As many of you know, I now work for the first registered religious lobby in the United States, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). Imagine the audacity of American Quakers in 1943. In the midst of a country totally mobilized for war and in the middle of a world war, they followed their leadings from God to establish a lobby in this nation’s capital. "Let’s go lobby for peace!"

Now, some Friends are really proud of this organization. ‘They’re the policy wonks,’ you’re probably saying to yourself. (I hope to change your view of that before this talk is over.) However, other Friends really have little or no interest in lobbying of any kind. We have only 12% or less of the membership of the Religious Society of Friends on our database. Please, send us your Christmas and other lists of people who might want to receive our Washington Newsletter.

In my 30 years working on policy, I’ve met many Friends who seem to side with Mark Twain when it comes to politics. Wasn’t it he who said, "A dead politician is a good politician"?

When you think about us, we are a paradox. Nearly all US-American parents dream of their daughter or son growing up to one day become the President of the United States. Yet, virtually all those parents pray to God that their child would NEVER become a politician. Many Quakers seem to share this dislike for things political. Yet William Penn was a politician.

As one Friend said to me, "How can you work with those slime bags in Washington?" Another Friend once asked me, "How can you compromise yourself like that? I could never go to Washington, DC, and compromise my religious beliefs like you do." To these Friends, working in Washington, DC, on national legislation involves getting dirty and losing your center. Whereas to me and many other Friends, engaging Congress and the President on the big issues of our times is an essential aspect in the practice of our Quaker faith.

By now you’ve heard many times the perspective on Quaker work that, when our service work is at its best we do two things:

That second one is policy work, and policy work takes place in the political arenas. When we do policy work, we Quakers attempt to answer to that of God in every situation.

For a long time, I was like those Friends who did not want to work in the political arena. My experiences changed me. I want to tell you a few stories of some those transforming experiences.

On my birthday, February 28, 1967, just before midnight, in the cosmic stillness of a terribly cold winter’s night in Oxford, Ohio, I stood in awe of the zenith star and all the stars surrounding it. I gradually lowered my head to see the arc of the sky down to the horizon of human-made roof tops. I shivered and looked at the envelope in my hand. I had addressed it to my Draft Board. In it were my draft card and a letter protesting the war in Vietnam. I declared that I would not accept my deferments and that, if drafted, I would not fight in Vietnam.

No one else was in the street. I felt frightened, lonely and cold. I pushed through my fear and dropped the envelope through the slot. A moment passed. The mailbox had been empty. The corner of the envelope hit the bottom. To me, it made a cymbal-like sound. At that moment, I felt warm and embraced by a presence.

As a teenager at church and at tent revivals I had prayed for such a presence. It had never come, and I would not testify to my pastor or peers that I was saved, because for me there was no presence under the roof of the church. But now, in the still and empty night, I felt embraced and accompanied. My fear was dispelled, and I was ready to "face the music" whatever that would be.

I could not make contact with the divine presence until I merged my values, my faith, and my action into one, gluing them together with a thing called risk-taking. Doing this came after a long time of study, of preparation, of worship with others, but when it happened, I was in a place of stillness.

I was "on the street," not in the sanctuary. That place put me in awe of God’s creation. I felt that I was a creature in a governed universe. Although I didn’t know it, this experience of God would lead me to Friends and would be an opening into the world of political action as a practice of faith. What brought me to that place was not anger, not opposition, but love. Love is the first motion.

I did not start out as a Quaker. I am a convinced Friend. Here’s how I met the Religious Society of Friends.

In 1967, I went into the Army to try to organize soldiers to refuse to go to Vietnam. I was motivated basically by two things (not counting stupidity): first, as a Christian, I had meditated much on Jesus’s remark that "....in as much as you do it unto the least of these my brethren you have done it unto me…" and, second, the Nuremburg principles established after WWII led me to believe that, in a democracy, citizen-soldiers were responsible and accountable for their actions. I couldn’t imagine a Christian doing to the Vietnamese what I was reading about and what I was seeing on TV. I thought US soldiers had a responsibility to refuse illegal or unjust orders and then to take whatever consequences were coming to them.

