April 2014 – Jon Watts

Coming Out As Gay in Kenya

Quaker Speak: Justimore Musombi talks about being a Gay Christian Pastor in Kenya, homosexuality in Africa, and coming out as gay in Kenya.

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I’m looking for a new family honestly, because my family has disregarded me. They did a ceremony in the African context of when you are gay or you commit suicide, they perform a certain ritual that people don’t want to associate themselves with you. To me, they performed it. They burned my clothes. They destroyed my things. They have sold my commercial plots in town. Some of the things I have bought. They have sold my things, meaning they don’t want to associate themselves with me.

I don’t have family in Kenya. I don’t have support in Kenya. I don’t have friends in Kenya.

Being Gay in Kenya
The law of Kenya is against homosexuality. If you are gay and found having sex with a person of the same gender you are jailed for 14 years. People need to understand, you know, what we mean by sexual preference and sexual orientation. I think that is the big thing that Africans are struggling with. So if they come to the fullness of understanding what is sexual preference and what is sexual orientation I think they can distinguish that and not demonize people and I think it is just homophobic, you know.

Being brought from where—I just don’t know because people say it is a Western thing, but honestly speaking it’s not a Western thing because I have done research and I found out that in the African context we have some terms that they used to refer to people of the same sex having sex—and so it is something buried down that they don’t want to bring it up. And yet it is there.

Coming Out
When I came out, close friends of mine heard about my coming out and they demonized it. They started calling me—that I am evil, I am possessed—and they treat me as someone who is suffering from mental illness.

“Praying for God to lift this curse”
I can say that what Paul says, “a thorn in the flesh,” something that disturbed me for many years and so I wanted this thing to come out. But it didn’t come out. It is something that I have grown up with my entire life. The first time that I discovered that I was gay it was far away in high school. I was being attracted to men sexually—those who dress well and they look nice. It was just me.

I would go to people to ask, “I have these feelings about my sexual desires. How am I going to do it?” Most of the time people advised me to pray and fast because they were telling me that it is a demon. And so I believed maybe, you know, people who are heterosexual and they engage themselves into gay sex: it is an abomination. It is a curse.

So I was praying God to lift this curse away from me.

Reconciling
So it has been so difficult for me to reconcile my faith, to reconcile my culture, and my sexual orientation. People refer me to books like Leviticus: “It is wrong for people to be together, have sex with the same gender,” and then they quote so much what Paul said. But you know, they don’t look into the culture of that time. The context and the content.

Why did Paul say this? Why did the writer of Leviticus write this? They take the scriptures literally the way it is and they want to apply it. Maybe it was that time, it is not this time.

Can’t Go Home
So right now I am operating as a refugee. Not on student status, but student vis-a-vis refugee. So I can’t assure you I will be going home right now, but I do love my country and I want to go back and support my country. But I have no means of going back because of the fear that I have for my life. Sort of like, I have shifted my minds to be here and to look for the Quaker organization and work with the Quaker church to support me and to be there.

Hakuna Mungu kama wewe

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It has been an honor to serve Friends as the founder and director of QuakerSpeak. Now I am pleased to announce my next endeavor, a Quaker media project for the modern era. Find out more at TheeQuaker.org

Paulette Meier: Quaker Faith in Song

Quaker Speak: Paulette Meier sings songs from early Quaker Quotes. The act of creating music from Quaker spiritual writings helped Paulette through a difficult time in her life. These songs are unlike anything you’ve ever heard.

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“Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit, from thy own thoughts. Then thou wilt feel the principle of God, to turn thy mind to the Lord God. Whereby thou wilt receive God’s strength and love from whence life comes.”

I’d had an intense prayer experience at Pendle Hill where I clearly got the message that I had a role to play in spreading knowledge of the Quaker faith because it’s so little-known. The message was, “you have a role to play” and that it’s important right now, that the Quaker faith has important things for the world.

“Whereby thou wilt receive God’s strength to allay all blustering storms and tempest”

My name is Paulette Meier and I live in Cincinnati, Ohio, and we’re here at my meeting house, Community Friends Meeting in Cincinnati.

I was the artist in residence at the Quaker retreat center outside of Philadelphia, at Pendle Hill, where I had a chance to delve more deeply into the Early Quaker history and writings. The next year I went back to Philadelphia and was sojourning among Friends. It was challenging. I wanted to get my children’s music out there and wanted to learn more about Quaker history and be in Philadelphia in the “Quaker Mecca” but it was challenging for me and my spirits sank a lot, struggling with some isolation feelings even there.

So one day I picked up this quote from George Fox and said “I need to internalize this message” and the only way I know to memorize things is to put them to song, so I just ended up singing it.

“Art thou in the darkness? Mind it not, for if thou dost it will feed thee more, but stand still and act not and wait in patience.”
I was really struck by the wisdom in these texts and how relevant they are today.
Timeless Quaker Wisdom in Plainsong is a collection of 21 Quaker Quotations that I happened to put to melody. After I’d compiled this collection of quotations, I realized that there was a group of 4 themes in them and they seemed to relate to what I see as the process of Quaker spiritual practice.

Centering

“Ye have no time but this present time. Yet have no time but this present time”

The first one is all about centering and entering into the stillness. Rex Ambler, this theologian from England said—in a class I took at Pendle Hill—that Fox didn’t tell people what to believe. He was very unusual at the time in that. He told people what to do. It was directives about being still and letting go of thoughts and letting go of preoccupations and centering. So that’s the first theme: how to get there.

Experience

“When we should see the great creator stare us in the face.”

