Happy 75th Birthday, Ken Sehested!

Through the years, I have posted articles regarding many individuals, but very few about personal friends / acquaintances. This post is about a man I first met 39 years ago and whom I am glad to call a friend. I trust you will enjoy learning more about him and his meritorious activities over the past decades. 

Kenneth L. Sehested was born on April 29, 1951. After receiving degrees from New York University in 1973 and Union Theological Seminary in 1978, Ken began his career with Seeds magazine in the latter year. That publication, which I remember well, focused on food security and world hunger concerns. That is probably when I saw Ken’s name for the first time.

In 1984, Ken became the founding director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America (BPFNA), and as one who had become a pacifist while still a teenager, I became even more impressed with Ken and his work. I don’t remember how soon it was that I became a supporter of BPFNA, but I attended their summer gathering in Mars Hill, N.C., in July 1987.**

Perhaps it was later that year that Ken published “Trust and Obey,” which was identified as Peacemakers International Spiritual Pamphlet #10. I noted in my January 1988 diary/journal that I had read it. In that small publication, he quoted Clarence Jordan (1912~69), whom many of us greatly admired back then and still hold in great esteem.

Jordan said, “Faith is not belief in spite of the evidence; that’s not faith, but foolishness. Faith is life lived in scorn of the consequences.” Then Ken asserted that trust and obedience most go together: “To obey is the evidence that we live in trust.” Then he states,

Trusting and obeying creates no interest off which we may live. If unemployed, we fail to exercise our faith, we are reduced to spiritual poverty.

Edwin Dahlberg (1893~1986) was an American Baptist pastor and a passionate peacemaker. In 1960, the Gandhi Peace Award was established, and two peacemakers were selected to receive the awards that inaugural year: Dahlberg and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Four years later, the American Baptist Churches established the Dahlberg Peace Award, and the first recipient was Martin Luther King, Jr.  In 1979, Jimmy Carter received that Award, and Ken Sehested was the recipient in 1995. I was overjoyed when I heard that my friend Ken had been given such a prestigious award.

Ken and Nancy Hastings married in 1973, and they both attended Union Theological Seminary, graduating in the same class of 1978. After years of service in various ministry activities as members of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, a suburban city on the east side of Atlanta, in 2001, Ken & Nancy (and others) established the Circle of Mercy (CoM) church in Asheville, N.C.

Ken relinquished his pastoral duties at CoM in 2015, but Nancy continued her ministry there until 2021. They are still a part of that unique church fellowship. In 2014, Ken created an online blog, prayerandpolitiks.org. Its motto is “at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action.”  (Here is a link to “Contagious Resurrection,” his recent post: Recent – Prayer & Politiks.)

When I asked for some of his quotes that I might share here, he wrote, “Probably the bedrock statement of my theological orientation has long been this: God is more taken with the agony of the earth than the ecstasy of heaven.” Also, “There’s no getting right with God. There’s only getting soaked. (A protest against transactional notions of faith.)”

Ken also shared this core belief/emphasis: “Faith entails both the disarming of the heart and the disarming of the nations. (One of the believing community’s worst failures is not understanding the interconnection of those two realities.)”

It has been my privilege to share these reflections about my friend Ken Sehested. Perhaps those of you who do know him and have read some of his publications learned something new from this post. I am especially happy that those of you who haven’t heard about him have learned some important things about him now, just a few days before his 75^th birthday.

I now close this post with what Ken calls his “favorite homegrown benediction.” 

_____

** In August 2018, I wrote an article titled "Passionately Pursuing Peace.” It was published that month in Word&Way, the historic Baptist paper of Missouri. The piece narrates some of the history of Baptist peace publications before the BPFNA was founded. (That article can be found on my supplementary blogsite, see here).

TTT #22 Jesus Expects His Followers to be Peacemakers

The 22^nd chapter of Thirty True Things . . . (TTT) was not one of the chapters planned for that book. But in the process of writing the previous chapter, linked to in my Aug. 10 blog article, I became aware of how closely related are the ideas of simple living and peacemaking.

