In this week’s Fruit of the Vine, Barbara Mann writes about the lessons she learned while caring for baby birds. She wrote yesterday about the nest her husband brought home “with four speckled, light blue eggs. He was weed-whacking in the gully below our farm and found this surprise. He thought it had fallen out of a tree and been abandoned.” Later, the eggs would hatch, and Barbara briefly shares that “some even traveled to Seattle with us, staying warm from my body heat together in half of a plastic Easter egg with cotton.”
This morning, reflecting on Ecclesiastes 3:1-10, Barbara shares that caring for others – whether baby birds or people – “can often be risky.” An elementary school teacher, Barbara writes of the loss of a rabbit that had lived in her classroom for four years. “She was a lot of work to keep and transport, but she enriched our lives.” Barbara also writes of the loss of her sister 12 years ago, a loss that never goes away. Barbara says it has increased her sensitivity to loss, it has increased her awareness of how she carries grief. “When I freely grieve, feeling deeply the loss that I have experienced, it opens up the possibility to feel joy more keenly in the future. If I wall myself off from my emotions, I decrease my capacity to feel both pain and joy.”
Tomorrow Barbara writes more of suffering. On Wednesday she recounts her efforts to feed the baby birds and how it prompted her to think about the kind of nourishment she needs to flourish. On Thursday she writes of how it can feel crazy to work at something you know will surely fail. And yet you go on.
Maybe you’d like to hear the rest of Barbara’s story or any of the stories we share each day in Fruit of the Vine. You can find a print subscription to Fruit of the Vine in our bookstore. We also have an inexpensive digital version that comes right to your email inbox each morning.
While you’re at the bookstore, take time to look through our discount books. At the end of July, we go through our shelves and mark down all the titles we’d like to move out of inventory. Nearly 15 percent of those books have found new homes this month, which means that as of today, we still have nearly 200 titles marked down by 40 percent or more.
Finally, Barbara offers a simple prayer: “Help me as I risk loving others.”
In Ecclesiastes 3:10, the writer claims, “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.” I think we help one another to carry that burden by risking love.
Eric Muhr
Face to Face
Quaker publishing is a niche market, so our books sell in smaller quantities than those released in other categories. It’s forced us to do things differently. Our primary publishing strategy, for instance, has been to focus our efforts not on books that will make a splash (we don’t have the marketing power or distribution networks for that) but on titles that will hold their value for years to come.
Case in point: T. Vail Palmer Jr. A year ago, we released the first title in his three-volume masterwork on Friends history, polity, and theology. Face to Face: Early Quaker Encounters with the Bible. The second volume – A Long Road: How Quakers Made Sense of God and the Bible – will be available this fall. In the meantime, reviews of Face to Face are just starting to come in.
Stuart Masters at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre writes of Palmer’s assertion that early Friends “read the Scriptures in an empathetic way, entering imaginatively into the lives and stories of biblical characters. Rejecting a legalistic approach, they focused instead on an immersion in story, making them pioneers of narrative theology.”
Masters writes that Palmer’s claims appear “to contradict a widely held view that it was the direct inward teaching of Christ that constituted the foundational experience of early Friends.... Could it be that it was precisely the direct inward experience of the living Word that inspired Friends to read the Bible empathetically ... and engendered the dynamic interaction between spiritual experience and biblical narrative?”
Tom Paxson writes in a Friends Journal review that Face to Face is “an investigation of various ways Quakers have read and used the Bible from the beginning of the movement down through the great separations of the late 1820s.” Paxson continues, “Friends were not and are not immune to notional currents in the larger society in which they or we find ourselves. Palmer gives due attention to this and shows how the influence over the centuries of Restoration, Quietist, Enlightenment, and Evangelical modes of thinking influenced Quakers’ readings and uses of the Bible and their understanding of Quaker faith and practice generally.”
Paxson points out that Face to Face grapples with important and interesting questions:
- How did earlier generations of Friends read and use the Bible?
- How was it that in spite of the diversity within the Bible regarding God’s apparent encouragement and approval of war, mass killing, and the like, early Friends were both deeply informed by scripture and yet took “pioneering positions on matters such as war, women’s ministry, and justice”?
- How could later seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Friends read the Bible so differently from one another without these differences separating them or disrupting their friendships?
- What can we learn about reading the Bible and about community from earlier generations of Friends?
Masters claims that Palmer’s work on the empathetic hermeneutic is both valuable and a basis for further scholarship. Paxson calls it “a compelling depiction of important aspects of Quaker history.”
This is a book I think every Friends church should make available for book studies, small groups, and individuals who want to know more about Quaker history. You can find it in the Barclay Press Bookstore.
I send out this newsletter almost every week, and there’s a clickable link over in the right margin – Share Stories Change Lives. It takes you to a donation page where you can support the work of Barclay Press. Your donations make it possible for us to take on small but significant projects like Face to Face. Thank you!
Eric Muhr
Broken pipes
In this morning’s Fruit of the Vine, Priscilla Hochhalter reflects on Paul’s plea in Philippians 4:2 for Euodia and Syntyche “to be of the same mind in the Lord.” We don’t know for certain the source of their conflict, and maybe, for our purposes, that’s not important. What matters, according to Priscilla, is that “the two women . . . had split apart and were leaking out damage.”
I have a friend who for years has been reminding me that conflict is “a dangerous opportunity.” When we engage one another on the point of our disagreement, there is the potential that we might uncover and resolve some hidden source of dysfunction. The engagement, though, creates friction. Not only do we risk hurting one another in our disagreement, but there may also be danger for anyone close enough to feel the heat.
Priscilla uses a plumbing problem from her own kitchen as a metaphor for what happens when we’re not in unity: “Pipes are meant to fit together and work as a network.” Which might illustrate why “Jesus prayed his followers would ‘be one’” (John 17:20-23). When the pipes in Priscilla’s kitchen “were detached, it was amazing how much water . . . leaked. The cleanup took longer than the fix.”
Is there a way for us to stay together when we disagree? The answer is yes, but there’s a catch. If there isn’t mutual agreement that the relationship matters, forcing people together won’t resolve the problem. It just increases the friction.
I’ve been thinking about the role Barclay Press might play in helping people to come together, and in supporting the work of reconciliation and renewal. There are a few things we’re already doing.
Each day we provide a short, first-person reflection in Fruit of the Vine. These devotional pieces are one of the ways our shared stories help us to grow in our sense of who all is part of this family of Friends from across the country and around the world. You can find a print subscription to Fruit of the Vine in our bookstore. We also have an inexpensive digital version that comes right to your email inbox each morning.
Our Illuminate curriculum – starting next month – is different from previous years in that it has a little less commentary and nearly three times as many questions for discussion and reflection. I’m convinced that one of the best ways to bring people together is to get them focused on and talking about the Bible. The questions are open-ended, designed to challenge assumptions, and written to help small-group participants find safe ways to share their stories.
Additionally, we’re bringing out more books and pamphlets in the next year than in any year in our recent history. We’re re-releasing several small collections of essays and talks on Quaker polity and theology. We’ll be presenting some new poetry, a series of studies, a history, and a volume on Friends’ views over the centuries on the nature of God as well as their understandings of the atonement. If you’re interested in supporting this work, you can click on the Barclay Press link in the right margin of this letter and donate through Paypal.
Finally, there are a lot of things that Barclay Press isn’t doing. At least not yet. Some of these might be projects we just haven’t thought of. Some are beyond our capabilities. But I trust God has a purpose for Barclay Press and for us as Friends. Because there are a lot of broken pipes in the world. A lot of dangerous opportunities.
Eric Muhr