Quakers and Indians in California, 1869

In writing of the beginnings of Friends in Bolivia, I tell the story of William Abel, a Native American from California who converted to Christianity in the small Ramona Friends Church in 1897.

I found historian Richard Carrico’s work helpful in providing background to this story. The book, Strangers in a Stolen Land: Indians of San Diego County from Prehistory to the New Deal (2008, Sunbelt Publications), details the history of the Kumeyaay tribal peoples of San Pascual, Abel’s ancestors.

In the first chapter of my book (ALong Walk, A Gradual Ascent: The Story of the Bolivian Friends Church in its Context of Conflict), I present William Abel’s background, conversion story, and contribution to the Friends movement in Bolivia. I refer to US President U.S. Grant’s attempts rectify past injustices to the Indians with his Indian Peace Plan and the instituting of a Board of Indian Commissioners (attempts than were not immediately successful). I quote a fascinating piece of information about Friends in California. Carrico states that Grant’s plans included “placing many of the Indian Agencies in the hands of Quakers, eliminating much of the patronage that had led to the spoils system being rife in Indian affairs, and lessening the power of the military in Indian affairs” (pages 108-109).

Carrico does not footnote this observation. I’m fascinated that the Quaker reputation for a ministry of justice had reached the White House and influenced government policy. I’m now curious to know more about Quaker involvement with indigenous peoples in Southern California.

As usual with historical investigation, among all my discoveries, I found a whole new set of questions.

Maybe someone will write a book about it.

New book on Bolivian Quakers!

It’s finally here!

The new release is entitled, A Long Walk, A Gradual Ascent: The Story of the Bolivian Friends Church in its Context of Conflict (Wipf & Stock, 2019).

This feels almost like presenting a new baby to the world. Only this one followed six years of hard labor.

Even so, it was a labor of love: love for Bolivian Quakers among whom Hal and I lived and worked for over 30 years; love for the team of Bolivian investigators who accompanied us on this adventure; love for Jesus, the head of the church and the real protagonist of this story.

Love for the country and people of Bolivia also energized this project. Recently, conflicts in Bolivia have been on the news, and many have been praying for peace and reconciliation. The subtitle of the book, “The Story of the Bolivian Friends Church in its Context of Conflict,” illustrates the fact that the recent upheaval, unique in some ways, is actually part of an ongoing drama. Conflict seems to be part of the DNA of this nation’s history, as well as of the Aymara culture among which the Friends Church developed.

A Long Walk, A Gradual Ascent explores how both history and culture affected the development of this evangelical peace church over a period of 100 years.

I found the story fascinating and enlightening. I hope you will, too.

Bolivian Friends--100 Years!

I’m just back from our family trip to Bolivia to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the Bolivian Friends Church (INELA). And celebrate we did—both on the macro level of the whole denomination and the more micro level of our family. Although I’m still physically recovering from the trip (only one more round of antibiotics!), this is a good time for reflections and memories.

Celebrate is something the INELA knows how to do. They had rented the government sports coliseum on the upper city. After a two-hour, two-mile long parade of some of the church’s 200 congregations, around 7000 Andean Quakers filled the building for the Easter Sunday celebration. (Some leaders were actually disappointed that the anticipated 11,000 didn’t show. It seemed like a great crowd to me!)

The four-hour celebration filled the building with music, speeches, prayers, pronouncements, and lots of smiles and hugs at the end.

 With Hilarion and Agustina

Mario Surco, now an old man, was the first INELA national missionary in the 1960s.

Girl friends, Teodora and Solome

Hal with another dear old friend, Francisco Tintaya, twice INELA president in the 1970s and 80s.

Jim LeShana, NWYM superintendent, and Hector Castro, INELA president

Kristin sitting with her friends

For our family—David, Kristin, Hal and me—the whole two weeks was a time for memories and renewal of old friendships. Hal and I, with one-year-old David, arrived in La Paz in January 1972. Kristin joined our family in 1973. We all feel like Bolivia was the place of our growing-up years. When we left in 1989, David was 19 and Kristin 16-years-old. This place is still home to them. And this was the first time in the last 30 years we were together in La Paz.

View from our Airbnb in downtown La Paz, a perfect central place to receive guests and from which to launch out on our excursions

Behind us, the city at night

 Visit with Juana Ott de Mamani

In the New Jerusalem Friends Church with Jesus and Paulina Torrez

Kristin's friends had great fun dressing her up as a cholita.

