Quaker Pagan Reflections

Winter Light

2012-01-16T15:27:00.000-05:00

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

2011-11-13T08:42:00.000-05:00

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

2011-11-02T16:51:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-22T16:17:00.006-04:00

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.

So Much

2011-09-26T21:29:00.002-04:00

So much of the pain in our spiritual lives, it seems to me, comes down to this:

It is bitterly hurtful to have our spiritual gifts rejected or ignored by the communities we belong to.

And yet, the price of bringing those gifts to those communities is being able to accept their guidance on where we are falling short, in error, or mistaken in how we use those gifts. And that hurts, too--a desperate, sharp, shameful pain in the part of us that sees ourselves willfully rather than honestly, in ego and not in open-heartedness.

And then, for a lot of us, giving guidance that holds the potential to inflict such pain is almost unthinkable. We are compassionate; we love, and we don't want to be the instrument of one another's hurts. (And then, too, we don't want to risk losing the love of those we need to guide.)

And this turns out to inflict another kind of suffering: that of the lack of full and present receptivity and responsiveness to one another's gifts.

It is a rare gift, to offer honest, humble criticism in a spirit of love and kindness. And it's not one much nurtured.

So there's the pain of rejection and the fear of rejection, the pain of honest feedback, and the suffering of avoiding that honesty.

So much of what hurts us in our communities is rooted in our gifts, and how we master our fears, and give and receive them honestly and with integrity...

...or not.

The Great Outbreath of Summer

2011-08-03T13:04:00.001-04:00

This past weekend, sitting out on my porch in the long twilight of a summer's night, I noticed how, where a few weeks past, our lawn was spangled with fireflies, their lights have almost all gone dark. I noticed, too, all around me in the night were the songs of crickets. It was not so many weeks ago that there were no crickets to be heard, and now their songs of love and death fill the days and evenings both.

It must be Lammas-tide.

The long, slow gathered breath of of summer's beginning is over; the wave crests, and the outbreath is beginning.

Tomatoes are ripening in the garden we scurried to plant at the end of May. Zucchinis mature in such numbers and size that I am challenged to put them all to use; the early lettuce has bolted in the heat, the raspberries are done, and the blueberries are blushing at the end of the garden. Summer's end is coming, and anything that can bear fruit or give birth is hurrying to do so while it lasts.

This is not the summer I thought I would be having.

I had thought that this summer would be a lot like last summer: lots of writing, lots of hiking, lots of "quality Quaker time."

Instead, it's been lots of gardening, lots of canning and preserving food, and unexpected Pagan time: Peter and I were lucky enough to have surprise guests this past weekend, so we celebrated a pick-up Lammas out by our raised bed gardens.

The Pick-up Lammas ritual begins

We did a symbolic sacrifice and corn "harvest" (with farm-stand corn, as that is not one of the crops we grow) and roasted it on the grill, did a quick "wine" blessing with the homebrew, and feasted on an almost entirely locally-grown meal. (The flour and barley for the bread and beer were not local. But since I made them both in my own kitchen, they felt appropriately tied to the local land.)

We brought a share of the bounty out to the woods for the land spirits to share. The next day, everything but a few cherry tomatoes had disappeared. (A good omen, surely.)

So it has been a satisfying summer. And--despite the disappointing berry crop this year--a fruitful one.

But I'm not living much in my words. I'm not writing very much. I'm making pickles, getting dirt between my toes, or reclining in the shade of a favorite tree, its leaves rustling in the great outbreath of summer.

New at No Unsacred Place: Disturbing Miracles

2011-07-30T10:43:00.000-04:00

Reflections on organic gardening. (It's a jungle in there!)

Pagan Values Month: Living in Relationship

2011-07-11T13:56:00.000-04:00

The very fact that I am writing this entry for Pagan Values Month--June, in case you missed it--is a testimony to the importance of relationships in Paganism. Despite the fact that we are now eleven days into the month of July, I can't bear to let Pax down. Not only is Pax a kind and generous-spirited Pagan writer, not only did he invite me to participate this year, but he has become a friend, although we have never (yet) met in person. We have that so-important thing in my religious life: a relationship.

