Author: Michael Batinski

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Does standing on the corner holding a sign matter?

Author: Michael Batinski

For some months I have been thinking about the mundane yet shining examples of the way faith and practice join on the path to peace.

This inquiry began a couple days after last Christmas, when I encountered a friend at the coop grocery who regularly joins Carbondale’s Saturday morning peace vigil. I had not attended the last vigil, simply because Christmas fell on Saturday. That morning, while with my family, my thoughts turned to that street corner where the vigil meets. As the customary time approached, I wondered whether others were gathering with their signs calling for peace on earth. I continued to wonder. Spontaneously my friend and I asked each other who had appeared. She too had not attended and also wondered. She had heard that three regulars were there. We were not sure who they were.

I have been reflecting on this moment with the two of us recognizing a shared concern. Sometimes I ask why I still come to that street corner vigil. Does standing on the corner holding a sign calling for the end of war make a difference? The weight of evidence is not encouraging. Public demonstrations for peace seem to have negligible affect on this republic’s deeply engrained war making impulses. Indeed, with the wars’ continuation regardless of the 2008 election’s outcome, I have wondered with others whether the continuing vigil serves to remind passersby that nothing changes and that protest is futile. Is war like the weather? We might complain, but can we do anything about it?

Such questions likely occur to others who congregate on this corner in the cold as well as the blistering heat and who keep this appointment despite the taunts and jeers. Yet such questions may distract us from meanings that lie on the edges of this event, meanings that emerge on another plane than that of practical politics or straightforward cause-effect relationships.

I have been wondering about the feelings that lead me to the Saturday vigil and then to Friends Meeting the following morning. For some time I have been aware of a necessity that moves me to both places. Exploring the similarities returns me to distinctions conventionally made between the religious and the secular. The differences are manifest. In contrast to the quiet of the Quaker Meeting, the street corner is a noisy place with traffic streaming past and the freight train thundering by predictably. Instead of a voice speaking out of the silence, passers-by honk in support or screech obscenities. Such differences notwithstanding, I return to those who remind us and teach us to open ourselves to the religious in everyday life.

I write with care at this point lest I misrepresent these vigil keepers. They come from diverse traditions, some religious and some emphatically secular. Their talk is often not focused on the vigil’s purpose. Nor does the talk turn to religious topics. Some reflect on their personal lives. They joke. They exchange thoughts on other community activities. The wars do not come up, at least not directly. Yet wars are there, always. These people have been gathering despite the lessons that might teach them the futility of their actions. They have been standing on that corner for nearly a decade. Many are veteran advocates of peace. For decades they have protested the growth of the military state and have watched it grow steadily in size. And they keep true to their convictions. Perhaps they do not talk about the pragmatics of their vigil. What impresses me is that they persist and that they persist in good humor.

I recall one rainy day. Drivers were swerving deliberately away from a puddle lest they splatter the protestors. Then with the same deliberation a police car veered in the opposite direction to splash a couple women. All, even the splattered ones, laughed. At times, some one will keep a tally of passersby who honk in support and those who jeer in anger. Some will talk about the agenda of the Southern Illinois Peace Coalition. Tickets will be sold for a folk singer coming to town. I have listened to one steadfast soul ruminate: how can we reach across to those who express such white-hot anger? There seems to be no answer. Yet she is the most faithful attender.

The people who gather—most are women—have been teaching me. Their example returns me to the ageless question regarding the secular and the religious, the sacred and the profane: how can we discern a difference? A light illuminates that street corner. Perhaps that is what draws me. These veteran witnesses for peace continue despite the enervating question: does keeping this appointment stop the shooting? They persist even while attending to weighty personal matters. They tend to partners who are ill. They talk about children, some with their own problems. Some are battling their own illnesses. The distractions are numerous, and yet they gather at noon. Somehow one veteran captures the moment with her sign “I am against the next war.” Another sign reads “Been here since 2001.”

The record of persistence is impressive and teaches me something. Perhaps counting their rates of attendance does not reveal clear meaning. Between fifteen and twenty regulars gather each week, good or bad weather. Is the number small? Perhaps. I do not know. What is their affect on passers-by? On each other? Somehow their smiles and their good faith carry meaning enough in this time of endless war.