By the early spring of 1968, I was a light weapons specialist assigned to A Troop, 4th Brigade, 12 Battalion, of the 5th Mechanized Army at Fort Carson, Colorado, not far from Denver. We were scheduled for deployment to Vietnam in something called Project Red Diamond that summer. I knew that I would refuse to go with them to Vietnam, and I told my buddies, my sergeant, my platoon leader, my First Sergeant, and my Commanding Officer that I wasn’t going. I appealed to them to refuse to go, too.

Don’t be misled. I was convinced but not confident. I was, if you will please excuse the rude phrase, "wet-my-pants-scared" every time I had to face them. My parents disapproved, my brother disagreed, my friends were astonished, my church asked me to reconsider and do the right thing by serving my country in Vietnam. I thought service to my country called me to go in a different direction. I was young, inexperienced, seeking truth but not knowing it, and VERY alone.

At that moment, when I had so little support and facing a not very important but very personal abyss, Quakers appeared to me. A Methodist pastor in Denver told me, "I can’t help you, but the Quakers might. They have a military counseling office here in Denver. Go see them." I did.

Sure enough, AFSC’s Holmes Brown and Chester McQuiry had a walk-in office. They listened to my story. They asked me questions. They never tried to lead me in a direction. They wanted to understand my direction and how they could support me. I had worried how a peace group would respond to a soldier walking into their place. Once, when I was on leave visiting a friend at Columbia University, the famous New York City Baptist pastor, peacenik and playwright Al Carmines, had poured a drink over my head to show his disgust for the Vietnam War and the military. He’d never bothered to ask me what I thought or what I was doing in uniform. But with AFSC, I was safe.

Holmes explained that I would receive a general court-martial. On the basis of the experience of others, he thought I would get a sentence of six months at hard labor, two-thirds forfeiture of pay, and reduction in grade to E-1. At worst, I would do my time and be sent back to duty. At best, they would release me early and send me back to duty. No dishonorable discharge. No less than honorable discharge.

As I thanked Holmes and Chester for their advice and prepared to catch the next bus to Fort Carson to be arrested by the military police, Holmes said, "One more thing. If you like, we could ask a local Quaker in Colorado Springs to call the Commander of the Guard at the stockade once a week to ask how you are doing. A simple phone call might help to protect you while you are confined. Would you want someone to make a call?"

At the time, I thought, "that’s a no-brainer; of course, I want someone to make the call." I learned later that it is the Quaker way not to presume to give help where it might not be wanted. "Yes, please," I said.

We said goodbye. I walked alone to the bus station, but I went with a sense that "the Quakers"—whoever the hell they were —would be helping me to make my way through the troubles ahead.

The information that AFSC’s Holmes Brown had given me was accurate. It all happened just as he had said it would. About once a week, an officer came to the "back forty" of the stockade looking for Soldier in Confinement Volk.

He asked me, "Are you Private Volk?" Yes, sir. "How are you doing?" OK, sir. "Anybody giving you any trouble?" No, sir. He would then say, "Good," and walk away. I assumed from those periodic visits by an officer that someone on the outside was making a phone call on my behalf.

I thought the phone call probably took a minute or two to make. Someone who didn’t know me and who might never meet me was calling. They probably thought it was trivial and too simple a thing to make a difference in the big scheme of things. That’s how I would have thought about a request to make a minute-long phone call on behalf of someone I didn’t know. Yet, someone was taking it on faith that such a little thing would make such a difference that it was important to do. Someone I didn’t know put that into their weekly schedule.

"Inasmuch as you do it unto the least of these...." I fit that category myself. These Quakers didn’t preach the good news, as my church did; they practiced it, as my church didn’t. This was the "cup of cool water and the crust of bread" part of the Quaker service. It spoke to me in my time of need. What I didn’t know then was that these same Quakers had organizations to also try to change the policy that put me and others into this situation. They were serving, yes, but they were protesting, too. And, as important, they were translating the protest into political action by addressing Members of Congress and the President through the FCNL. Quakers, I later understood, were answering to "that of God in everyone" both by ministering to hurting people and by trying to transform the policies that hurt them.

