The Return of Quaker Pagan Reflections

Cat at Laurelin. Peter Bishop, 2011.

Welcome to the new, hopefully improved Quaker Pagan Reflections.

Between leaving Patheos Pagan and this post, Peter has finished the last edit on his novel and begun to pitch it to agents, I have been in negotiations with Anne Newkirk Niven of Pagan Square to carry our blog starting this fall, we have redesigned our layout, and--oh yes! I have also retired from my work as a high school English teacher.

It has been a summer like any other, in many ways: bike rides and trips to the beach, gardening and canning and time with friends.

It has also involved daily trips to Peter's parents in their assisted living center, grief and worry over their failing health and their futures, and for me, a fair amount of soul searching around what to do with Act III of my life.

We have spent more time in meetings with caseworkers and at protests than at the beach, and I have been focused on trying to discern how to be faithful to the promptings of Spirit in the personal and political spheres, having arrived at the point where I don't have to hold down a paying job any more. I have been referring to myself, not truly joking about it, as a "released Friend"--traditionally, that has meant a Quaker whose financial obligations are supported by their meeting as a way of freeing them to follow a leading from Spirit.

My meeting hasn't spoken on my work--my meeting generally doesn't do such things--but my spiritual accountability group has been very supportive of my identifying the work I've been longing to do as a leading. Me? I'm a bit afraid to say that out loud, for fear of jinxing it.

Suppose, now I have time to spend being faithful to the concerns that have been driving me--especially my concern around racism--I don't manage my time well? Suppose I'm not able to live up to the opportunities I've been given?

Meanwhile, I am a woman living in an aging body, watching her parents and in-laws age, too. What does it mean to age in this society? How does it affect my relationship with my spiritual communities, Quaker and Pagan? What is there to learn from my hot flashes, my aches and pains, my fear?

I have been a teacher, a counselor, a priestess, a writer. Who am I now? What gifts do I have to share, and how do I organize my life without the grind of lesson prep, grading, and faculty meetings compressing all the rest of life into the margins? Will I feel a loss of meaning, or a freedom and surge of energy when the first of the big yellow school buses go by next week?

Those are the concerns you're likely to find me writing about, over the next few months. Stay tuned.

Comments

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...

Fame

(Note: there were so many thought provoking comments in response to this post that it generated a second-round of ideas. You can read the follow-up post here .) I have a confession to make. I want to be famous. Well, sort of. I don't want to be famous, famous, and ride around in a limousine and have to hire security and that sort of thing. I just want to write a book, have it published by somebody other than my mother, and bought and read by somebody other than my mother, and maybe even sign a couple of autographs along the way. Mom can have one autographed, too, if she wants. It has to be a spiritual book. A really moving and truthful book, that makes people want to look deep inside themselves, and then they come up to me and say something like, "It was all because of that book you wrote! It changed my life!" And I would say, no, no, really, you did all that, you and God/the gods --I'm a little fuzzy on whether the life-changing book is for Pagans or for Quake...

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