The Rocky Mountain Locust creatures make a dramatic appearance as “grasshoppers” in On the Banks of Plum Creek, the Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” book that’s the boys’ current nighttime reading. Laura writes of them hatching and eating every plant bare before turning in the millions for a swarm westward—and briefly over baby Carrie!
… A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before. It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, and thin and glittering. Light shone through each flickering particle.
There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came across the sky faster than the wind. The hair stood up on Jack’s neck. All at once he made a frightful sound up at that cloud, a growl and a whine.
Plunk! Something hit Laura’s head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen…
The Cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.
Wikipedia’s story is even more amazing:
One 1874 sighting famous to entomologists recorded a swarm 198,000 square miles (513,000 km²) in estimated size—greater than the area of California. According to The Guinness Book of Records under the heading ‘greatest concentration of animals’, the swarm must have contained at least 12.5 trillion insects with a total weight of 27.5 million tons. [1] But less than 30 years later, the species was apparently extinct.
University of Wisconsin Biologist Charles R. Bomar has some great accounts:
The grasshoppers ate and ate; they devoured everything from barley and buckwheat to spruce and tobacco. The locusts even ate blankets that women put over the crops to protect them. A few records report the locusts eating fence posts, leather, dead animals, and sheep wool. Cannibalism was also observed. One common comment was that “grasshoppers ate everything but the mortgage”
Picture courtesy of Bugguide.net. Map from Charles R. Bomar’s page.
The Subscriber would respectfully invite the attention of the members of the Society of Friends to his assortment of Friends’, Miscellaneous, Juvenile, School and Blank Books.
Please let me know whether you’ve found Quaker books, pamphlets, videos, anything, from recent years, that [shed light on the reader’s situation]. Whether our motive is to make Quakers simply glow in the dark, or to one-up somebody else, internal or external, it’s all about us. If we can simply speak from where we are at this moment… that’s all I really yearn for. That’s what I want Friends to be known for.
Evangelical Friend AJ Schwanz writes about a new book from Mike King called Presence-centered Youth Ministry: Guiding Students into Spiritual Formation:
In my history of being part of faith communities I realized that those who are “group”-oriented seem more clubish, more “come in, be one of us”, more fractured, more self-interested. Those that were “ministry”-0riented thought of the bigger picture, had more awareness of the each other, practiced more over-arching hospitality. And in my faith gathering we have many ministries, but not a lot of groups … but the places where there are groups, we seem to have more lack of communication and conflict with each other.
Martin Commentary: On her post I asked AJ to tease out this distinction between “groups” that separate youth and “ministry” that keeps them in the church body.
I wonder if there’s some lesson for liberal Friends in this and not just for youth ministry. It seems like we have a tendency to compartimentalize our activities. Every purpose needs its own committee and we spend a lot of time starting and laying down committees. Why is “peace and concerns” separated from “earthcare” separated from “outreach” separated from “racial justice”? They’re all loving our neighbors.
My impression is that earlier generations of Friends did most things through two “committees”: ministers and elders. By divorcing our good deeds from ministry, we often secularlize them. How might we pull these functions together? Have any liberal Friends read out there Mike King’s work? Here’s the Amazon description:
How many programs does it take to change a youth group?
That question has bothered youth workers for decades, and the cracks in its logic are beginning to show. In place of the contrived, artificial mechanisms employed so widely in modern youth outreach and discipleship, Mike King proposes a ministry centered in the presence of God.
Young people encounter Christ not in the flash and pop of arena ministry, but in the sacred shadow of his presence. They learn what it is to love and follow Christ by observing others loving and following Christ—letting Christ shape their worldviews, their habits, their virtues. Presence-Centered Youth Ministry gives shape to such ministry through the classic disciplines and potent symbols and practices that have sustained the church over the centuries.
The sound and fury that has characterized youth ministry for so long has left too many youth workers tired and too many young people disillusioned. Come explore the deeper terrain; your students are sure to follow.
What follows below are answers to what I suspect will be frequently asked questions regarding the creation of the book Writing Cheerfully on the Web: A Quaker Blog Reader.