Dinner with the extended Gutierrez family

With my old prayer partners, Susan Espejo and Ruth Galeb.

David was invited to give a major presentation. What a joy to support him.

What a joy to share this experience as a family.

Thanks be to God!

Remembering Geraldine Willcuts

It’s been several months since Geraldine Willcuts died, but she’s still resting on my mind. I have before me one of her watercolor cards in a frame—a mountain stream cascading through autumn trees, interspersed with evergreen. It captures some of Geraldine’s lively, creative spirit.

When I think of her impact on my life, I have to open my memories to include Jack. In my earlier years, as a newcomer to the yearly meeting and a fledgling missionary, it was Jack Willcuts who told me I was a good writer. And it was Jack as editor of the Evangelical Friend magazine who actually gave me a monthly column and encouraged me to take seriously my vocation as a writer.

On furloughs home from Bolivia, Jack and Geraldine as a couple befriended and mentored us.

Sometime at the end of the 1990s, my home church, North Valley Friends, sent my name to the yearly meeting as a candidate for recording. When the recording committee informed me that my official mentor for the process would be Geraldine Willcuts, I was thrilled. Geraldine took her role seriously (and with a lot of humor). Whenever I was home from overseas, we met frequently over cups of tea and great conversation. I loved her earthy common-sense spirituality. We talked about what it means to be wife, mother, and minister of the gospel at the same time; how to nurture creativity in the busyness of life (she the artist, me the poet); how to walk lightly over the planet; how to support our leader-type husbands while being true to our own callings; how to identify our callings—all sorts of good stuff.

During yearly meeting sessions, 2001, I stood on stage with the other recording candidates. Geraldine stood at my side and presented me with a certificate and a new Bible, the one I still use. On the inside cover she had inscribed 1 Corinthians 2:13: “So then we do not speak or write in words taught by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, as we explain spiritual truths to those who have the Spirit.” She added her own thoughts on our time together and ended with a blessing: “God bless your words, written, spoken, and thought; God bless your students; these are all ‘bread cast upon the waters that will not return void.’”

I hold that blessing today. Thank you, Geraldine Willcuts, mentor and friend.

Good News!

Good news! The history book has a publisher. Wipf & Stock has accepted our manuscript, and we’re finally looking at some light at the end of this long tunnel.

A tunnel is probably not the best metaphor for this seven-year project, though much of it has been underground: mining the past in the archives of nine different universities, yearly meetings, mission headquarters, and museums; sifting through a lot of debris; bringing the good stuff up to the top; discovering a few gold nuggets.

And then came figuring out how to organize, analyze, and understand it all, at least enough to begin writing. I have thousands of database items and scanned documents, all backed up and filed away.

But a lot of the research was carried out above ground. The field work required hundreds of interviews with the leaders of the church and, especially, with the children and grandchildren of past leaders. This is where our Bolivian team members were so helpful.

I must confess how joyful most of this work has been. I’m one of those strange people who love to research and write. Although much of this has been drudge work, I’ve been excited to make the discoveries, to begin to see the patterns, to come to understand how God and God’s missionary agents (both expatriate and national) co-labored to plant and develop a community of some 200 Quaker congregations scattered about the Bolivian highlands and tropical valleys.

And now I’m excited to be able to share the story with others.

Our working title has us climbing a mountain—A Long Walk, A Gradual Ascent: The Story of the Bolivian Friends Church in its Context of Conflict. I like the mountain metaphor better than the tunnel. It’s more accurate.

I still have to do my final editing, including cutting down the size of the book. I hope to have the final manuscript to the publisher by early April. Actual publication may take up to year from that date.

Rejoice with us!

How many Quakers does it take?

Actually, this is not a joke about changing a light bulb. (If it were, I imagine the answer would have to do with how hard it is to come to consensus on weighty issues.)

Rather, this is a story about how many different yearly meetings contributed to the beginnings of the Bolivian Friends Church (INELA).

In previous blogs we’ve seen how a Native American who was converted and discipled under California Yearly Meeting gave his life as a missionary to Bolivia after a few months preaching on the streets of La Paz. We’ve seen how this man, William Abel, partnered with Quaker missionaries from yearly meetings in Kansas (Florence Smith) and Indiana (Emma Morrow and Mattie Blount) in 1919, a year of beginnings.

