Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another
- Ephesians 4:25

We Quakers put a high value on truth telling.  

This might be why we find the current state of affairs so deeply disturbing.   In the last 100 days we've been fed about 492 suspect claims.  Since 2020 who knows how many?  In the tens of thousands that we know of.   And if we combine both political parties in that calculation it's probably a lot higher.  But honestly, I find it hard to tell when I'm being lied to unless I can look in the liar's face. And that's just outright lies; not to mention lies of omission. 

On the right and left of the political spectrum everything is spun for some political advantage. My distrust of everything is at an alltime high. 

So what does a person do in such a fact free environment?  How do we find common ground when the color of the ground is clearly brown, the wavelength of the light reflected from the ground is in the brown spectrum but we are told the ground is blue? 

The delusions of the world are many, but perhaps the way out of this is to have shared experiences.   It is easy to quote what others say or follow the words of so-called leaders, but what is our own experience? 

• If I walk along the shore with a friend and the surf gets us both wet surely we can agree on water and wetness? 
• We can agree on gravity if we both jump off a rock into a lake.
• Maybe we can even agree on some shared language to describe something we both see or experience.

Beyond that I don't know what is true.  Everything else is just second hand news or conjecture.  

The inquiry I am in is this: 

• What is real? 
• Can I trust my senses?  My experience is that the Earth is flat unless I get in an airplane and see the curve of the planet.
• If I hear something, do I trust the source?  How do I even evaluate that? A photo can show one truth and then be cropped to show another.  A statement can also be chopped into sound bytes to have many different meanings? 
• Are there universal truths that I can accept without question?  Such as God is love. 
• Is logic a bastion of truth?  Math?  a2 + b2 = c2  

I think the notion that we are "members of one another" is a guide to truth, but only if we are building that community together. And by together I mean in person; looking into the eyes of another.  Feeling into that person's inner light. 

~ Joseph Olejak

Maya Angelou's poetry is a shining beacon of truth in the murky times.  

As Quakers worldwide witnessed the grotesque violation of the Westminster Quaker Meeting space by the Metropolitan police, an act that had not occurred in the living memory of British Quakers, we must double down on our insistence that Quaker houses of worship are inviolable places where the police, the military and government informants are not welcome as enforcers. 

We must draw a line in the sand about what we will tolerate as the encroachments on human decency continue unabated. 

Angelou wrote: 
When we come to it

When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches

The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

Is it so hard to imagine that we are now at an inflection point in American history where the sapling of American democracy is now bent and ready to break.  This is not the birches of Robert Frost.  This tree is much more fragile. This tree is only able to bend for so long before it will be crippled and twisted forever.  

What does this have to do with our blessed community?  Is politics, the deeply temporal realm of man, not also in the realm of spirit?  Should we allow our values (and soon our children) be consumed in the "minstrel show of hate." 

I would argue that there is a time for quiet and a time for witness (quiet or vocal).  The brave and startling truth is that "We, this people", as Angelou wrote "have the power to fashion this earth..."

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet

Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible

We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it. 

And when will we come to it?  The hour is getting late.  We cannot stand by and wait for the oligarchs' campaign to implode.  It won't.  

In our own spiritual discernment I urge all Quakers to: 

• Take a deep look at what is happening to others and then map that onto ourselves.  
  
  • No one is safe.  Westminster was a test case. 
    
• Inquire into your heart and see what you find there.  
  • In Chile the mothers of the disappeared stood in front of La Moneda Palace, the home of Pinochet, to witness what had been done to their sons and daughters. 
• What are you willing to do? 
  • George Lakey wrote that "non-violent direct action is the street heat of successful movements."  

Let us now ... come to it !!

For the entire poem of Maya Angelou

https://www.best-poems.net/poem/a-brave-and-startling-truth-by-maya-angelou.html

~ Joseph Olejak

I hear the surf in Palestine sifting through the sand
amidst the scream of missiles and the flinch of metals.
Kites once snapped in wind unspooled by children’s hands.

Fresh produce is now rare in Gaza’s markets. Meat, chicken,
potatoes, yogurt, eggs and fruits are completely gone.  Lament
the loss while dialing Senator Schumer and Senator Gillibrand

complicit in the genocide by shipping contraband
bunker busters to Israel instead of water, food, fuel, medical
supplies and kitchens to the fringed by the sea Palestinians.

 Crops and livestock have been decimated, there’s a stout demand
for veterinary supplies, what animals will low by the manger,
what star will rise in the East, how long will the Menorah’s candles

last or when will the Ramadan fast be broken in the already broken
evening?  Who will play the flutes or read stories to the children,
who will dance in the squares?  Have they unearthed the railroad

 in the Gaza strip, repaved its airport, rebuilt her port?  Fool pier
that boondoggled off the coast shuttled by befuddled Army Corp
of engineers, smashed by uncharted seas in untested currents.

 Clog every road to Gaza with trucks stuffed to the gills with food, President
Trump’s number is 202 455 1111 Tuesday –Thursday ten minute
waiting time and you get a live person unlike Schumer or Gillibrand.

 ~ Bob Elmendorf