I will not be in town for the next eight weeks. Yet I will think of them each Saturday and feel my faith renewed by their shining example.

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So what is special about Quaker education? Some reflections…

Author: Michael Batinski

While flying home from a visit to The Meeting School, I thought about the people, there in New Hampshire and at home in Illinois who gather the resources for making a peaceful world.  They do good work, quietly, so often unaware of coworkers hidden from each other by distance and condition.  Lessons might be learned by attending to what each of us is doing.

Somewhere in midair between Boston and St. Louis, I returned to the question that flitted though my thoughts last year while Ginny and I lived in The Meeting School community as Friends in Residence.  So what is it about Quaker education that makes it unique?  While feeding the ducks and cows in the early morning, I felt prodded by some Friends who have written questioning whether there is such uniqueness.  Sometimes, as I grasped for words to address the question, I too doubted.  But through the year as I wondered and as Ginny and I shared our thoughts, I grew satisfied that there is a tradition, a rich one, and that this tradition is best understood not so much by listing principles but by witnessing its practice.

As I reflected, I realized that the answers flowed into another question: how might this tradition guide the world at large?  Or can the practice of Quaker education guide and focus us as we work toward developing the resources for peace among Friends as well as among neighbors in the larger public?  Last year, while Ginny and I sat in community meetings, cooked meals, taught and counseled students, did farm chores, and laughed and played with students, we wondered about this miraculous learning community and moved toward understanding by making comparisons with educational practices that prevail in the society at large.  “Why,” Ginny would lament, “is it that other young people no matter their place in this society cannot learn in a community like this?”

Comparison with prevailing practices seems a good first step toward understanding.   As retired members of a public university community, one a teacher and the other a counseling psychologist, we were most familiar with society’s norms.  As we sat in community meetings with students and teachers together learning to work in common and as we watched students wrestle with the mysteries of pre-calculus and physics, we could not but attend to the public discussions over education in the print and broadcast media.  Two points of comparison served as guideposts: first, the prevailing discussions over academic achievement (which is as old as the 1950s bestselling Why Johnny Can’t Read) and, second, the nagging worries about violence in the schoolyard (which are also at least as old as the film The Blackboard Jungle).  What was striking was not just the prevailing concern about achievement scores as measures of academic achievement or the measures of violence as registered in incidents of bullying taken to tragic ends.  Counting, while useful, carries worrisome implications.  Equally troubling is a predisposition to conduct each discussion, of academics and of violence, on two adjoining and separated platforms.  But need the discussions be separated?  As we watched practices in this alternative learning environment, we inevitably asked ourselves what is the price for making such a division or what is gained by making integrations?

Academics, equality, community—what happens when schools treat these concerns as important but separated? Or what happens when a school weaves them together?  Academic excellence is pursued for what end?  To gain competitive edges?  To “race to the top”?   As an historian, I listen to today’s talk about education and hear the echoes of Social Darwinism.  What kinds of community members are we raising by focusing narrowly on identifying students and teachers who do well at calculus?   Or where and how do the schools open students to the habits of community and equality?  For what end beyond technical skills are we preparing this rising generation?

Or what happens when students and teachers learn and live in community?  In a community that nurtures egalitarian habits?  The miraculous transformations I witnessed in weekly community meetings still enrich my imagination.  Imagine students and faculty gathered in meeting with the clerk a student.  But that by itself seems a superficial procedural matter when compared to the spirit that guides the conduct of the meeting.  Students come here with expectations conditioned by their acquaintance with something called student government as conducted in public schools.   Those of us who came from that tradition learned quickly the unsaid little truth that student democracy was contained by the authority of the assistant principle.   We learned to understand, even identify with, Holden Caulfield.  Across the meeting room I watched fascinated as students who came from that public tradition ready to test the school’s professed principles of community and equality.  At first, they were testy in the manner of all-too-familiar adolescent rebels waiting to discover the truth underlying the rhetoric.  Soon, however, they recognized that their voices did carry weight, and they began to conduct themselves accordingly and to take on responsibility for community life.