Our attention now turns to a young Bolivia mestizo, Juan Ayllón, who was drawn to the witness of these early Quaker missionaries and became a convinced Friend, also in 1919. Ayllón was particularly attracted by William Abel, having encountered him one evening praying publicly in a street meeting. Ayllón found himself moved by the power and sincerity of Abel’s prayer, and he determined to get to know him. Ayllón joined Abel and the others in their street ministry, attended Abel in his bout with small pox, and helped bury him in the public cemetery in La Paz. It had been a brief but highly impactful relationship. At that point Juan Ayllón seemed to take on the mantle of William Abel, including Abel’s convictions about adequate preparation for Christian service.

Through Emma Morrow’s contacts with the fledgling mission work in Central America, Juan Ayllón received an invitation to study in the new “Berea Training School for Christian Workers” in Guatemala. Missionary to Guatemala, R. Esther Smith (California Yearly Meeting) was especially interested in this young Bolivian and offered him a full scholarship in the new training school. So, in the fall of 1920, Juan Ayllón began a four-month journey (via trains, boats, and a donkey) from La Paz, Bolivia to Chiquimula, Guatemala.

The journey itself was a series of misadventures (which you can read about when the book is published). Juan earned his passage through manual labor. Legal problems prevented his disembarking in Central America, and he ended up in New York City, knowing no one and speaking little English.

Arriving on February 14, the ship’s captain let Ayllón occupy his room on board for five days while the ship reloaded. After that time, on a Sunday morning, Ayllón gathered his belongings to leave at a police station in New York City while he attempted to arrange for his passage to Guatemala. A policeman at the station, upon learning that Ayllón was a Quaker, “just happened” to know of a Friends meeting house nearby and gave him directions.

Ayllón was the first to arrive at the meeting house and he prayed in silence for someone to help him. After the meeting, people were interested in his story. Paul Furnas of New York and Frederick Swan of New Jersey hosted him for the next few weeks. Between them they arranged for his trip by train to New Orleans, and then by ship to the east coast of Guatemala. Thanks to the grace and generosity of these Quakers, Juan Ayllón finally arrived in Chiquimula on the evening of March 9, 1921, late for the beginning of classes, but much welcomed.

Ayllón spent the next three years in the Berea Training School. In January of 1924, he married Honduran classmate, Tomasa Valle, and in the Central American Friends Yearly Meeting sessions, Juan and Tomasa were commissioned as their first missionaries to Bolivia. They sailed in April, arriving in La Paz in May of 1924, thus beginning a new phase in the development of the Bolivia Friends Church. In the years between 1924 and 1930, years which saw the first official Friends Churches (INELA) planted in Bolivia, the mission work was supported by the Central American Friends Church and Mission, through the service of Juan and Tomasa Ayllón.

Getting to this place in the story required the contributions of Friends from California, Kansas, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Honduras, and Guatemala. Oregon Yearly Meeting would not become involved until 1930. But that’s another chapter.

I should also add that Ayllón’s fascinating conversion story involved a Methodist missionary, a Salvation Army evangelistic service, and a small Baptist church, after which Ayllón met William Abel and became a convinced Friend. (Read the book for the details.)

This particular light bulb required many Christians, as well as many Quakers, to finally reach the light-giving point!

Favorite books of 2018

Of the many books I read last year, these impacted me the most. As usual, this is not a list of books written in 2018, but of the ones I read last year. For some reason, I concentrated more on non-fiction, especially memoir.

Fiction

Michael O’Brien, Sophia House (2005): Set in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, a bookseller risks all to give refuge to a Jewish boy who proves to be a precocious seeker after truth. Through their long conversations in the dangerous setting, Pawel, the bookseller comes back to his own faith. A moving story.

Jane Kirkpatrick, Emma of Aurora: A Clearing in the Wild (2006), A Tendering in the Storm (2007), A Mending at the Edge (2008): Trilogy based on the real history of a Christian colony from Michigan (on the verge of becoming a sect) moving to Washington and finally to Aurora, Oregon. The story of one woman’s growth into maturity and compassion. Promotes the values and rights of women without being stridently feminist.

Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River (1994): Story of Trudi, a dwarf, in Germany during the rise of Hitler. Small town life of a marginal person, while larger issues surround the village, making many people (a whole race) marginal. As an adolescent, Trudi was molested by some boys her own age (including one who had been her friend), and in anger she throws stones into the river. Later, she uses stones from the river to name people and events in her life and to build an altar. Gradually as she matures, she learns tolerance and forgiveness.

Nadia Hashimi, The Pearl that Broke its Shell (2014): By an Afghani author about the sufferings of women under Islam. The stories of two girls, separated by a century, one the great-great grandmother of the other, interweave. Both suffered under the rule of the men in their lives, both lived for a time disguised as boys, and both found ways of escape. Good writing, important themes, cultural insights.

Non-Fiction

Clodaugh Finn, A Time To Risk All (2017): The sub-title reads, “The incredible untold story of MARY ELMES, the Irish woman who saved children from Nazi concentration camps.” This is a good academic biography that focuses on Elmes’ time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and in southern France during World War II. It’s an incredible story, but doesn’t go much into Elmes’ personal life, probably because she was such a private person and no personal records remain. She worked for Quakers, but her own commitment to Quakerism is unclear.

Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir (2018): Amazing memoir about what it means to be poor in the context of a right-wing cult in America. About the role of education in breaking free and coming to live an expanded and full life. Powerful.

Kathleen Norris, The Virgin of Bennington (2001): One of my favorite books this year, this is Norris’ memoir of her college years at Bennington (where she finally lost her virginity as well as her faith, but discovered poetry), and her years in New York working at the Poetry Academy and learning more about the life of a poet, struggling, and finally deciding to leave New York for her grandmother’s ancestral home in North Dakota. Good insights about poetry and poets and mentoring.

Jamie Wright, The Very Worst Missionary: A Memoir or Whatever (2018): Wright’s typical rant against Christian missions, based on her very limited experience as a missionary for two or three years in Costa Rica. She seems to be trying to shock. She’s a skillful writer and an intelligent person, but arrogance may be her downfall. She makes some good points but needs to broaden her experience and read some history. Even so, I enjoyed the book.

J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016): Excellent and insightful on the situation of the poor white working class in Kentucky, Ohio, etc. Vance reflects on the factors that provided a way out for him, mostly people like his grandparents who genuinely loved him and others who provided a positive example. He talks about his ongoing battles to resist his learned responses to conflict (shouting or escaping). The book illustrates the power of the environment of poverty, but shows that it is not necessarily destiny.

Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, Discoveries from a Secret World (2016): One of my favorites this year, this is an excellent non-fiction study by a German tree scientist about the complex underground connections (fungi) between trees in an old growth forest. It deals with the differences between and old growth and planted forests, the slowness of healthy growth, how trees handle disasters—storms, fires, beasts, humans (the worse), how they feed each other, how they share—or don’t share—light, how they migrate when necessary. Much more complex than I ever dreamed.

Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (2018): A hard and terrible book to read, but an important one. Woodward carefully documents details of Trump’s behavior, confirming the suspicions I’ve had of a childish, stupid and very dangerous and controlling man. It’s important that this is documented. God have mercy on us and on the whole world.

Douglas Preston, The Lost City of the Monkey God (2017): Non-fiction, story of the discovery of two large pre-Columbian cities in the Honduran rain forests. The difficulties of working in the snake and bug infested atmosphere, the importance of the discoveries (still happening), etc. The book shifted emphasis to the disease of Leishmania braziliensis caused by sand flies, which the author and others on the expedition contracted, with life-threatening and life-long consequences. Discussion as to what caused the sudden demise of the cities, and the effects of diseases, both from the Old and New worlds.

Lisa Ohlen Harris, The Fifth Season (2013): The subtitle is, “A Daughter-in Law’s Memoir of Caregiving.” The events happened in Texas but the author has since moved to Newberg where I live. An excellent book and a compassionate story that doesn’t withhold or gloss over the hard stuff. Well written.

Poetry

Jane Kenyon, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1996): I love her poetry and find it accessible, much of it based on the ordinary stuff of life.

James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break (2011) : I love the title and the poem it’s based on, about waking up after a hangover (and more). Others I love include “Trying to Pray,” “Beginning,” and “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.”

Scott Cairn, Endless Life: Poems of the Mystics (2014): Cairns takes the writings of some of the church Fathers and Mothers (many of them Orthodox, as he is) and turns passages into contemporary poems. Good devotional material.