So this one's for you, Pax--but also for the spirit of Paganism, that I think lives in our need to form and honor powerful relationships in the world.

* * *

My husband Peter, a biology teacher, has a classroom full of odd and interesting animals: a turtle, a gecko, two hamsters, and a ball python. Next year, he's planning to get finches, to help him illustrate his annual evolution talks, and the references to the Galapagos Islands, and all the varieties of finches that can be found there.

He also has a dragon: a bearded dragon called Harriet.

While not quite as interesting a classroom pet as the kind of dragons Hagrid keeps, the reptiles known as bearded dragons are, in fact, quite lively and intelligent. Now that it is summer, Harriet (and the rest of the menagerie) live at our house, where I get to observe both them and my husband's interactions with them all at close range. Harriet is in a smaller tank than usual, in order to fit her into the house with all the other beasties, and by the end of a day, she is visibly bored--quite literally climbing the walls of her aquarium. She wants out, and Peter often agrees, taking her out in his office, behind a closed door (so our dogs won't mistake her for a chew toy) and letting her run around to her heart's content.

He also takes her out, supporting her carefully from beneath all four legs to keep her from becoming anxious, to show her to guests, or to feed her chunks of apple he places up the length of his arms.

She is, for a lizard, a fairly charming being, and clearly pretty alert and interested in the world. I don't in the least blame Peter for finding her interesting in turn.

But my husband, my rational and scientific husband, behaves somewhat oddly toward Harriet at times. Along with giving her room to run, exercise, and crickets and apples to eat, he spends time training her to accept affection.

My husband owns a dragon, and he is training it to be petted--to tolerate his fingers, not just holding her or moving her about as non-lethal elements of her lizardy world, but to accept those same fingers moving affectionately over her scaly sides.

Harriet will permit this. But unlike the ability to run freely, to hunt crickets, to eat small mice or apple chunks, she doesn't seek it out. In the world of physical affection, Harriet pretty clearly could scarcely care less.

Which makes sense. Think about it: she's a reptile, a lizard. Her kind do not cuddle one another or their infants for warmth or comfort. They do not even touch when they reproduce. More than we can ever appreciate, lizards are born alone, live alone, and they die alone... though not lonely. It's just who they are.

We, however, are not like that.

There's really no practical need for a reptile to be trained to allow petting, even for a classroom animal. This isn't really about Harriet's needs, or even Peter's students. This is about who Peter is, by nature, by birth: a mammal and a primate, a being that constantly seeks out relationships and the powerful connections of touch. We, not Harriet, experience the world through skin hunger, heart hunger, and a need to commune and experience closeness and connection.

What is true for my husband is true for me, for you, and for all of us monkeys. We want to touch. We want to soothe ourselves through connection. We want to engage and we want to relate, and not with one another alone, but with the members of each and every species we can find: bearded dragons, but also dogs, cats, horses, even trees and potted palms. It is who we are, by nature.

And we Pagans, whose religion includes reverence for and homage to the powers and forces of the natural world, we bring our natures into our religious life. We seek relationship, perhaps above all things... with one another, with the natural world, and with the gods.

Think about it. How do primates establish relationships? How do humans establish relationships? There's food and there's touch, right? Ask the girl out to dinner before you get physical. Feed and cuddle the infants. Groom the other chimps, and share with them your bananas. It's how it's done.

And if it is difficult to touch a god, we've certainly done our best to feed them. Perhaps the earliest of all Pagan rituals was the sharing of food. What is a proper Homeric sacrifice? Among other things, it's a barbecue where the gods are invited: Hestia gets the first libation; the Olympian gods receive the smoke (if not the substance) of the grilling meat--the fat and the bones are theirs, but also the scent (which anyone can tell you is the best part--even vegetarians are drawn in by the smell of a burger or some bacon on the grill).