While writing, I can hear an inner voice from my public school experience that warns: what about discipline and order?   Last year’s experience taught me to quiet such memories.  Equality and community work well with respectful listening.  Teachers need not abandon their responsibilities to mentor.  Nor need they forsake the wisdom that comes with age.  Teachers work, for example, to help nurture awareness of such concerns as housekeeping, sustainable practices, and smoking tobacco.  But rather than simply dictating rules from above, they work together with students to write the school’s agreements that define such behaviors as smoking.   While the community has embraced a minute against smoking on campus, the faculty has been guided by the awareness that the rule itself does not necessarily address the matter of healthy lifelong practices.  After a long and thoughtful process, the school moved to address smoking off-campus at home among neighborhood friends.   This was a long process that began while our son was a student five years ago.   I confess that as I write I smile anticipating eyes rolling in skepticism.  How naïve!   Perhaps.  But during morning opening last month, a student spoke from the silence volunteering that he smoked with friends during home visits.   No one suspected.  There seemed no reason to come forward other than inner direction.   While living in this community, he had internalized not just rules but also an ethos of healthy living.  He only asked for the community to help with this struggle.

The process is slow, frustratingly slow, by prevailing standards.  But the community agreements emerge not as rules imposed from above to be dodged by those below.  Discussion continues over the internet, its distractions and seductions.  Students and teachers discuss the matter, come to agreements, and revise them in light of experience.  At year’s end an issue arose that needed quick response, more quick than community process might allow.  As expected, students came to community meeting indignant both about the decision and also the unilateral manner in which it was made.  I watched comparing the present with similar situations when I attended public school.  How different was the spirit guiding this discussion.  Slowly the students came to recognize the reasoning that guided the head of school and finally agreed, but they also spoke clearly to their concern that the decision had not been made in the spirit of community process they had come to expect.  The head of school and faculty learned that they had done their work well in nurturing healthy community.

This learning community illustrates the uniqueness of Quaker education because it places the Quaker clearness process at the center.  If we consider school budgets, in particular faculty and student time, clearness committees may seem expensive.  If we make integrity, respect for self and others, and clarity of communication essential aspects of student growth, the price seems as reasonable as hiring a geometry teacher.  Students ask for meetings for clearness when considering which college to attend or while struggling with a roommate.  Teachers request them with students who are not meeting their potential or with colleagues over the inevitable differences that arise in a small community.  Civics can be taught from a textbook or it can be learned from experience.  While watching, I returned to long-standing concern about prevailing patterns in public education that rest on authoritarian, albeit short-term economical, norms.   How do we build schools that nurture the essential spirit of democracy?  John Dewey still asks that question of us.  Sadly, our schools practice as if he does not ask.  Perhaps, the answer can come by attending to the traditions of Quaker education.

From these practices emerges the peace testimony.  I think so.  Is peace studies the subject of a course?  Yes, in a way.  But this small school in Rindge, New Hampshire, offers an instructive alternative to prevailing practice.   Before retirement I taught a course on peace in American history as part of a peace studies curriculum.   It was an elective, on the margins of the mainstream curriculum, and it was attended largely by those who were predisposed to listen.  But more important, I think, my course was just one course, a fragment of the student’s education.  Peace studies is an integral part of The Meeting School, but not simply because there is a course requirement but because the precepts of that course permeate the entire learning experience from community meetings to clearness committees, to classes, and even to doing farm chores.

There is a difference in Quaker education.  I felt so as we listened to the radio’s reporting a local incident of schoolyard bullying that ended tragically.  Slowly I have come to understand what was happening.  There are alternative ways to grow through the trials of adolescence.  Perhaps the challenges are universal.  Questioning one’s identity and one’s life course may be common to modern youth.  But I began to learn that these uncertainties and anxieties that commonly can turn to predatory behaviors need not—need not, if the environment changes.  Youth need not be violent, uncaring.  Students brought the same issues to The Meeting School but were learning with the support of strong, patient, and attentive listening that there were alternatives.