Simple Living and Peacemaking

In looking back at exemplary Christians through the centuries, most of those most interested in simple living were also interested in peacemaking, and many of those most interested in peacemaking were also interested in simple living.

In that connection, through the years I have also become increasingly cognizant of how there seems to be a significant economic factor behind most major historical events, including, and especially, wars. In spite of all the high-sounding rhetoric, wars are almost always fought for economic reasons, at least in part.

In his State of the Union message in January 2002, President George W. Bush referred to three countries as “the axis of evil.” Those three countries were Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The next year war was launched against Iraq, and there have been repeated rumblings about a future war against Iran.

While the government of North Korea has often been renounced, until briefly in 2017 there had been little talk of going to war against that country. What is the difference? It is hard to deny that the abundance of oil in the Middle East and the scarcity of oil in North Korea was likely the major reason Iran and Iraq were targeted and North Korea was not.

If population pressures, the need for natural resources, the desire for markets are all factors lying behind most wars (a generalization that, admittedly, some historians would disagree with), it is not hard to understand that an emphasis on simple living is closely related to peacemaking.  

Peacemaking as Love in Action

One of Martin Luther King’s notable books contains fifteen sermons published under the title Strength to Love (1963). Two sermons appearing early in the book are “Love in Action” and “Love Your Enemies,” and then the final sermon is “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.”

Those sermons sum up well what everyone needs to realize about love, which is at the core of the Christian faith.

Christian pacifists, such as Francis of Assisi and the Anabaptists, do not base their peacemaking activities upon the optimistic belief that people are basically good and that peace can result from that goodness if people just tap into it and talk to each other in a rational manner.

No, Christian pacifism is primarily based on Jesus’ teachings about love.

Christian pacifism does not necessarily “work” in every case. You might say it didn’t “work” for Jesus. It didn’t work for numerous Christian martyrs through the centuries, people who out of obedience to Christ were willing to shed their own blood rather than to be engaged in killing other people.

And so to the present time, many of those who take Jesus’ teaching seriously refuse to support war, for they do not see how it would be possible to love their enemies if they were also seeking to kill them through warfare.

People like Dorothy Day, MLK, John Dear, and many others during my lifetime have made it quite clear that peacemaking is hard, dangerous work. And most of the people who want to be “good” Christians fall far short of the example that people like them have set.

But in a world where Christianity has often become entwined with war and warlike activities, people such as Day, King, and Dear challenge us to realize that Jesus expects his followers to be peacemakers.

[The entire chapter 22 of Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (TTT) can be accessed here.]

Jane Addams on the New $10 Bill?

As you probably know, in 2020 the Treasury Department is planning to issue a new $10 bill with the picture of a woman on it. Jane Addams was one name on a list I saw suggesting twenty women worth being considered for that honor. 

Wanting to learn more about her life and work, last month I read Robin K. Berson’s book Jane Addams: A Biography (2004)

Berson tells the fascinating story of Jane, who was born 155 years ago tomorrow (on September 6, 1860) in Illinois near the Wisconsin border about 250 miles (as the crow flies) almost due north of St. Louis. Hers was an upper middle class family, and her father served as a state senator for seven terms. (He was also a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln.)

As a girl and young woman, Jane had various health issues. Further, by the time she was 21, she “felt an overwhelming sense of failure, a despairing purposelessness, a debilitating passivity” (Berson, p. 14).

After several unfruitful years, in 1888 during a visit to England she visited Toynbee Hall, a “settlement” in a poor district in London. That visit sparked her desire to open a similar facility in Chicago—and she did. Hull-House opened its doors in September 1889.

A settlement house is defined as “a center in an underprivileged area that provides community services.” And that is what Hull-House was for more than 120 years. Unfortunately, it closed in 2012.

According to the Chicago Tribune article announcing its closing, “The organization, first formed in 1889, has provided foster care, domestic violence counseling, child development programs and job training to 60,000 children, families and community groups each year.”

Jane Addams died in 1935, but during her 75 years she was involved in far more than helping the poor people of Chicago—although those efforts were certainly praiseworthy. Beginning especially in 1915, and for the rest of her life, she was an untiring opponent of war and advocate for world peace.