In the ancient world, the poorest citizens might only get to eat meat after a sacrifice. What the gods did not take, the humans shared.

What act cements a relationship more, even now, even in secular society, than sharing a good meal? It is how our animal selves understand that we are in this together: the sharing of food, of life. And so our religious traditions include that shared meal: whether in the form of a blot to the gods of Heathenry, the final offering to the Goddess at the end of the Wiccan celebration of cakes and ale, or the offering of milk or fresh bread made to the Good Neighbors on our windowsills.

We're seeking relationship.

Our legends, our stories, are so often about relationship too. Women are seduced by gods or marry spirit animals; men marry deer or selkies, are taken as lovers by the Queen of Faerie or a tree nymph or a goddess. Animals can talk to us, steal the sun or bring us the seeds of beans and corn, ask us riddles or punish us for our offenses against the gods. The boundaries between humanity and nature, and between humanity and the world of the gods, blur time and time again.

We are in relationship with our world, with the spirits, with the gods.

Can you say, "anthropomorphization?"

Now... can you say it like it's a good thing? Because it is. It's how we think. It's how we understand. It's how we connect.

We are human. Whether we are petting a lizard, or longing to embrace the sun on solstice day, this is how we touch the world.

We relate.

Happy Fourth of July

2011-07-04T17:15:00.002-04:00

I remember when I first learned that war was wrong.

I was nineteen years old, in love for the first time, sexual for the first time, holding my lover in my arms. I looked at his body, long, smooth, and perfect lying next to me, and I knew that it was Holy. This body I knew so well, that could bring us both so much pleasure, was sacred for that, yes--but also because it was whole, and it was living and it was inherently a thing of beauty and goodness.

And war, it followed immediately, which could shatter that beauty in an instant, was a blasphemy.

All I needed to understand that war is a blasphemy was to love one human being in the flesh, as an adult.

The peace testimony is different; my peace testimony took many more years to come to me. But I have known from the age of nineteen that war is a blasphemy.

* * *

Yesterday, I was in my kitchen making pickles. What with boiling kettles of water and processing pounds of vegetables and brine, making pickles is something of a lengthy process. To keep my company as I work, I nearly always play the radio. Yesterday, no doubt in honor of today's American holiday, the radio show Snap Judgment did a special broadcast on veterans.

The first story in the episode involved the suffering and courage of a Korean War P. O.W. The second was the story of an army nurse. Both stories, and the anecdotes by the announcer, were the sort of booster-ish, pro-military, upbeat stories of heroism, loyalty, and generosity by members of the military that Americans are most comfortable hearing. I might have turned the show off, but my hands were wet--I was washing dishes as I waited for my kettles to boil--and I had half-tuned the show out, thinking that this kind of coverage happens every year, whenever there is a patriotic national holiday.

I hate those holidays. I hate Veteran's Day--wear a poppy in your lapel and feel good about "supporting veterans," or lay a wreath and change your Facebook status to say, "Honor a veteran: post this status!"

To me, there is nothing easy or cheap about military service. And not just because, as a Quaker, I am deeply and completely opposed to all wars.

The next piece was about a gang member who joined the military in order to regain his sense of honor and purpose in life. He reminded me of the students I teach, several of whom have entered the military as a way out of poverty or into lives of service and care for others. I pray for them--privately--and I admire them in their uniforms when they return to show them to me. And I want to tattoo the phone number of the G.I. Hotline or of Quaker House to the backs of their hands, but I settle for telling them, amid my admiration and support, "You know, if you ever want to get out--if you discover that you believe that war is wrong--there are people who can help you."

And I mention the G.I. Hotline. And I mention Quakers. And then I pray, along with prayers for their safety and their hearts, that they will not forget.

And that we will be there for them if they call--that we will not let them down.

And then came the piece about Chris, who joined for all the most honorable reasons, who was stationed at Guantanamo, and who saw and did things that chipped pieces away from his heart and his soul. And then I couldn't make pickles any more, because I was weeping too hard to see.

