Peter on Silence and Intimacy

This past weekend, Mt. Toby Friends Meeting held a weekend-long retreat. About sixty Friends gathered at Woolman Hill, a Quaker retreat center that’s about half an hour to the north. Many of us stayed there Friday and Saturday nights; others commuted. The Friends attending included slightly more than half the regular attenders at our meeting.

One of the queries that was asked early on in the gathering was, “What do you most long for in your faith family?” Some of us felt more comfortable with the phrase “spiritual community,” but the question was valid for all of us. What I said I most craved—what I have been longing for my whole life, really—are spiritual intimacy and a sense of shared meaningful work.

I have had this at a couple of points in my life. At Oberlin I felt like organic gardening and left-wing Christianity could save the world, and in the Oberlin Farm Co-op I felt like we were beginning to do it. In my 30’s, in the Church of the Sacred Earth, I felt like we were inventing a new religion and finding new ways to connect with the Divine. Cat and I were newly in love, and as a couple we provided a “seed crystal” for a group house, and around that a coven, and around that a whole rich and vibrant Pagan community. It was exhausting and volatile and often painful, but at the same time full of meaning and hope and love.

The loss of Christianity in my 20’s was a wrenching experience that left me feeling shattered. Entering my 40’s as a Pagan, I did not lose my faith so much as I simply came to feel I had followed that path to its end. I had come out on a plateau, and from there I would need to find another path if I wanted to keep growing. Quakerism provided that further path, with new ways to touch and be touched by the Divine, and with people who were wiser than me and had much to teach me. But that heady, almost narcotic sense of community that I’d felt in the Farm Co-op and in Paganism was still lacking. It seemed like it would always be lacking—like seeking that level of community among Quakers was like looking for the sensuality of Bouguereau in the works of Grant Wood.

In another exercise this weekend, someone read a passage from First Corinthians, in which Paul compares the members of a church to the parts of a body.

Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

1 Corinthians 12:14-20 NIV

We were then given sticky notes and asked to put our names on a big outline of a body to show which “body part” we felt like we are at Mt. Toby, and also which we wished we were. I surprised myself a little when I went straight for the solar plexus, placing myself at the gravitational center of the meeting. I haven’t always felt like I was that central there. Next, we broke up into groups of six or seven for worship sharing and worshipful discussion. And it was there, in those 45 minutes or so, that I—and I think a critical mass of Mt. Toby Friends—tapped into a level of spiritual intimacy that I hadn’t been sure Quakers were capable of. We talked of our visions for community, and the ways we have searched for community in our lives. We talked of what happens in worship, and how difficult it is to express in words what worshiping in silence means to us. And in so doing, we peeled back layers of ourselves to expose deeper and deeper truths.

Quakers worship in silence. In that silence, we often feel a deep sense of connection and intimacy with one another, but it’s difficult to carry that out into the fellowship room afterwards. One Friend last weekend spoke of how shocking it was, after being part of the meeting for ten years, to realize that no one knew she had been dealing with a serious illness that whole time. “I guess I assumed everyone could read my mind during worship,” she said. The experience of gathered worship is so profound that it’s not such a crazy assumption.

At the end of the weekend, going around in a closing circle for each of us to say what we had gotten out of it, I talked about getting to know and be known by the Friends in meeting, and I called for two things: “Let us never forget how precious this is. And let us never forget that we can do it.”

I think we can do this in the wider Quaker world as well. And I think it is vitally important that we do so.

I see Friends in the more Christ-centered branches of Quakerism using Christian language and Biblical reference points to anchor themselves in the deep, spiritual dimensions of their practice. It works for them—works so well, in fact, that if they were asked to give up the particularity of Christian myth, they would feel robbed of their voice, unable to speak about their religious experience at all.

That same Christian language is deeply alienating to many Friends, who often come to Quakerism as refugees from Christian churches of the kind Jesus was talking about when he said,

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

Matthew 23:13 NIV

Talking to one another across this kind of theological divide is hard. It is hard enough that many liberal Friends shy away from talking at all about what happens in worship, afraid of giving offense or of being offended, afraid of being shut down or told to shut up. We worship together in the deep intimacy of silence, but like the Friend with the serious illness, often we rely on mind-reading when really we need to be talking.