Addams presided at the International Congress of Women, which met in The Hague, and was the president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which grew out of that 1915 meeting.

She presided at six congresses of WILPF, and partly for her work with that organization she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931—the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Addams was an untiring supporter of those who were exploited and/or discriminated against. Accordingly, she was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920.

She was also prominently involved in the labor movement and a strong advocate of unions. Because of that kind of activity and advocacy, as well as because of her unwavering pacifism, she came under considerable criticism during the 1920s.

In fact, J. Edgar Hoover went so far as to characterize Addams as “the most dangerous woman in America.”

The Road to Character by the New York Times op-ed writer David Brooks has been one of the bestselling non-fiction books of 2015. In the second chapter Brooks writes appreciatively of the life and work of Jane Addams, highlighting how she “dedicated her life to serving the needy.”

In spite of the criticism by Hoover and others, at the time of her death she was, once again, very high regarded. Although she likely will not be the one selected, Jane Addams is indeed a woman worth being considered for the new $10 bill.

World Week for Peace

Many Christians across the U.S. have little interest in, and perhaps not much knowledge of, the World Council of Churches (WCC). Some Christians are even quite critical of the WCC. 

Nevertheless, the WCC is involved in many very commendable activities. Their sponsorship of World Week for Peace in Palestine Israel (WWPPI), scheduled from Sept. 21 to 27 this year, is a good example.

WWPPI is an initiative of the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum of the WCC. That group is described as “an international, inter-church advocacy initiative for peace in Israel and Palestine.” 

Israeli and Palestinian Flags with Peace (salaam/shalom) in Arabic & Hebrew

Certainly Israel and Palestine are places in the world badly in need of peace, as you know well. On July 8, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip.

A ceasefire has been in effect since the last week in August. But seven weeks of Israeli air strikes and Palestinian rocket attacks left more than 2,100 people dead and over 10,000 wounded, most of them Palestinians—and a majority of them civilians.

While conservative Christians, as well as those who are conservative politically, tend to be strong supporters of Israel, the WCC tends to be more on the side of the Palestinians—as I think they should be.

That is one reason some are critical of the WCC—and some may well be critical of my position as well.

Certainly neither the WCC nor I support the violent activities of Hamas. But it seems quite clear that the Palestinian people as a whole have long been the victims of grave injustice.

More and more of Palestinian land has been taken by Israeli force. For example, on Aug. 31 Israel’s government made its largest appropriation of occupied West Bank land in a generation, taking some 1,000 acres that legally belonged to Palestinians.

For many reasons, materials for the WWPPI declare, “It’s time for Palestine.” One piece includes the following statements:

• It time for Palestinians and Israelis to share a just peace.

• It’s time to end more than 60 years of conflict, oppression and fear.

• It’s time for freedom from occupation.

• It’s time to stop bulldozing one community’s homes and building homes for the other community on land that is not theirs.

• It’s time for people who have been refugees for more than 60 years to regain their rights and a permanent home.

• It’s time to be revolted by violence against civilians and for civilians on both sides to be safe.

• It’s time to reunite the people of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

• It’s time to seek forgiveness between communities and to repair a broken land together.

• For Palestine, for Israel and for a troubled world, it’s time for peace.

This year the International Day of Prayer for Peace is scheduled for Sept. 21. In the week that follows, church organizations, congregations, and people of faith are being encouraged to participate in worship services, educational events, and acts of advocacy in support a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians.

I hope that, at least to some degree, this will be done in the churches across the U.S. and around the world.

At the very least, I hope that on Sunday in addition to the usual prayers for people in the congregation who have health needs there will be some fervent prayers for peace in Palestine and Israel.

It’s high time for peace and justice there.

Sadako and the Thousand Cranes

Sadako Sasaki was born in January 1943 in Hiroshima, Japan. But 1943 was not a good time to be born in Japan, and Hiroshima was not a good place to be born.

Sixty-nine years ago tomorrow, on August 6, 1945, the atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima. Although Sadako lived not far from the center of the explosion, she was not visibly injured.

Just before her 12^th birthday, though, she began to have symptoms indicating that something was wrong. It turned out that she had leukemia, or “atomic bomb disease” as it was often referred to in Japan then.