The students told me so by the lives they were learning to lead.  I listened to students talk about becoming doctors in less privileges places, lawyers and advocates of human rights, urban farmers making a greener world, English teachers.  During winter intersession they are exploring these ideals by living in a Catholic Worker group (Dorothy Day’s) in New York, by working with a volunteer health clinic.  Last year one student worked in Africa with school children and another camped in a northern Vermont refuge for wolves.    If there are significant indicators to measure a school’s success, they come by attending to the graduates.  I have spent much time in the last year talking with these wonderful people, most of whom are working in caring professions.  They are teachers, workers in social welfare agencies and international development agencies, and counselors.   One teacher who returned for a second term, separated by more than twenty years, now is preparing to join the Peace Corps in Africa.  What better indicators of healthy education can we find?  And what better answer to questions regarding the uniqueness of Quaker education?

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The Quran Reading at Gaia House

Author: Michael Batinski

Three weeks ago in Carbondale, neighbors from the Abrahmic faiths and from other traditions gathered at Gaia House/Interfaith Center for a reading of the Quran that would last twenty-four hours.   During the first hour, people began to sense separately and collectively a feeling of wellbeing that warmed the room.   The feeling came upon them quietly, slowly, catching some unawares.  Those who worked to make this moment possible were doubtless preoccupied with mundane matters of programming, seating, acoustics, and food.   Then, as I recall, the gathered souls felt the light.   I felt so, and others volunteered that they felt similar feelings.  This awareness came upon me as if from my peripheral vision.  If words can capture the feeling, it seemed to come from a shared sense of thankfulness, thankfulness that we had come together.

Through the evening, into the night and early morning, and then through the day until we gathered in evening prayer, people came together, listened to the Quran read in Arabic and English.  We listened as members of the Muslim community explained the guiding precepts of their faith such as compassion, repentance, as well as views of Jesus and of democracy.  I cannot speak for others who shared in this experience.  I can recall so vividly the faces sparkling with warmth and thankfulness.

I have been reflecting since.  Those who organized the event began out of shared concern regarding the harsh words directed at the Muslim community.  Soon, however, as the organizers met at Gaia House, I sensed small transformative moments.  The initial concern—the hate speech—was rarely discussed.  Instead, neighbors were gathering around a common need to express community.   In the last organizing meeting, a Muslim participant worried that the event would not be a success, however one can measure success.  And I volunteered that the planning process itself had in itself become a success.  He beamed in agreement.

Was the reading a success because more than two-hundred people had come to Gaia House?  The numbers were gratifying.  When I returned at 4:30 in the morning, I found eight hardy souls struggling with fatigue.  With the dawn the numbers increased again.  New faces appeared, some I was surprised to see.   Yes, the numbers are a way to measure.   And there are other measures.  Some shared, days later, that praying with Muslims had been transformative.  How?   The answers are still emerging.  Something more than numbers, indeed other than words, is needed to explain.

Last week, while attending an Interfaith Thanksgiving at the mosque, I encountered a person I had first met at the Quran reading.  We smiled at one another, and I felt as if we both were sharing in the afterglow.   I cannot speak for my Muslim neighbors but to observe that they came to this project with great worries about the temper of the times.  They spoke as if under siege, as if it were best to be quiet and not visible.  In a small way, the reading seemed to give them some measure of assurance.  Many non-Muslims, like myself, are simply thankful.

And something may be happening.   Participants in the reading are beginning to gather to make plans for continuing down this path.  What will happen or where these conversations will lead I cannot presume to answer.   The discussion continues, and that also may be a sign of success.   There are glimmerings emerging from these talks:  discussion groups, perhaps small classes on various faiths. May form.   What will emerge, what resources will be gathered—such concerns will turn to action as the meetings continue.

I pass these reflections on because I feel that in these times we need to share such moments.    Good work is being done.  Sometimes as in the case of the Quran reading at Gaia House the electronic media does turn from the louder and harsher events that seem newsworthy and takes a moment to give attention to this kind of work.   The event did receive such attention and others who did not attend expressed their gratitude.  Most important, such events illustrate the good work that is being done in communities such as Carbondale.  While Maruine Pyle, as director of Gaia House, did much to guide the community’s energies, I also marvel at the creativity that emerged from this process.  Perhaps such a moment may work to move imaginations and faith.   (If interested in more on the reading you may visit    http://www.ourgaiahouse.com/. )

At this time when we might feel disheartened, we might find assurance by sharing such news.