Intermission and Apology

Jan Hoffman says to give messages without preamble or apology, and that's a good discipline, but I'm finding it impossible here... So please bear with me, ladies and gentlemen, while I ask you to bear with me.

Apologies on the long delay for the next post in my spiritual journey series... (If it's not too much hubris to imagine anyone out there cares about that!) Part IV is definately the toughest part to write about: so many things happened in such a short span of time, and continue to be important to who I have become. It's particularly personal material, and some of it still a tad painful. But mostly, I'm really hoping to bring the series in under the length of St. Augustine's Confessions (helping myself to Marshall's humorous analogy) and this one is tough to edit.

It's also hard to balance self-revelation with privacy, and plain speaking with a desire not to have some of the more difficult aspects of the story used against the Pagan community... I'm just feeling a need to season this one very, very carefully. (Quite a contrast to my usual slap-dash style...)

And thanks to the (to you all) mostly invisible Peter for his assistance as an editor. If I manage to get this installment out in a readable form somewhat shorter than the average Steven King novel, it will be owing to his loving assistance.

Comments

Martin Kelley said…

Hi Cat, I can easily imagine how a spiritual autobiography would get trickier to write the closer to the present you get, especially if there are tender issues involved. Maybe this is why a lot of the Quaker ministers wrote them in old age! If and when you do publish it I'll try to read it in all openness. I certainly appreciate the sense of fairness you try to bring to your deliberation, and if there's something that you don't want to share it's fine to simply state there are more stories and issues that you don't think it appropriate to share.

When I travel among Friends, I often don't blog about it immediately, except maybe to say I traveled, met nice people, etc., and that's because I sometimes see some major issues that I wish they would address (usually around accessibility/friendliness to newcomers). I'll wait a year then mention how in recent travels I saw x-y-z issues. That makes it a more general concern lifted up and not a critique against a particular community.

Good luck!
Your Friend, Martin @ QuakerRanter

12:25 PM

John (@bookdreamer) said…

Hi, I care! And feel that this type of warts and all account of why we are the spirtual beings we are is "theology" of the profoundest type.

1:06 PM

Peter on Grief and Communities

Well, that was unexpected. For the last year, ever since my mom's health took a sharp downturn, I've been my dad's ride to Florence Congregational Church on Sundays. That community has been important for my dad and the weekly outing with me was something he always looked forward to and enjoyed, so I didn't mind taking him there. It meant giving up attending my own Quaker meeting for the duration, but I had already been questioning whether silent waiting worship was working for me. I was ready for a sabbatical. A month ago, my dad was Section-Twelved into a geriatric psych hospital when his dementia started to make him emotionally volatile. I had been visiting him every day at his assisted living facility which was right on my way home from work, but the hospital was almost an hour away. I didn't see him at all for three weeks, and when I did visit him there, it actually took me a couple of seconds to recognize him. He was slumped forward in a wheel chair, lo...

A Quaker Pagan Day Book: Testimonies and Queries

Pagans often argue about how to define who we are. What are the boundaries--between Wicca and Witchcraft, between Heathens and Pagans, between polytheists, pantheists, and non-theists... While I could do without the acrimony, we're a new as well as an old religious movement, so it makes sense that like any adolescent, we are fascinated by questions of identity. I will admit to preferring the Quaker approach to identity, though: rather than trying to create the definitive checklist of belief that make someone a "real Quaker," Friends typically share a body of testimonies and questions for reflection with those who are drawn to the Religious Society of Friends. "Do you feel this same sort of spiritual leading?" Friends ask one another. "Does this speak to the condition of your soul, as it does to ours?" Queries, not checklists of doctrine, hold the ways Quakers approach discernment, including around membership. And though no individual can declar...

Red in Tooth and Claw

When Nora, Peter's grandmother, lived with us , our household was the nucleus of an active local Pagan community. Over time, dementia eroded more and more of Nora's ability to retain anything she learned about in the present, so she wound up discovering again and again that she was living in a family of Pagans. Over and over, we would have made some reference to our Paganism, and Nora, having forgotten about it for the time being, would ask us to explain again what it was we believed. We would explain, yet again, about all of life being sacred to us, and nature being the source of our inspiration. Each time we did this, we would reach the point in our discussion where she would protest, quoting the line from Tennyson about " Nature, red in tooth and claw ." Nevertheless, we would insist that that was where we looked for the holy, and eventually, she would exclaim (just as she had the time before that): "Well, then, you're all heathens!" When we ...

Quaker Pagan Reflections

Search This Blog