Most of you know about the Japanese art of paper folding, which the Japanese call origami. In the late 1700s, one of the first books on origami published in Japan was titled “How to Fold 1,000 Cranes.”

The crane has long been used in Asian cultures as a symbol for good health and longevity. According to Japanese tradition, anyone with the patience and commitment to fold 1,000 paper cranes will be granted their most desired wish.

After Sadako came down with leukemia, her good friend Chizuko came to her hospital room with a piece of gold-colored paper and scissors.

Reminding Sadako of the legend of the thousand cranes, Chizuko folded the first of what she hoped would become a string of 1,000 paper cranes that would lead to Sadako’s healing.

According to Eleanor Coerr’s popular book “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes” (1977), at the time of her death on Oct. 25, 1955, only 644 paper cranes had been finished. The lack of paper is one reason more had not been folded.

Her classmates folded 356 more cranes, making 1,000 that were placed with her in her casket.

Sadako’s friends also dreamed of building a monument to her and for all the children who were killed by the atomic bomb.

Their dream became a reality when in 1958 a statue of Sadako holding a golden crane was unveiled in Hiroshima Peace Park. These words are engraved on the base of that statue:

          This is our cry, this is our prayer; peace in the world.

Every year hundreds of thousands of paper cranes are placed around Sakako’s memorial statue on August 6, which is widely observed in Japan as Peace Day.

Sadako wrote on the wings of one of her paper cranes, “I write peace on your wings, and you will fly all over the world.”

In the library at the church where June and I are members, there is a painting of a paper crane with those words cited at the bottom. This year people at our church also are folding 1,000 paper cranes and will send them to Hiroshima to be placed by Sadako’s statue in the Peace Park.

Even though Sadako’s wish to get well didn’t come true, her story has become known around the world.

This evening in Santa Barbara, Calif., the Nuclear Age Peace Age Foundation will host the 20^th annual Sadako Peace Day with poetry, music, and reflections commemorating the story of Sadako. Their slogan this year is a good one: Reflecting on the past to assure a more peaceful future.

In 2002, Naomi Takeuchi, a Japanese-American woman, founded a business consulting organization she named 1000 Cranes. One page on its attractive website tells “The 1000 Cranes Legend.”

That page concludes by saying that Sadako’s story “stands as an inspiration to all, and a testament to the continued power of the paper crane as a compelling symbol for hope, love, honor, and peace.”

And so it does.

The Life of Brian

"Monty Python’s Life of Brian” is a 1979 British comedy film starring and written by the comedy group known as Monty Python. The film contains themes of religious satire that were controversial at the time of its release, and onward, drawing accusations of blasphemy and protests from some religious groups.

Some of you, no doubt, have seen the movie, and I don’t particularly recommend it to those of you who haven’t. But I do remember it as being quite interesting—and quite funny in places.

This article, though, is about the life of a different Brian, one much closer to (my) home than Great Britain. In fact, the man about whom I am writing lives only 15 miles from my home town in northwest Missouri.

Brian Terrell and his wife Betsy Keenan live and work at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in Maloy, Iowa. They raise most of what they need from their gardens, chickens and small herd of goats.

From this little farm, Brian travels around Iowa and across the U.S.—and even overseas—speaking and acting with various communities as a peace activist and a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

This month Brian, who will turn 58 next month, has been on another lengthy protest march. This one was called “On the Road to Ground the Drones.”

Brian and those with him walked about 165 miles from the Boeing corporate headquarters in Chicago (where the manufacture of drones and conventional war planes is managed and designed) to the Michigan Air National Guard Facility at the Battle Creek Airport, planned site of a new drone command center. They arrived there on June 14.

My Nov. 25, 2012, blog article was about drones. It was not long after that that I heard about Brian for the first time. At that very time he was serving a six month sentence at the federal prison camp in Yankton, South Dakota.

Brian had been arrested and sentenced for protesting remote control murder by drones, specifically from Whiteman Air Force Base in Johnson Co., Mo. It was not long after his release that I met him for the first time.

