Quaker Selfies with "Finding God in the Verbs"

"So good, I wish I'd written it myself"
--  D. Elton Trueblood

George Fox

Richard M. Nixon

Rufus Jones

"He's my second favorite Quaker author"
-- Jessamyn West

"It's poetic" -- John Greenleaf Whittier

Lucretia Mott

Join the "Quaker Book Circle" by getting your own copy -- just click here.  

President Herbert Hoover
trying to stimulate the economy

Six Cheerful Couplets on Death: Poem

Six Cheerful Couplets on Death
by Michael Blumenthal


Most things won't happen, Larkin said,
But this one will: We will be dead.

The saddest thing, in each context,
Is knowing that we could be next.

Some take the bus, some take the train,
Some die in sleep, the rest in pain

But of one thing we can be sure:
All die imperfect, each impure

Some wishing that they had been better,
Others worse, but no one deader.

Shoes left, like Buddhists, at the door:
Those won't be needed anymore.

"Six Cheerful Couplets on Death" by Michael Blumenthal, from No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012. © Etruscan Press, 2012. From the Writers Almanac. (buy now)

"A Girl's Best Friend" -- Anglican Version

This is very clever -- and delightful. I would love to see what would be the Quaker version of "A Girl's Best Friend."

What Would THIS Jesus Say? A Caption Contest

"I tell you, Trump, it is easier for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God than to find a place to park my Rolls in Manhattan..."

Add your contribution as a comment!

The DIabetic Dive: A Light Hearted Blog

I thought some folks who read Holy Ordinary might be interested in knowing that my Quebecois friend Chantale and I have started a new blog called The Diabetic Dive. It's an often light-hearted look at the "lows" and "highs" of living with diabetes. There are humorous stories and pictures contributed by Chantale, blog readers, and me. We also have a Facebook group called "The Diabetic Dive."

Our tagline is that the blog is "Written by professional diabetics and writers Chantale Perron and Brent Bill, authors of the forthcoming No More Lines: And Other Tricks for Making Diabetes Work for You"

If you are a diabetic, know a diabetic, or just enjoy light-hearted stories, I think you'd enjoy the site!

-- Brent

To The Left of Elias Hicks

... that's what I found out I was whilst "e-talking" to my friend Haven Kimmel (who's new novel Iodine is a must read). She pointed out that while looking up Jessamyn West's entry on Wikipedia she was led to "American Quakers" and said laughing, "Look! In this column is my buddy Brent, and right across from him is Elias Hicks!"

Of course I wanted to know if I was on the right or left of Hicks and Haven kindly pointed out that I was on the left. I loved it (though I doubt that Elias or my Evangelical Quaker grandmother do) -- a "pastorized" Quaker (as my college prof T. Canby Jones called me) to the left of the namesake of the liberal Friends movement.

Of course, that set me to wonderin' (I often go a'wonderin') where I was in relation to other folks? To the right of Jesus ... or left? To the left of Moses or the right? To the right of Teddy Roosevelt ... wait, that couldn't be!

Then I got to thinking how unhelpful those designations were. Left, right, liberal, conservative -- compared to what? What's the standard? And who gets to set it? I have a sneaky suspicion that the standard-setters are not people I'd find particularly trustworthy -- using their biases to set the "norm" (as if I wouldn't!).

So I finally decided, I am neither left nor right of anybody. I am just who I am -- someone who's trying to follow the way of Jesus the best he knows how to. That's about all I can manage.

-- Brent

PS But I still love being left of Hicks!

The Chick Magnet & Wildlife

I ran out of gas today. Well, not me, my mower. So I loaded up the gas cans in the Chick Magnet and headed to town. "The Chick Magnet" is the name of our old farm truck (tri-owned by me w/ two other guys). It's a 1990 Chevy S-10 with tinted windows, alarm system, chromed wheels, honkin' stereo and a bunch of other stuff. It's also got painting peeling off, rust everywhere, some major dents in the bed, and a host of bumper stickers holding the tailgate together ("You can no more win a war than you can an earthquake;" "Genuine VW Parts, Dude;" "I love Old Baldy," and more). You know it's a farm truck because you have know certain tricks about it -- like the keys aren't really necessary most of the time, the doors have to be closed a certain way if you want them to latch, the mud in the wheel wells is from 4 different fields, and stuff like that.

As a farm truck, it doesn't get driven all the time. Mostly to haul wood from a field after splitting or running to the hardware store for parts -- that sort of thing.

