Testimony.  And in fact when we look at the first part that I quoted: "all outward wars & strife, & fightings with outward Weapons, for any end"  (emphasis added) it would seem pretty clear.   A gun is an outward weapon and it is rejected for all ends or means.

Now I realize that in proclaiming to the world that they should lay down their guns and try to live nonviolently that this will seem dangerous to some, laughable to others, way too idealistic to be "practical," a threat to the Second Amendment, etc.  But why should that stop us from proclaiming the truth?  After all the peace testimony itself is seen to be absurdly impractical and idealistic to most of the world and has for three and half centuries and that has not stopped us!  In fact, when we first suggested to the world that they give up slaves that was seen as unrealistic (something that we had first had work a century on within our own ranks) and yet it was useful to the world that we held out that idea, or the idea of women's suffrage, or same sex marriage.  Eventually the world sometimes catches up to idealists.  It still has not come to accept the idea that it is wrong to fight wars and yet I don't see us laying down that testimony any time soon.

So instead it is time to note that if a testimony is the "truth as we know it so far" that it is indeed now time to expand the peace testimony.  I think it is time for us to tell the world that we are called to that Life and Power that takes away the occasion for all violence against other humans.  That we utterly deny the use of any weapon against another child of God and that we are called to walk in struggle for understanding, love, and compassion which can lead us into peace with others when there is conflict.

A Matter of Convenience

A commercial crackles over the radio...it is presenting the idea that a man proposes over the phone and then his cell phone cuts out so he does not get his intends response, thus destroying the engagement.  The commercial makes clear that life will only be good if one has the right cell phone service.  In fact a myriad of ads tell Americans on a daily basis that our lives will only be good and "right" if we have convenience, if it is easy.  The message line over and over again is our lives are supposed to be easy.

Right now the globe requires of all people living in first world countries that we live less energy intensive lives which means less convenient lives.  Several years ago my family peace group decided as a group that we needed to stop using plastic bags in stores because they are made of petroleum.  This meant needing to own and bring to the store our own bags.  Now that sounds SO simple right?  Wrong.  I discovered keeping them in the car was easy, but time and time again I would get in the store to realize I left them in the car.  If I was not all the way in the checkout line I would make myself go back out and get them which eventually ingrained habit. 

But I was amazed how hard I found the habit to make.  I realized I had been RAISED to never have to prepare for going to the store - to just have what I needed there.  It is the same with using real products over paper plates, cups, plastic silverware and paper napkins or paper towels.  All these things waste resources and can easily be replaced with real items....All it requires is preplanning and the willingness to clean the items afterwards.

My favorite example of this engrained American way of thinking is a friend of mine decided she was going to start a campaign to get people to bring their own mugs to coffee shops.  She went to her favorite coffee shop to ask them something about how much the cups cost them and while she was there ordered a coffee. She then looked down and realized she was drinking out of a paper cup that the coffee she had just ordered was put in!

In a support group I later joined to look at Climate Change issues a friend joked:   "Hi my name is Rick and I'm a carbon addict"  at first we laughed at this 12-step parody.  But very quickly we began to realize it is NO joke!  We are addicted and it actually requires focused attention and support to change the life time American habit of believing we are entitled to convenience.  In that group I struggled to reduce my driving by riding a bike more.  (I have mainly failed.)  It is so hard for me to decide that it is ok to spend more time getting around because it is so much quicker and thus convenient to dash somewhere in my car.  Opps I forgot an ingredient for dinner and now it is half cooked and almost dinner time; just jump in the car and go get that ingredient.  A 10 block drive each direction for a can of one item.   We do this sort of thing all the time, doe it really make sense? Do I want the planet melted for a quick can of beans, or for the right to throw away my napkin?

Several years after my peace group decided to switch to carrying our own bags,  (I now have a nylon one folded up the size of a wallet in my purse at all times) my city first had a referendum to abolish plastic bags.  The petroleum industry actually spent X number of  dollars to defeat the referendum claiming it disadvantaged the poor.  A few years later the city council, not to be as easily bought, passed a law outlawing plastic bags after July lst.

The second week of July I encountered an old woman running through the parking lot back to the check out line with her plastic bags in hand:  “Not yet a habit” she cheerfully called out.  I asked the cashier how this was going.  He said: “Some people are fine and some are really mad”. At Christmas I got to witness a grown man having a tantrum in the store because the cashier could not give him a bag.  American addiction to convenience is not always pretty!  What will we have to feel if life is not always easy?

Most recently my sweetheart has challenged me to look at being completely vegetarian.  I was completely vegetarian for 10 years and partially vegetarian for some two decades more.  I added fish back in as a matter of convenience.  I was driving three times a week along a hwy where I had to purchase my dinner and it was littered with only fast food restaurants.  After a year of bean burritos three times a week I could not look at one without feeling slightly sick, so I added fish back in.  For years and years I ate meat only outside of my home in restaurants because it was hard (read inconvenient) to find restaurants with vegetarian options.  (In foreign cities it often requires careful internet research ahead of time.)  However eating no meat is the carbon equivalent to going from a gas guzzler to a Prius. I must once again look at this peculiar American obsession and feeling of entitlement to convenience. Eating no meat is the greatest reduction in carbon most Americans could make.  Since I have been in the business for the last few years of encouraging Americans to reduce their carbon foot print, it certainly makes my witness more integral.  So for New Years I will eat a ceremonious last fish and then stop eating all meat.

 "How inconvenient."  Good thing Al Gore named it an inconvenient truth that our planet is melting.  Which thing is ultimately more inconvenient?