A few years ago I was invited to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens holiday light show. The entire property was lit up with thousands of lights. The people there, especially the children, were awestruck – walking around with wondrous looks on their faces.

I looked up at one of the trees which was filled with large, multicolored round lights, and in between the lights and the branches, I saw a bright full moon with a planet – I think it was Jupiter – also shining brightly right next to the moon. I doubt if too many other people at the Botanical Gardens that night noticed it.

The sight of the moon and Jupiter was spectacular. And then consider that Jupiter is over 300 million miles away from the Earth. It’s amazing that it’s visible to us.

It got me thinking about the many beautiful sights that are available to us every day. Sights that we may take for granted or overlook.

Hawks soaring in the air seemingly forever without ever flapping their wings. The lakes and waterfalls and streams in North Georgia. Sunrise and sunset.

The beauty of fall foliage. The occasional snowfall that we get here in Georgia. The spectacular colors in spring blossoms (try to ignore the pollen).

The holiday decorations all around us this time of year are beautiful and festive. But let’s also remember – and appreciate – the beauty and wonder that Nature provides for us every day.

Quakers have a reputation for not celebrating religious holidays. The Quaker.org website explains why: “From a theological standpoint, Quakers don’t buy into the notion of religious holidays; every day is a holy day.”

On their website Colonial Quills said “The Quakers believed… that they should not set one day ahead of any other. In essence, they believed that every day was Thanksgiving.”

And maybe Thanksgiving, the focus of this month for many, would be the best holiday to apply the Quaker mindset to.

Psychologists tell us that being mindful every day of all those things we have to be grateful for will make us happier. And focusing on what we have makes us focus less on what we don’t have. That’s got to be a good thing for helping us live the Quaker testimony of simplicity.

If we take a moment every day to appreciate all that nature has given us, and the beauty that it provides, wouldn’t that help us remember to protect the natural world, the goal of the testimony of stewardship?

While it might be difficult to invite the whole family over for a fancy dinner every day, it isn’t hard – and can be extremely beneficial – to apply the Quaker attitude about holidays to Thanksgiving.

Every day is a holy day. Every day is a cause for giving thanks.

We’re sending out the Reflections email for 10th Month a little early in case you’d like to participate in the Atlanta Friends World Quaker Day celebration.

Details are shown below. 

Atlanta Friends Meeting is at 701 West Howard Avenue in Decatur.

———- Forwarded message ———
From: Bill Hooson
Subject: World Quaker Day 2023 Sunday 1 October

Dear Friends:

On Sunday, October 1, Atlanta Friends Meeting will join other Friends around the world to celebrate our roots and common concerns as well as our diversity.   Ministry and Worship invites you to test your knowledge of Quakers worldwide with questions about the locations and diversity while sampling a celebration cake at potluck.  A map will show the extent of meeting locations and may surprise you.  

We invite you to join us for worship at 10:00am and/or our potluck gathering at the rise of worship around 11:30am.

What is World Quaker Day?   Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) began this annual event in 2014 to help raise awareness of the diverse family of Friends around the world.  It is a chance for Quakers to remember that we are worshiping through every time zone, celebrating our deep connections across cultures and Quaker traditions. We are united in love and can accompany each other on this special day that draws us together. It is a chance to celebrate our wonderful diversity of expression, whilst at the same time offering an important opportunity to learn about Friends’ experiences in other parts of the world. 

World Quaker Day – 1 October 2023 – will be an opportunity to learn, reflect and act, as we prepare to come together as a global family of Friends at next year’s World Plenary Meeting in South Africa and online, themed Living the Spirit of Ubuntu: Responding with Hope to God’s Call to Cherish Creation and One Another.

Grace & Peace,

Bill Hooson
Clerk
Ministry and Worship Committee
Atlanta Friends Meeting

As you can tell from the PFM website and our Reflections emails, we like to use the Quaker tradition of referring to days of the week and months of the year by their numbers, not their commonly used names.

We hold our meetings for worship on First Day, and do not use the name Sunday. This is the Reflections email for Eighth Month, not August.

The reason for that is that the days of the week and the months of the year were named after ancient gods (well, most of them anyway), and Quakers do not think those gods should be honored that way. But how we got to where we are is an interesting story.

Somewhere around the second century, the Romans put the seven day week we currently use in place. The names of those days were mostly based on the names of the planets, which in turn were based on the names of the Roman gods of that time.

The Roman names for the days of the week referred to these gods:

– Sunday: Sōl or Helios (Sun)
– Monday: Luna or Selene (Moon)
– Tuesday: Mars or Ares (Mars)
– Wednesday: Mercurius or Hermes (Mercury)
– Thursday: Jove or Zeus (Jupiter)
– Friday: Venus or Aphrodite (Venus)
– Saturday: Saturnus or Kronos (Saturn)

Our current English names are derived in part from Germanic translations of the Roman names and in part from Germanic gods. According to The Scholarly Community Encyclopedia website, they come from:

– Sunday: the day of the sun
– Monday: the day of the Moon
– Tuesday: “Tiw’s day”. Tiw was a god in Norse mythology
– Wednesday: the day of the Germanic god Woden
– Thursday: the day of the Norse god known as Thor
– Friday: the day of the Anglo-Saxon goddess Fríge
– Saturday: the day of Saturn

The months of the year have a similar history. The Old Farmer’s Almanac website explains the origins of the names of the months:

At one time, the Roman calendar had 12 months, but only 10 of the months had names. The winter months were not named because not much happened in those months.