I think what impressed me as I learned more about Friends was summed up in a remark that Sam Caldwell made years ago in a plenary speech to FGC. He said something like "Friends’ religious insights are drawn, not from our knowledge or schooling, but from our experience as tested in the community."

We receive continuing revelation of Truth through our experience with people in many different communities, in many different circumstances, in many different parts of the world. We gather this experience. We test it among ourselves and with others. We seek to discover, with the benefit of divine guidance, what it means. And the discoveries of meaning then give renewed purpose and direction to our lives and to the life of our community. Thus, in some sense, we are always unsettled because we are always changing, and yet, we are always grounded because we seek to be obedient to the Creator.

As a young student of theology and a soldier, this was the community of faith that I did not know existed but for which I was searching. We met each other through an individual’s act of conscience (mine) and a community’s practice of faith (yours).

When I think about this, I marvel how Quaker service agencies, in this case, the American Friends Service Committee and FCNL, bring people into the Religious Society of Friends. I think how my little story is multiplied by the people touched by the service work of AFSC and lobby work of FCNL.

In 1982, the Executive Secretary of AFSC, Asia Bennett, invited me to serve as the National Secretary for Peace Education. She and the Chair of the Board, Steve Cary, became my mentors and heroes. Perhaps as always, AFSC, especially the national office, was a cauldron of ideas and action. AFSC dared to practice what others only preached. They took on enormous risk—a merging of values, faith, and action—by trying what love can do to mend a broken world. The contemporary version of that 17th century Quaker phrase was to attempt to fashion a nonviolent, multi-racial, multi-cultural, and global community—what Martin Luther King, Jr. called "... a coalition of conscience to close the gaps in broken community." This is today’s version of Penn’s Holy Experiment. What a challenge and an opportunity to be living in the time of this project!

Let me tell you just one story from my eight years as National Secretary for Peace Education. One day in 1984, David Goodman walked into my office with a preposterous proposal. David was an Earlham graduate and an accomplished researcher-writer in our NARMIC program—that’s National Action Research into the Military Industrial Complex. It was started by Honey Knopp.

David said, "I want to make a documentary film. I want to tell the story of Charlie Clements. Charlie was a doctor to peasants in the contested areas of El Salvador. When the government listed him for assassination, he had to leave. Years before, he was also a combat pilot in Vietnam, and he eventually refused to fly. His is a story of conscience and war, and I think we can tell it in a way that will educate people about the Central America wars, about conscientious objection to war, and about active nonviolence."

How much will it cost, I asked. "I don’t know. Somewhere between $100,000 and $250,000, but we can broadcast it on PBS Frontline. We can reach a lot of people. And, it will have a long shelf life even after the Central America Wars are done."

To make a long story short, I said let’s do it. David, who had never made a film before, did. He invited me to go with him to pick up his Oscar at the Academy Awards for Best Short Documentary. When it was all done, I said, "David, you did a remarkable thing for the peace movement and for Quakers." He said, "I hope so. But, you know what? We had to spend 95 per cent of our time raising money, moving bureaucratic barriers, and answering those who were afraid of what we might do in a film. That left about 5 per cent of our time to do the creative work of making the film. Think what we might have accomplished if the ratios could have been the other way around!"

What David said of the film project, I find to be true of most of our Quaker work. The fundraising, the committee processes, the bureaucratic hassles take up the largest part of our time. I think of what we could do if the ratios were reversed. But, I also think what courage he had to imagine that he could make such a film and then risk failure to try it. We are well served by that kind of courage. Many of you exercise it every day.

What will help to change policy on the environment?—the death penalty?—nuclear weapons?—gun violence?—the unfinished business of slavery?—the left-overs of the Vietnam War?—freedom and equality for gay and lesbian people?—the free exercise of religion, and all those big issues you care about? Yes, we have to provide service. Yes, we have to educate people. Yes, we have to build movements and protest, but we have to do something more. We have to translate the service, the education, and the protest into the political arena. That is policy work. That is politics. That is lobbying.