Every year Brian and Betsy host a Summer Solstice and Feast of St. John the Baptist celebration, and I attended part of that festive time last year and met Brian there. People from various parts of the country, and even England, had come to Maloy to be with Brian and Betsy and the others who had gathered at their place.

With few exceptions, those who had come were peace activists. This year’s gathering, their 20^th, will begin around 4 p.m. on June 21, tomorrow afternoon, and I plan to be there again.

Yes, the life of Brian Terrell is quite different from that of the Brian in the Monty Python movie—and it is quite different from the way most of us live.

Most of us are not willing or able to live the Catholic worker type of lifestyle, and even fewer are willing to involve ourselves in public protests that lead to arrest and even incarceration.

But Brian keeps walking, keeps protesting, and keeps advocating for cessation of the use of drones.

Last month he wrote, “Our civilian and military authorities, proliferating drone attacks around the globe from more and more American bases, are acting recklessly and in defiance of domestic and international law.”

The main objection, of course, is to the killing of civilians as “collateral damage” of the drones.

Yes, the life Brian Terrell is living now is worth our consideration—and appreciation.

In Admiration of John Dear

Years ago when I first heard the name John Dear, being a farm boy I immediately thought of John Deere tractors. But as I quipped in my 4/5 blog article, John Dear is not a tractor but detractor of the nation’s weapons of war. 

For many years I have admired the man whose name really is John Dear, and I was very happy to meet him and hear him talk earlier this month. And what a talk it was! 

Dear’s newest book is “The Nonviolent Life” (2013), and his passionate talk was based upon it. He contends that the life of nonviolence requires three simultaneous attributes: being nonviolent toward ourselves; being nonviolent to all people, all creatures, and all creation; and joining the global grassroots movement of nonviolence.

Dear (b. 1959) is an American Catholic priest (a former Jesuit), a Christian pacifist, and an author & lecturer. He has been highly involved in nonviolent action for three decades, having been greatly influenced by Daniel Berrigan, whom he joined in the Plowshares movement.

Remarkably, Dear has been arrested over 75 times for his acts of nonviolent civil disobedience against war, injustice and nuclear weapons. The first time he was arrested was at the Pentagon 30 years ago, on April 17, 1984.

In 1994 he spent eight months in jail for his Plowshares action of civil disobedience. That followed his arrest, along with three others, in December 1993 for hammering on an F-15 nuclear-capable fighter bomber at an Air Force base in North Carolina—symbolically beating swords into plowshares.

I have just purchased and begun to read Dear’s 2011 book “Lazarus, Come Forth!: How Jesus Confronts the Culture of Death and Invites Us into the New Life of Peace.”

Since this is Passion Week, I’ve just read “Washing Each Other’s Feet” in the book just mentioned. As one might expect from Dear, he says the biblical account of Jesus’ activity on the night before his crucifixion has generally been misunderstood.

“The episode is not meant to inspire us to service. It is not meant to urge us toward self-humiliation. Rather it is a ritual of preparing our feet to walk Jesus’ road of nonviolence” (p. 162).

Dear ends the chapter contending that Jesus “calls us out of our addiction to violence. He calls us into the freedom of resurrection, into the new life of peace and nonviolence” (p. 166).

In his 2007 book “Transformation” Dear declared: 

One day when the people of the United States finally wake up; dismantle their nuclear weapons; spend their billions of dollars to eradicate hunger, disease, homelessness, illiteracy, and unemployment; clean up the oceans and the earth; and renounce war forever, humanity itself will be transfigured and the light of Christ will shine brightly and lead us to an astonishing breakthrough of global hope and encouragement.

Not only because of what he has written, but especially because he has had the courage over the past 30 years to plead for peace by participating in non-violent protests, many resulting in his being arrested and jailed, I write this with deep admiration for John Dear. He continues to be an inspiring advocate for peace and justice.

In closing, from the very beginning of his 2011 book, here are Dear’s words for us to ponder—and to pray:

Lead me from death to life,
from falsehood to truth
from despair to hope,
from fear to trust,
from hate to love,
from war to peace.
Let peace fill my heart.
Let peace fill my world.
Let peace fill the universe.
Amen!