I know, from a lot of interaction with Christ-centered Friends over the ten years that I’ve been Quaker, that we liberal Quakers sometimes look like we have no spiritual center at all. Writers like Pink Dandelion talk about the silence in worship as a defense against admitting how little we have in common any more. Martin Kelly is even more articulate and impassioned:

Every week our Meetings for Worship bring together people of radically different beliefs and non-beliefs. Instead of worship, we have individual meditation in a group setting, where everyone is free to believe what they want to believe. This isn’t Friends’ style and it’s not satisfying to many of us. I know this statement may seem like sacrilege to many Friends who value tolerance above all. But I don’t think I’m the only one who would rather worship God than Silence, who longs for a deeper religious fellowship than that found in most contemporary Meetings.

Quaker Ranter

He’s wrong. At least, if he’s talking about Mt. Toby Monthly Meeting, he’s wrong. But I’ve long since given up debating this issue in on-line forums or in writing, because ultimately all I can say is, Come worship with me. Feel the Spirit gather us and cover us in meeting, you and me both, and then maybe, if we both hold ourselves radically open and listen prayerfully to one another, we can begin to talk about our theological diversity.

At the same time, I’m not sure that he isn’t right about some liberal Friends. The fact that we lack a vocabulary to express what it is we experience when a theologically diverse body is worshiping together in a gathered meeting makes it really hard to know how much we really share of our experiences of worship.

We are blessed, at New England Yearly Meeting, with the opportunity to labor together over this very question. As part of both Friends General Conference and Friends United Meeting, NEYM includes a wide spectrum from the very liberal to the evangelical. In past years, I used to describe us as “teetering on the brink of schism,” but this past year we seemed to push through to a place of greater unity. The phrase that came out of the 2011 Sessions was “listening in tongues,” and it describes the way liberals and evangelicals can try to hear into one another’s language, metaphors, and mythology, getting down to the root experience of worship that we all share.

The best way to help each other hear is to say more. At the Mt. Toby retreat, we explored new ways of sharing, just within our little monthly meeting community, the ways that we experience and conceptualize our worship. We begin with the people we know best, the community we worship with every week. We peel back layers amongst ourselves, finding the words to keep us low to the truth and share what we know experientially of God. And we will hold that truth as we interact with the wider Quaker world.

We are a circle
Within a circle
With no beginning
And never ending.

Winter Light

I find myself almost incredulous at how deep a vein of contentment I can find in a single afternoon at home.

I love my home: my house, my garden, my woods.  I've understood for many years that buying stuff, things, doesn't actually build much contentment once I'm not in need.  I'll think, when I contemplate buying a new whatzit, that once I have that whatzit I'll be happy; I envision all the good and satisfying things I will be able to accomplish once I have my whatzit.  And, of course, once I have purchased it, brought it home, and unpacked it, it's only a matter of days or weeks before I'm no happier in my daily round than before I got hold of it.

This house has not been like that for me.  It's actually pretty rare that I come home without thinking, as I walk up to my door, open it, and slip inside, "I really love this house."

I think that is because a house, like land, is not really a thing at all.  Properly considered, we don't own either one: we enter relationships with them.  In the case of land, of course, there is the web of interdependent living things that is already there, from grass and the microorganisms and worms and grubs that live in soil to the trees, voles, mice, birds, and larger mammals that live in or move across that particular place.

Houses have some of that--more than a fastidious housekeeper would like, perhaps!--but there is something else that gives rise to the numen, the spirit of place that enlivens a house.  It may be the lives that have passed through the house over the years, or that have shaped its parts--trees for wood, glacier-rounded rocks for the foundations, and so forth.  Some houses seem to have more of that particularity of self than others; I'm sure it was one of the things that made us fall in love with the house before we bought it.

Another thing, however, was the light.

We had been living in a very nice, if shabby, Victorian duplex.  Lots of dark woodwork, nooks and crannies and a porch that was up in the treetops on the second floor.  But few of the windows faced south, and no room had more than two medium-sized windows.  Not only was the view of a densely settled urban street, but it was a dark view, from dark rooms.   Nothing we did could ever change that.

This year, I have been more aware than ever of the changes of light that come with winter.  It is hard to describe, but the shortened days of December left me without energy, worn out and weary by four, and exhausted and listless each morning when I rose in the dark to bolt my breakfast and head out to school.  I was leaving for work in the dark, and returning from work in the dark.  It was too dark to walk in the woods after work, and, with no snow to speak of this year, it was hard to avoid noticing how weak as well as brief the light of each day was, even when we were home.  I was not depressed--that is, I knew perfectly well that there was no especially discouraging thing in my life last month--and yet, my body was depressed: lethargic, irritable, sleepy.