You don’t like the idea of politics. You don’t want to take time to lobby. OK. Just send FCNL money. We will lobby for you! I’m only partly kidding.

Really, lobbying, especially the way FCNL does it, is not so bad. Let me tell you a made-up story about what lobbying is. This is the story of the lost bus driver and passengers:

You got on the bus to go to your place of business. You’ve taken this bus everyday for years, and you know the route. But today a substitute bus driver takes a right instead of a left turn. The bus is going the wrong way on the right street. This bus driver is earnest but misguided.

There is a buzz among the regular passengers. You point out to other passengers that the bus is not going on the planned route. One of the passengers says, "Don’t bother me; I’m reading the paper." Another passenger goes into a long discussion with you of how off route the bus driver is and how everyone is going to be late to work and how could this happen and doesn’t the bus driver know better.

You say why don’t you go tell the driver to turn around. She says she’s too shy. Somebody else should do it. A man behind you says he’ll take care of this. He strides to the front with purpose. He yells at the bus driver,

"You are going the wrong way, you moron! You are so stupid. I don’t know how you got this job. I hope they fire you. You’re doing a lousy job!" He returns to his seat behind you and says proudly, "I got that jerk right between the eyes." You point out that he hasn’t helped. The bus is still going the wrong direction. "Yeah, but it isn’t my fault; he just wants to go the wrong way; screw him!" replies the self-satisfied man.

You appeal to another passenger to do something. She says you and she are the only ones on the bus who care so why bother? Finally, you decide to give it a try. You walk up to the bus driver. You say, "Excuse me. I can tell that you’re an excellent bus driver, but, as a regular passenger, I see you’re going the wrong way on the right street. Or do I have the wrong bus?"

The bus driver immediately realizes his mistake, and you can see it in his face. You say, "I’m sure the other passengers haven’t noticed. I think you could just make a pass through that shopping mall up ahead, return to the street, and head back the right direction, and no one would notice." The bus driver says, "Thanks." And you go back to your seat. The bus gets turned around. The passengers make it to their destinations.

This parable of the lost bus driver and passengers describes, in part, what we at FCNL do: experience-based, factually informed, friendly lobbying.

The Congress and the President are basically our bus drivers. They are supposed to drive us to our agreed upon destinations. When they take a wrong turn, we not only have a right to say something to them we have a civic responsibility to address them. Our purpose isn’t partisan; rather, our purpose is to help turn our national policies in a direction that will serve the common good. Which bus passenger are you? Can you imagine yourself helping to turn this US-bus around using Friendly persuasion?

Let me close with one more story. Let me tell you another story about a kind of stillness that leads us into the world and into political action as a practice of faith.

We at FCNL have set a course to invite youth and young adults into our Quaker lobby. Building on our 30 years of legislative intern program experience, Mary Lord has labored to develop a thriving young adult program.

This fall Jessica Braider, a former FCNL intern, will take over the leadership of that program. We have been encouraging students from Quaker colleges to attend our annual meetings and to become involved in the program and governance of FCNL. We hope, over time, to dramatically reduce the mean-age of those who participate in FCNL.

It’s working. Last November, a number of students came to our annual meeting, including a second year Quaker student from Haverford College. As Executive Secretary, I have a lot of duties and things on my mind during Annual Meeting. I had time to say hello to her, shake hands, ask, "What college are you from? Is this your first Annual Meeting? What interested you in FCNL?" and "I hope you get a lot out of this meeting." Then I was on my way thinking there’s a smart young woman, hope she gets involved in FCNL.

In all, a couple of minutes in the corridor between program sessions.

Weeks passed. Thanksgiving. Then Christmas. I returned to the office and received news that a young Quaker woman who was a student at Haverford College and who had attended the FCNL Annual Meeting had been murdered. She had been doing volunteer service at a mental health facility over the Christmas holiday. Her volunteer work let a regular staffer take a holiday leave. While at the reception desk, a disgruntled patient, off his "meds," came in, shot and killed her and continued his rampage there and at a restaurant down the road.