Anyhoo, I loaded it up and headed to town. When I got out at the gas station, I heard a strange buzzing. Loud. I started filling the gas cans and could still here the buzzing. Joined by a bird chirping at me from somewhere. I looked around the canopy over me for the bird and didn't see it. Then I decided to put some gas in the Chick Magnet. I opened the door covering the gas cap and the source of the buzzing was revealed -- a bunch of angry wasps swarmed out. As did I -- swarmed out of the neighborhood of the gas tank. After most of them dispersed, I went back and saw they had built a next right on top of the gas cap. No wonder they were buzzing -- they'd just taken a five mile trip in a beat up old truck. So I cleared them out, got gas and headed home.

When I got home and shut off the truck, I heard that bird again. Loud. Inside the truck. Remember what I said about shutting the doors just right? Well, somehow a birdie had built a nest inside the truck. Up inside the heater. Which explained why the air conditioning didn't seem to be putting out much air. So I opened the doors and I think the bird flew away whilst I finished mowing.

The oil needs changed in the Chick Magnet -- but I'll tell ya, I'm really a-scared to open the hood! Maybe a bobcat living in there.

I gotta drive that truck more often.

--Brent

Old Age -- Officially

It's finally happened. I'm officially a geezer. No, I didn't have a birthday recently. No I did not reach any "milestone" this year. The only way I know it's official is because I have now been quoted on the AARP website in an article titled "50 Reasons to Love Being 50+." I'm #29 -- no, not my age (that's highly classified but is somewhere between 57 and 59), just after Paul Newman (not bad placement!).

I knew this was coming because earlier this summer Lynne Meredith Schreiber called and interviewed me about spirituality for people over 50 for Modern Maturity magazine's celebration of AARP's 50th anniversary. Still, for someone who still "sees" himself as 20ish with hair, this is quite a shock. And yet, after reading the other 49 reasons life at my age is good, I'm begin to relish my new elder status. While when younger I always hoped to be on the cover of Rolling Stone, to be quoted inside Modern Maturity is not all bad.

And I hope #43 is true (and that I can convince Nancy that #8 needs some testing to make sure it is true!).

-- Brent

Snakes...

Indiana Jones: There's a big snake in the plane, Jock.

Jock: Oh, that's just my pet snake Reggie.

Indiana Jones: I hate snakes, Jock. I hate 'em.

I concur. Nancy likes 'em and feels bad whenever we find one that got caught by one of the mowers or the the bushhog. Me? Well, I know I should feel bad for one of God's creatures (although I seem to recall some verses in Genesis that don't put them in too kindly of a light) that encountered a spinning blade, but... I'm with Indiana Jones on this one.

I thought of that when my dear sister July (actually her name is Julie -- but I call her July and she calls me... well, that's for another post) sent me the following story from the Salt Lake City Tribune. She knows my love of snakes -- and, at first, I thought that's why she sent it to me. Then I saw another connection...

Unpleasant surprise
Roy woman shocked to find snakes in parcel
By Erin Alberty The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 06/27/2008 06:09:58 AM

Gaye Hurst refuses to enter pet stores because of her fear of snakes.

If she sees a picture of a snake, she folds the page so she does not have to look at it. A Halloween haunted house once had to stop operations, turn on the lights and escort Hurst outside because she panicked when she saw a python among the attractions, she says.

Now the Roy woman is reeling from the discovery of two large snakes that apparently escaped a flooded farm in the Midwest by slithering into a package delivered to her home Wednesday.

Hurst, 55, had ordered an oxygen generator from an Indiana company for her glass-blowing hobby, she said. She took the parcel to her living room and was pulling bubble wrap out of the box when she noticed what appeared to be a hose attachment. Her cat took great interest. On closer examination, her husband, James, discovered the "hose" was a 4-foot snake. "Just leave it alone," Gaye Hurst told her husband. "We don't know what kind of snake it is. It's from Indiana."

Hurst said she called 911 and begged dispatchers to send police and the National Guard. "They probably thought I was kidding," she said.

State wildlife officers arrived to removed the snake when James Hurst noticed movement inside the base of the oxygen generator. A second snake was coiled in the appliance, Gayle Hurst said.

Scientists suspect the snakes are black rat snakes - nonvenomous snakes common in Indiana, said Mark Hadley, spokesman for the state Division of Wildlife Resources. It appears they fed on a piece of foam inside the machine, which was shipped from Unlimited Oxygen in Mooresville, Ind., on June 20, Hurst said.

Staff at the Unlimited Oxygen said a barn near the company's warehouse had become swamped during recent flooding in the Midwest. A company spokeswoman said the snakes likely were displaced and took refuge in the generator.