We put up lights.  This year, for the first time, we were able to carve out a little time in our solstice preparations to consider decorations particular to this new house of ours, and we got strings of white icicle lights to go into the big, south facing front windows.  I began turning them on in the morning before sitting down for five minutes' breakfast, and my husband made a point of turning them on again as soon as he got home from work, so I would find them shining softly in the dark when I came home.

Those lights helped.  They really did.  It's not for nothing we decorate our homes with lights at Solstice.

But now the days are ever so slightly longer, the sun every so slightly higher in the sky at noon than it was three weeks ago.

And it has snowed--snowed, gotten warm, and then given us a hard, sub-zero freeze that has set up an enormous white reflecting mirror on the ground all around us.  Now there is light: light worth basking in, in our big, shabby living room with the wide southern windows.  Light I can steep in, when I'm home for lunch, in our cozy cube of a dining room, with enormous southern windows of its own.

I can look out my windows, from the comfort of my rocking chair or my couch, and see the woods with the tree bark painted orange in the light.  I can look up, and see the sky burnished an almost metallic blue--the blue of the winter sky.

On weekdays, I still have very little light while I am at home.  But moonlight or starlight, whatever light there is is picked up by the whiteness of snow and amplified.  I can walk in my woods at night, in a way I cannot do at any other time of year.  Indeed, the leafless trees open out the woods in such a way that I can see much, much deeper into those woods than at any other time of year.  Come summer, the seemingly infinite succession of tree trunk and tree trunk, receding off into the distances of perspective will vanish for me, cut off by a wall of green.  But in winter, my views are wide and deep.

And full of yellow light.

And so I find myself contented again, bodily depression lifting, opening myself like a flower to the glory of the return of winter light.

The Empty Bucket

Recent conversations with Pagans, in person and online, are bubbling up for me this morning, bringing with them troubling thoughts.

Do we care more about our rituals than we do about our gods?

It's happened more than once, lately, that the response to some concern expressed among us has been a rather pat, "I wrote a really good ritual about that, once."  As though the authorship was the main thing; as though the performance of a ritual script was enough to settle whatever questions living posed us.

I'm not knocking a good ritual.  But surely, the point of ritual is communion, relationship, and change--not carving a notch on a staff or athame.  We seem to think that rituals work if they're good theater, if they move a human audience.

We rarely ask if they are of any interest at all to any other audience.  Indeed, I've heard Pagans go on at length about how nothing any individual one of us can do would ever attract the attention of a god, and that those who think otherwise are fools or deluded... and lucky, as the attention of a god would simply destroy our minds, blow open our psyches and leave us gibbering in a corner.

The gods don't care, the reasoning goes, or if they do, we're unprepared to encounter them in any case.

As for me, I don't see a lot to choose from, between gods who don't care or are unavailable to us, and gods who don't exist.  That polytheism that denies the possibility of a relationship with our gods seems sterile to me, pointless.

Incidentally, I don't feel that way about non-theism.  I know plenty of what might be called "juicy" Pagan non-theists: they may not have much use for gods or goddesses, but their lives are spent in communion with spirits on every side: spirits of ancestors, trees, animals, and places.  Their rituals are not merely theater for their own entertainment, but doorways.

Doorways that lead somewhere.  Wells that bring up water.

Photo by Zserghei

Sometimes I think that, for many of us in the Pagan world, we found a well that gave us water once, but when it ran dry, we neither searched elsewhere for water nor attempted to dig the well deeper, but instead sat down and worshiped an empty bucket.

Too much of the conversation I hear among Pagans strikes me as an invitation to worship an empty bucket, and that makes me sad.

The gods are real, and there is good water everywhere, if you know--not so much how to look, but that looking is a possibility.

Gardens Are Just Weird

And amazing.

This is tonight's harvest.  After several nights of frost, and 18" of snow in a blizzard that left us without power for about 48 hours.

Bok choi, carrots, Swiss chard, and mustard greens, gathered from the snow.

The Saturday Farm

I love Saturdays.

I have come to think of the work that I do on Saturdays as "farming."  Now, I know it isn't farming--not really.  We have a medium-sized vegetable garden and two dogs, and that's not a farm, by any stretch of the imagination. 

But I keep thinking of a comment Joel Salatin made in Yes Magazine once, about how Americans have become used to thinking of our homes as centers of consumption, but how once, thinking of your home as a center of production (typically, a farm, for most of us for most of our history) was the norm.