That young woman was Laura Wilcox of Nevada County, CA (see FB, March 2001, p. 17, for her story and picture). She had returned home that holiday very excited about FCNL work. She told her friends and family that she hoped to become a legislative intern after she graduated.

She planned a campaign to run for president of the student council. She looked forward to a life of public service, and, by all accounts, she would have made a remarkable contribution in politics. Sadly, we’ve lost her and her gifts of service to gun violence and a failure of public policy.

Laura’s family came to visit us at FCNL to deliver a check from a memorial walk and race held by neighbors and friends in her community. Her mom and dad, Amanda and Nick, and her brothers, Nathan and Caleb, and her Aunt Caren told us the story about which we had read. Two of our legislative interns sat in the conversation. Lydia and Jess gave them a tour of our FCNL operation. When it was time to go, the parting was difficult to accomplish.

We all stood on the front steps. Someone said what we were all thinking, "I guess Laura might have walked into FCNL on these steps and might have sat at one of your desks, if she hadn’t been killed." We stood looking at the Hart Senate Office Building in an awkward stillness with all the noisy traffic going by. We each considered what that meant about who we are and what we will do.

I saw Nick and Amanda in California a few weeks later for the 50th anniversary of the California Friends Committee on Legislation. They reminded me of our conversation in Washington. They said that Laura’s murder was preventable. That in many ways it was the outcome of failed public policy. For good reasons, public policy had been changed to release mentally ill patients from commitment and confinement to mental hospitals, but, for unjustifiable reasons, the policy makers had not provided the appropriations necessary for effective community-based treatment and support. What happened to Laura wasn’t an accident. It was the outcome of a failure of the public to demand that the policy-makers follow through on what they had begun. Evidence was that the murderer—now in custody, back on his "meds," getting treatment and facing punishment—recognized the enormity of what he had done and expressed remorse. Too late for Laura, though. Nick and Amanda told me they don’t want Laura’s death to be only about loss; they want to transform the evil into something good that will serve the community. Can we give new meaning to Laura’s life by entering the political arena to lobby for better policy?

When will we learn that the treatment and punishment model is a failed approach to public policy. It will always deliver too little too late at the expense of unnecessary human suffering? When will we learn what good health care providers know: that prevention is the best medicine?

In that awkward stillness on the front steps of FCNL with the survivors Nick, Amanda, Caleb, Nathan, and Caren, I felt my commitment strengthened to translate protest into policy. A phrase visited my mind, "...for God so loved the world..." that God came into the world. Religious experience, I thought, does not move us out of the world, rather spirituality takes us—in the company of God—into the world of human events.

I have many more stories that I would like to tell, but my time is up. To thank you for your time and attention, please allow me to leave you with a metaphor that Ed Snyder passed along to me. He got it from someone else....probably someone sitting here tonight.

Imagine yourself getting on a commercial airliner. You’ve planned a trip to a great destination....like Corvallis? Or Japan? Or think of your favorite far away place. You’ll have maybe 6 to 8 hours in that plane on your journey to that destination. By four hours into the flight, you’re aching, the food has been awful, the cabin has become a chaotic mess, even the flight attendants have become surly. You are cooped up in that awful tin can with the sour air, and you can’t stand it.

I’m on the ground below. I’m watching a beautiful sunrise. As I stand in awe of that glorious view, your plane crosses through it. I think to myself, ‘I can just imagine what the inside of that plane looks like and how the people feel. But, I wonder, do they realize what glory they are passing through?’

We Quakers have been on the big "jumbo jets" of history these last 350 years. We’ve set destinations for religious freedom, abolition of slavery, for women’s suffrage and liberation, for affirming gay and lesbian people, for peace through peaceful means, for unity with nature, for the dignity of the worker, for the rights of children, for racial integration, for one person one vote, for integrity in business, and, well, all the really big issues of our times. In the midst of our journeys toward these great destinations, we were often tired and grumpy and not too keen on government.

But, to an outside observer—one who could see the span of history and where our Quaker movement was going through it —we were in the midst of glory.