A TRIBUTE TO JIM CORBETT: ACTIVIST,
MYSTIC, GOATHERD
A MOST REMARKABLE FRIEND
By Chuck Fager
Jim Corbett: a Prophet of Post-Desert Quakerism
Friend Jim Corbett, of Pima Meeting, died on his Arizona ranch August
2, after a short illness. He was 67.
With his passing a quiet Quaker giant has departed.
I for one am grateful to have lived in the same two centuries as he.
For those who become familiar with the important strands of Quaker thought and action of
our time, I believe Jim's life and work will loom even larger with time.
Not that we'll see a lot of monuments to him; he deserves them, but
that wasn't his way, and Quakers aren't much for it.
But a tribute is due, and here's mine. It's an adaptation of a profile
of Jim that was part of my book, Without Apology. It will come in three
instalments. Here's the first.
Part I
In a treatise entitled Goatwalking, you might not expect
liberal Quaker "prophecy" to be a prominent theme. But in the case of this
stunning book, you would be mostly mistaken.
I say mostly because it's hard to characterize Goatwalking–or
its author. If I call him a prophet, it is not because he pens jeremiads. Corbett was a
gentle man, retiring, soft-spoken, grizzled by desert sun and wind. He worked as a
rancher, cowboy, horse trader, librarian, shepherd and wilderness guide. He also breezed
brilliantly through college in three years, and finished a masters in philosophy at
Harvard while spending most of his time partying. He cited the classics of
Western–and Eastern–thought with the same familiarity and confidence that he
explained how a human can become part of the society of goats.
In the course of his "errantry"(one of his favorite terms,
which means a quest for personal and spiritual adventure, best exemplified by Don
Quixote), there were ups and downs: Corbett once considered suicide, he says, after a
series of personal setbacks in the early 1960s. But instead, after an unexpected personal
mystical experience, he chose to live, and then "turned Quaker" as the best
expression of his renewed view of life.
Corbett was by no means a conventional social activist. But one night
in the early 1980s, he volunteered to help find legal assistance for a Salvadoran refugee
arrested by the Border Patrol. But before he could file the required forms, the Salvadoran
was abruptly deported, in defiance of the U.S. government' own laws. Corbett was shocked,
then galvanized. From this spontaneous effort to respond to the refugees' plight sprang
what became the Sanctuary movement.
The saga of the Sanctuary movement is something of an underground epic,
a counter-narrative to the triumphalist "Morning in America" posturing of the
Reagan-Bush years. And predictably for the times, as the movement developed, it first put
Corbett's weatherbeaten visage on national TV, and then got his name on the FBI's wiretap
list.
Federal prosecutors worked long and hard to put him behind bars, in one
of the more significant political trials of the 1980s. The effort misfired, it turned out,
because a wiretap recorder had run out of tape just at a point where Corbett was on the
phone making self-incriminating plans to rescue more refugee families.
Besides Goatwalking, Corbett's unique career of
"errantry" had the makings of a fascinating, offbeat suspense thriller (which
I'd like to write someday). But it was a particular discovery made in the course of his
Sanctuary work that I want to mention here: along with making friends and jousting with
the feds, he unexpectedly found the Church, and with it what he called "the prophetic
faith."
Before these encounters, however, Corbett spent years in the practice
of Goatwalking's title: wandering arid rangelands with a herd of goats. On these
excursions, he and the herd became a part of the natural landscape, moving outside the
standard, schedule-obsessed, nature-dominating way of life most of us lead most of the
time.
The practice of goatwalking is not for the faint of heart, however:
once he was asked to bring along some teenaged students from John Woolman School in
California for a week's trek, but they only lasted a few days. There was, they complained,
"nothing to do."
This was precisely the point, of course; but they couldn't bear it. How
many of us could?
Yet Corbett notes that the reflective, often mystical experiences
evoked by goatwalking, though formally "useless," are hardly unproductive,
especially in one important field:
"Leisure, solitude, dependence on uncontrolled natural rhythms,
alert concentration on present events, long nights devoted to quiet watching–little
wonder that so many religions originated among herders and so many religious metaphors are
pastoral....As a way to cultivate a dimension of life that is lost to industrial man [and
woman], goatwalking may put us in touch with a mystery more real than we are."
(The religions which originated in wilderness experiences include
not only Judaism, Islam and Christianity, but also a little-known sect which germinated in
the wanderings of a youth who in 1643 "left my relations, and broke off all
familiarity or fellowship with young or old...[and for more than three years] fasted much,
walked abroad in solitary places many days...." If England lacks deserts, it still
had its share of wilderness, both outward and inward, in which George Fox wandered alone
for several years.)
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Copyright © by Chuck Fager. All rights reserved.