And between trying to live with less plastic junk and trying to eat more sustainably and locally, Saturdays at home have become very productive days.  And that productivity--the willingness to substitute patience, skill, and thrift for consumption--I've come to think of as a species of farming.  (My apologies to actual farmers, whose work I increasingly appreciate.  But thinking in this way works for me, somehow.)

First thing this morning, after sorting the laundry and putting a load in to wash, I took a half gallon of local milk and put it into a crock to warm up to 86 degrees F.  While that was going on, I rinsed and repackaged the alfalfa sprouts I started on the window sills this week, and then I pitched the culture and rennet into the milk and set it aside to do its thing till tomorrow morning, when I'll put it into cheesecloth to drain and become next week's Neufchatel cheese for our bagels.

Then I took out the three bags of CSA veggies for the week, washed them and processed them, and set aside the share for our neighbor Janet.  By then, the first load of laundry was ready to take out and hang on the clothesline, giving me a chance to notice what an extraordinarily beautiful day it was.  Then I came inside, started the second load of laundry, and threw together the dough for two loaves of bread--enough to last us for about 2--3 weeks, at the rate we normally eat bread, so at least one loaf will wind up in the freezer.

After that, I put my feet up for a bit for coffee and a bagel, read a book, and hung out that second load of wash, by which time it was time to punch down the risen bread and form it into loaves.  While that was going on, I warmed up last week's vegetable stew--made with the whey from last week's Neufchatel cheese and the veggies we hadn't eaten from the garden and CSA share last week--and went out into the garden to get some salad greens to supplement the kale in the farm share.  We've got an embarrassing amount of bok choi, even given the predations of cabbage worms and the fact I've harvested about one a day to go into our lunches for school (rice and beans and some kind of vegetables, generally speaking) but there's a frost warning for tonight, so I picked some of the still immature green leaf lettuce, which may not survive the night, as well as some mustard greens and an icicle radish.  Threw in a bit of cilantro, too, just for fun, came back inside, added alfalfa sprouts, and served up soup and salad for lunch.

Regrettably, I decided that the remains of the autumn olive cobbler I'd made, then frozen, before our camping weekend, and thawed last week, was now too far gone to save, and I consigned it to the compost heap.  When I went outside to add it to the pile, I had a chance to wave to my neighbor Joyce, and ask about her health; she was raking leaves, but I know she has had cancer surgery recently, so I was anxious for an update.

Meanwhile, back in the house the newly-formed loaves of bread were rising, and after I did up the lunch dishes, I threw together a low-fat chocolate wacky cake to bake while I waited on the bread.  More coffee, more reading...  took out the cake, baked the bread, and here I am, writing this with the house smelling like chocolate and fresh bread.

This week's groceries, aside from our garden and CSA shares, will be the milk, butter, cheese and eggs from the coop.  Admittedly, we'll also be using canned beans, bulk rice, pasta, and canned tomato paste to supplement the fresh, frozen, and canned produce we put aside this week and over the summer.  But we've seen our grocery bills go down this year, not up, and I have to tell you, my house smells wonderful, and we eat like kings--vegetarian kings much of the time, but still... not much room for complaint.

And if we do get to craving some meat?  We've still got about 3 lbs of goose (drumsticks and wings) and a similar quantity of goose sausage we put up last spring.  A goose dinner whenever I wish--what royalty could ask for more?

What's more, it's fun.  It's satisfying.  And, while I know that there are a lot of people who don't enjoy cooking and don't enjoy gardening, it has been very satisfying to garden and to learning what to do with each season's produce.  And there's a change in how I approach my food and my home that goes beyond changing recipes.  There's a shift, and it's not one that has to do with an intellectual desire to eat seasonably.  More than anything, perhaps, it's a change of attitude--learning not to ask the question, "What do I want to cook, and what ingredients do I need to buy in order to cook it?" but rather, "What do I have on hand, and what can I cook with it so as not to waste anything?"

Making the most of what I have.  So, yeah, we buy coffee, and our spaghetti noodles are not organic.  I may change a recipe so that it's less gourmet, perhaps.  But it's also going to be more in keeping with where I live, and what the land is producing where I live now--this year, as opposed to other, hypothetical Octobers past.  This year, I have no winter squash--the field where they were growing was flooded by the hurricane--but I have an abundance of leeks.  So this year, I will not serve squash soup... but I will put sliced leeks onto my salad, along with the last of the lettuce, the mustard greens, alfalfa, and kale.

I'm adding value to ordinary things: vegetables, eggs, milk.  But I'm also relating to my world in a different way.  I feel more a part of the world I live in. And I like it.  And I love my Saturday farm--whether it really is "farming" or not.