March (Martius) was named for Mars. May (Maius) and June (Junius) were named for the goddesses Maia and Juno. April (Aprilis) comes from Latin aperio, meaning “to open”, probably a reference to springtime.

The rest of the months were simply numbered; their original names in Latin meant the fifth (Quintilis), sixth (Sextilis), seventh (September), eighth (October), ninth (November), and tenth (December) month. (At that time, September through December were the 7th through 10th months.)

Eventually, January (named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions) and February (from Februa, an ancient festival dedicated to ritual springtime cleaning and washing) were added, giving all 12 months names.

Under Julius Caesar, the calendar was changed to the calendar we have today. January and February were moved to the front of the year, thus moving September through December to their current positions as the 9th through 12th months.

In 44 BC, the month Quintilis was renamed July in honor of Julius Caesar. In 8 BC, Sextilis was renamed August in honor of the Emperor Augustus.

So we ended up with names from gods, emperors, numbers, and… spring cleaning? The Quaker method seems a lot easier.

We hope to see you at one of our FIRST DAY meetings for worship during EIGHT MONTH and beyond.

Thee Quaker is a podcast started earlier this year by Jon Watts and Georgia Sparlin.

In their first episode, titled “Who Are the Modern Quakers”, they discuss the many different flavors of Quakers today.

There are Evangelical Quakers with loud boisterous worship meetings, unprogrammed Quakers who worship in silence, and many semi-programmed variations in between.

There are Catholic Quakers and Muslim Quakers and they even know of a Quaker who identifies as a shaman.

With so many different types of people, basic beliefs and worship styles, Sparling asked what it is that actually makes someone a Quaker.

One answer they proposed is the fundamental belief stated by Quaker founder George Fox in the 1600s: there is “that of God” in everyone.

If you’re Evangelically bent and you have that of God in you of course you’ll want to sing and dance and say it out loud. At the other extreme, unprogrammed meetings for worship use the silence to listen to that still, small voice that comes from that of God in us.

If you believe there is that of God in everyone, you’ll want to live by the testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship because those all shape how we interact with all the other people who have that of God in them.

You can find the Thee Quaker podcast on most podcast outlets and at their website quakerpodcast.com.

The Earth Quaker Action Team is working to fight the intertwined problems of climate change and income inequality.

Their website (eqat.org) says they are “a grassroots, nonviolent action group including Quakers and people of diverse beliefs, who join with millions of people around the world fighting for a just and sustainable economy.”

EQAT directly confronts those who benefit from the current systems, but they emphasize doing such confrontations in a nonviolent manner. They say they believe in this method because “it works. Direct action has been crucial to the success of every major social movement over the last century.”

Founded in 2009, EQAT did not wait to launch their first campaign. In 2010 they started their Bank Like Appalachia Matters (BLAM!) campaign, asking PNC Bank to stop financing corporations that participated in mountaintop removal coal mining. After five years of nonviolent direct action, PNC changed their investment policy.

It took six years of work before EQAT’s second campaign — Power Local Green Jobs — successfully influenced PECO, a Pennsylvania electrical utility to boost the local solar economy and invest in job creation for Black and Brown community members.

Their current campaign is working to make Vangaurd change their investment approaches to help address the climate problem and build a livable future.

For more information about EQAT visit their website at eqat.org or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

The Quakers United Nations Office (QUNO) is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. Founded in 1948, QUNO represents Quakers at the United Nations and other multilateral institutions.

Their website says “QUNO works to uphold the original ideal of the UN to strive for sustainable peace and justice. QUNO’s consistent commitment to speaking with integrity, lifting up the voices of those on the margins and bringing to light diverse perspectives, insights, and concerns, has led Quakers to be recognised as trusted partners who create space for new and creative solutions in response to global challenges.”

Working out of offices in Geneva and New York City, QUNO works to impact the policies of the U.N. They attempt to accomplish this in the quiet, patient Quaker tradition, and that approach has worked well.

QUNO has successfully worked for banning anti-personnel mines, banning having children in armed combat, the right to conscientious objection, and many other positive policies.

They sum up their mission this way:

“Our work is rooted in the Quaker testimonies of peace, truth, justice, equality, and simplicity. We understand peace as more than the absence of war and violence, recognizing the need to look for what seeds of war there may be in all our social, political, and economic relationships.”

QUNO will be celebrating their anniversary with several events and activities throughout the year. You can see the list of events at their website quno.org, or by following them on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.