Biologists planned to bring the snakes to Salt Lake City today to confirm their species and decide whether they may be kept in Utah as pets, Hadley said. If not, they likely will be shipped and released in a state where the species is native. ealberty@sltrib.com

Ah, it's so typical of us wily Hoosier to ship our snakes to other places to get 'em out of our hair (well, not mine personally -- having none). Dan Quayle and Dan Coats and a few other political types come to mind -- send them to the snakepit in DC.

But enough of the political wise-cracks. The story above just makes me proud to live close to Mooresville -- home of the Indiana state flag, John Dillinger, Zydeco's World Famous Cajun Restuarant, and inter-snake commerce department.

[Upon opening the Well of the Souls and peering down into it]

Sallah: Indy, why does the floor move?

Indiana Jones: Give me your torch. [Sallah does, and Indy drops it in] Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?

Yuckkkk!

--Brent

The Newly Discovered History of Amish Rock and Roll

Not too long ago, my friend Carrie Newcomer and I were on tour together (well, actually, we appeared at one place together). While together, we put our heads together and discovered that we had both been working on the same research project -- the heretofore little known phenomenon of Amish rock and roll.

Now many people know Carrie as an outstanding singer/songwriter and me as a passable writer. But they don't know that we both PhD's in music ethnology from the Berlin Conservatory of Music (online, distance learning division) located in Berlin, North Dakota. And we have a special interest in historic peace church music (Quaker -- very, very, very quiet with few lyrics, for example).

The Amish are, of course, are loosely affiliated with the historic peace churches. And so we began looking into their music -- especially the music of the youth. What we found astounded us. That is that the Amish have had an amazing influence on American Rock and Roll.

Most of us know the Amish as a rather closed (to put it mildly) sect of pious buggy-driving believers and eschew electricity. They live in a strict society, under tight control of their family and close-knit community. But then there's "rumspringa." When they turn 16, Amish teenagers are allowed the freedom to explore the customs of the outside "English" world before deciding whether to join the Amish church for life or leave the community altogether.

During this period, many of their youth have formed clandestine rock and roll bands and have rocked forth with a wide range of songs. Many of these songs were discovered by "the English," given slightly different lyrical phrasing, and been recorded by rock and roll stars as diverse as "The Beach Boys," "The Doors," The Rolling Stones," and more.

While the reader may find that hard to believe, Carrie and I (prior to publishing our findings in a scholarly journal) are herewith listing some of our findings -- and inviting others to contribute songs they may have discovered in their listening.

"Amish Girls"

Well Mennonite girls are hip

I really dig those caps they wear

And der English girls with no caps at all

They knock me out with that short hair.

I wish they all could be Amish

I wish they all could be Amish

I wish they all could be Amish girls.

Music & Lyrics by Brian Yoder and Karl Bontrager

"Born to be Mild"

Get your buggy runnin'

Head out on the two lane

Lookin' for some rumspringa

And not dressin' up so plain

Born to be mild

Born to be mild

Music & Lyrics by Mars Miller

"Raise my Barn"

Come on baby, raise my barn

Come on baby, raise my barn

Try to get the haymow higher!

Music & Lyrics by Jim Graber, Robbie Yoder, John Miller, and Ray Bontrager

"Stotzfus Action"

I can't get no Stoltzfus action

I can't get no Stotlzfus action

'cause i try and i try and i try and i try

I can't get no, i can't get no

Music & Lyrics by Mick Stoltzfus and Keith Stoltzfus

Those are our samples. Please send your suggestions to us c/o this blog or our website http://www.secrethistoryofamishrockandrollsongscoveredbybignamerocstars.com/

--Brent

PS Check out the Amish Outlaws (that's where the picture came from)

The High Price of High Octane

Well, it had to happen, I suppose. I paid over $4 per gallon for gasoline whilst doing book tour stuff in Chicago last week. Thank heavens I drive a hybrid. But the high price of fuel really hit me recently when my little Jewish brother, Rabbi Aaron, and I spent an afternoon at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was a practice day for the (then) upcoming Indianapolis 500 ("The 92nd running of the greatest spectacle in racing"). Aaron and I wandered through "Gasoline Alley" -- the home of the racing teams' garages. We saw lots of drivers and cars and enjoyed the general hoop-la surrounding the event. We turned a corner to go back to the Rubicon Racing suite (yes, we were guests of somebody -- we're both too stingy to drop real money for tickets, pit passes, etc) for another round of hot dogs and sodas when I saw true evidence of the high price of fuel. There sat one of the shiny round gas tanks of the racing league and plastered firmly upon it (you have to look close) was a sticker with a picture of an Indianapolis State Police trooper and the warning " Don't Pump and Run!"

Well, that certainly explains why some of the pit stops took so long at this year's race -- Dixon, Andretti, Patrick, et al had to swipe their cards and sign the receipts!

--Brent