Early Quakers talked so frequently about entering into the Kingdom of Heaven within. They took that quote from Jesus, “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” When one arrives at that deep, centered place, one experiences deep peace, deep healing, restoration into the image of the divine, and love—the eternal Christ spirit, which is love. That’s the second theme.

Community

“Our life is tenderness and bearing with each other and forgiving one another.”

That meeting in silence together fostered a tenderness for each other. Like the Early Christians I think experienced this indwelling of Spirit and this deep connection with each other that seemed to bring home this awareness that there’s that of God in everyone. It’s so much easier to love when one is living in that awareness.

Outward Witness

“May we look upon our treasure and try to discover whether the seeds of war are nourished by these our possessions.”

I think a lot of religious traditions may invite one into this centered space of refreshment and everything, but I think the thing that I loved about Quaker faith is that one can be centered but experience promptings of the Spirit to undertake action in the world and to witness to truth in the world.

I think this theme of outward witness is really so important to Quaker spiritual practice and listening for where and how we are to do that outer witness in the world is really important.

“We are a people that follow after those things that make for peace, love, and unity. It is our desire that others feet may walk in the same. We do deny and bear our testimony against all strife and wars and contentions”

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James Nayler – “Art Thou in the Darkness?” (Sung by Paulette Meier)

A quote by early Quaker James Nayler, sung by Paulette Meier.

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Art thou in darkness? Mind it not, for if thou dost it will feed thee more. But stand still, and act not, and wait in patience, till Light arises out of Darkness and leads thee. James Nayler (1659)

James Nayler (or Naylor) (1616–1660) was an English Quaker leader. He is among the members of the Valiant Sixty, a group of early Quaker preachers and missionaries. At the peak of his career, he preached against enclosure and the slave trade.[1] In 1656, Nayler achieved national notoriety when he reenacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem by entering Bristol on a donkey. He was imprisoned and charged with blasphemy.

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George Fox – “Be Still and Cool” (Sung by Paulette Meier)

A quote by early Quaker George Fox, sung by Paulette Meier.

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Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit, from thy own thoughts. Then thou wilt feel the principle of God, to turn thy mind to the Lord God, whereby thou wilt receive Gods strength and power from whence life comes, whereby thou wilt receive Gods strength to allay all blustering, storms, and tempests. George Fox (1658)

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Why Are Quakers Pacifists?

Swarthmore College professor George Lakey in this week’s Quaker Speak on why Quakers are nonviolent, pacifism and nonviolence (also known as nonviolent action). We talked with George Lakey about Quakers’ call to struggle, the myth that violence works, and how that’s all changing.

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Fox said that we do not war with outward weapons. Our understanding of Jesus is he will not ask us to do outward weapons. We don’t understand a holy Spirit that one minute says “be peaceful” and the next minute, “Go out and kill a lot of people.”

We don’t understand that kind of Spirit. The Spirit we experience is one that is consistent and wants us to not war with outward weapons.

I’m George Lakey, Philadelphia Quaker.

We’re going through a paradigm change right now. It’s something that I didn’t know if I would ever live to see because the paradigm that says, “when push comes to shove, you have to use violence,” is so tough and it’s been around for tens of thousands of years. It seems as obvious as the paradigm once was that the Earth was flat. Everybody knows the Earth is flat, right? Well, not any longer.

But that’s how toughly in-built the paradigm is that violence is what needs to be used when we’re going to really exert power and do humanitarian interventions or anything we want to do. “When it’s tough we have to use violence.” But that’s shifting now.

Quakers understood it 350 years ago because it was what they felt naturally you do when the spirit is in you saying, “love people and do what’s right. Set up the conditions under which it is easier to do right and stop oppressing each other.” The practical dimension of Quakers was expressed through nonviolent struggle.

Struggle, mind you. Not everyone responds in that way. Some people say “spirituality means I should avoid struggle.” But for Early Quakers, the Spirit wanted us to go out and do struggle. And so Quakers would pick fights.

Quakers would go into churches for example, and after a preacher had preached something that they felt like was really wrong, they would stand up and contradict the preacher even though that meant that it was pretty likely that they would be grabbed by the parishioners nearby and dragged out of the church and beaten up just outside the church. But they would do that, that’s an example of nonviolent struggle.

It’s because, “yes we make war with inward weapons”, and they even called themselves people who were struggling for the Lamb’s war. They were fighting the Lamb’s war. So this was a warrior outfit, these 17th century Quakers, who were fighting with nonviolent means.

There’s a new scholarly book [“Why Civil Resistance Works” by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan] that the hardboiled political scientists who wrote it are getting enormous credit for. It describes in ways that political scientists and hardboiled realists, governance people, are taking deeply seriously because the book describes over 300 struggles in which regime change has been the issue: overthrowing governments or getting out from under an empire or stopping an occupation — big stuff. In this book, they prove that the movements that chose nonviolent means were twice as effective as the movements that chose violent means.

To anyone who is pragmatic of mind, this is news. This is extremely important. So it’s not only seeing the Egyptians overthrow Mubarak, or seeing the Tunisians overthrow their dictator or the other kinds of recent experiences that we’ve seen, but it’s also the scholarship—which is important in terms of idea formation—is beginning to catch up with this idea of nonviolent struggle.

It’s just believing that the Earth was flat. You can’t really hold it against people for believing that the Earth was flat. At a certain time in history, everybody knows that the Earth was flat. And at this time in history, most people just know that violence is the only way to do things when it’s tough. However, the excitement for me is there have been sufficient breakthroughs so that now an opening may exist. And maybe some adventurous person watching this will decide to open themselves to new possibilities.

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