In Part 1 of my interview with Adria, we have a tender conversation about spiritual wounding and healing in faith communities. It continues here in the second half. It’s a topic that is close to my heart. Yet my favorite part of this second half is when she tells her story about male friendships. It’s why she does not want to let go of referring to God as “he.” We also talk about remorse, grace, and forgiveness.

Adria is a lawyer with a heart for mediation. She's on the Board of Advisors for the Earlham School of Religion and is a member of Friends of Jesus Fellowship founded by Micah Bales, Faith Kelley, and others. She's also a compassionate voice of prophecy within the Quaker movement.

In her blog post, Adria describes “the fierce grip that White supremacy has on our national psyche and the real-world impact that it has on the lives of people of color.”

She sees that chokehold in profoundly spiritual terms. She described racism “as a malevolent spirit haunting our land." The Lamb's War is what early Friends called the fight against evil to which Christ called his followers. Adria writes that “Fighting racism is a non-negotiable aspect of the Lamb’s War.”

So I began with a question about the connection.

I grew up in a one-church, two-bar town, in the first set of mountains north of Phoenix. It was a quirky little town. It was a mystery to me why my classmates’ dads could fix cars and lay concrete floors, but my dad could only read ancient Greek and Hebrew. He was the pastor in that one church, and for a while had been a regular denizen of one of those bars…

Just before Christmas, out where huge boulders had tumbled down the mountainside eons ago, I’d huddle next to my best friend, always in the children’s choir. I'd see my dad’s profile in the candlelight near a palo verde tree, rocking slightly on his feet. Then his booming liturgical voice would say, “And the angel said unto her, ‘Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God.” It was the town’s annual Christmas pageant.

But again, this is part of an issue that I have with some kinds of Christianity. I feel like the message of Jesus has been greatly perverted to save empire and save, you know, the capitalist system. I`m pretty sure of that, based on what Jesus said about bringing freedom to captives and releasing the oppressed. I'm like, Well, if the system is oppressive and people are supporting it, then obviously, they're complicit.

People come to mediators because they haven’t been able to resolve their disputes on their own. They often are in despair that their disputes can ever be resolved. Mediators have to bring hope. The mediation process itself is a reason to have hope, but some mediations go through stretches where even the mediators get discouraged. How could I help my mediators keep hoping when the mediation seems to be going nowhere?

In an interview for this newsletter, Julie Peyton describes her spiritual journey as coming alive when she abandoned a theology and let her experience draw her ultimately to Jesus. But I think for me it may have gone the other way: from theology to experience.

I tell my trainees that I ground my hope for each mediation in my faith in a loving, omnipotent God. This is a theological faith, expressed in a lawyer-friendly syllogism:

1. If God is omnipotent, then (at least) anything God wants is possible.

2. If God is loving, and loves all of us, then God must want all of us to (at least) have means to meet our needs.

3. Therefore, there always has to be a way for both sides in the bitterest mediation to find means to meet their needs.

Maybe not their wants, especially not their desires for revenge, but their needs are always within reach.

Derek Lamson texted me that his new graphic novel, Mark V "is a little magic realism; it's a series of related shaggy dog stories; it's a memoir; it’s a bit of a love-letter to Eugene; and in three or four different bits it’s Mark 5:1-20."

Intrigued, I asked to interview him about the novel and his new album, A Month of Sundays. Here's our conversation, lightly edited.

When I was seven years old, a farmer who lived near our family home saw how much I loved chickens and gave me a cockerel—that’s a baby rooster—for a pet one summer. I named him Blackberry. We spent the days playing outside, often with Blackberry perched upon my head. Blackberry had glossy green-black feathers and beautiful eyes, and he taught me about how to communicate with chickens.

Before that summer I had begun lessons in chicken communication through spending time in my grandmother’s henhouse. If I sat quietly with the chickens, squatting between the nest boxes and the roosts, I could begin to feel part of the web of communication and energy within the flock. I watched the chickens relate to each other, and I listened to and sometimes mimicked their vocalizations.

Decades later, when I first began attending Quaker meetings, I thought about the lessons I learned from chickens. As about seven or eight of us gathered on Wednesday evenings for unprogrammed worship, I practiced feeling the same web of connection I had experienced in the henhouse.

And now, a few more decades after that first encounter with Friends, I’m thinking again about the chicken coop and the lessons I’m learning from Camas Friends.

Our conversation begins with Bernie’s “four besties,” as she called them, and their trip to San Francisco for three days last July to spread Bernie’s ashes. I’ve edited it lightly for brevity and clarity, and changed the names of the homeless people they served. - Judy

Faith Marsalli, former pastor at Klamath Falls Friends, has a certain courage. A native of Orange County California, where the Republican brand is foremost, she dares to have political conversations with people who have the very opposite opinion of hers—and stay in loving relationships.

Just how is that possible? I asked Faith. I told her I had gotten through the U.S. politics on Facebook okay. Then somebody started posting the same Russian propaganda points I heard when we lived in Russia.

That's when I lost it.

“We've all lost it," she replied. “And I think that's why we're trying to work on it. That's what motivates us, because we get so triggered by things that that feel so completely opposite of what our perspective is. And how do we have a conversation and not lose our cool?"

And as I'm sitting down, I think, ‘Oh, I did not lose my faith. I lost a theology.’ And for the first time, I was able to distinguish between those two things. So I'd been thinking for a long time, I lost my faith. I've lost my faith, I've lost my faith. — But I had just lost a theology.

- Julie Peyton