I know Chris. Not Chris himself, the individual soldier, but with a different face, a different name, and a different story that is still, somehow, the same. On some level, I think that every veteran is Chris--or could have been, in the blink of an eye, a wave of a bureaucrat's pen.

This is the part of patriotism and veteran's holidays we want to forget: what the cost of military service really is.

How common is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

So common, I have come to believe, that it is a travesty that we call it a "disorder" at all. PTSD is simply what happens when human beings see, experience, and do things that should never have happened at all.

How common is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? My own sense is that most of the men and women in the military who have ever been under fire, and virtually all of those who have ever aimed and fired a gun or directed violence at a human target are traumatized by it.

War makes scars where it does not kill outright. And we lie about this, as a society, as a culture, all the time. We are in massive denial about the true costs of war. And it makes me angry, and it makes me want to howl in anguish, and it makes me resent like hell cheap patriotism, cheap peace testimonies, and the way we can all pretend to care without losing a moment's sleep over what we do to soldiers--ours or the other side's.

It makes me think of my friends who have served in the military, and it makes me think of my friends who have suffered real hardships to oppose the actions of our military and our government. And it makes me angry over those whose idea of a "peace testimony" is to heap scorn on soldiers who have been confronted with choices we've safely managed to avoid.

People enlist in the military for all kinds of reasons. But almost never without an ambition to serve, to be selfless, to be honorable.

George Fox and James Nayler, the guys who created Quakers, with our so-precious peace testimony, were veterans of war--of a bloody and terrible civil war. I find that well worth remembering.

In my experience, no one hates war the way a veteran hates war. They know the beast. They have seen it bloody-fanged and dreadful, and if some of them prefer to cloak its horror in red, white, and blue, and pretend that it is noble, they have at least earned that right more than I have the right to judge them or to judge their service. I hate war, but the deeper I go into my peace testimony, the more deep and powerful is my feeling of respect and compassion for the suffering of veterans.

Veterans with a peace testimony are not abstract about it. Nor do they mistake other soldiers for their enemies.

Disrespect shown to those whose hearts and bodies have subjected to war dishonors the cause of peace.

I am thinking of one childhood friend in particular, this Fourth of July.

I've known him most of his life. I knew him in high school: watched him grow up, fall in love, skip classes, get a job... and eventually join the military, serve for years, experience battle and injury, disability and trauma.

I knew him when his first marriage ended, and I've grieved with him as his antagonistic ex-wife has worked hard to estrange him from the child of that marriage, his only daughter.

This daughter is now older than he was when I first knew him, college-aged and an adult in years, if not experience.

She has been raised to think of him as having abandoned her; she has been told (erroneously) that he did not pay child support. He did; in fact, disputes over his ex wanting checks early, or a loan against the next month's support, or whether or not checks had arrived at all eventually caused my friend to simply sign over his benefit check to his ex-wife. And now that his daughter is ready for college, he has taken pains to make sure she knows how to receive the benefits that, as the daughter of a disabled veteran, she is entitled to to help pay for her education.

Recently, she took him to task for that.

"That's not really your money," she told her father. "That money doesn't come from you. You don't earn it. That money comes from the government."

The mind boggles.

That money is not from you. You didn't earn it. That money comes from the government.

How in hell does that child think her father qualified for those benefits?

This is a man who lives in terrible and chronic physical pain every day of his life. The street value of the medications he has been prescribed to attempt to control his pain would, were he the kind of man to sell them on the street (which he is not) possibly even satisfy his ex's monetary desires. He has been through medical crisis after medical crisis, multiple surgeries, not just to try to ameliorate his pain but to save his life. He's been near death more than once, and I've watched his mother sit white-faced, watching the phone to find out whether or not the most recent medical crisis is cause for her to attend a funeral or a sick bed.

But his pain is also emotional, mental, and spiritual. He is a deeply private man, and he fights not to impose his pain on others, so perhaps this daughter of his is unaware of the memories and emotions he struggles to make peace with. (My own knowledge of them is fragmentary at best, and has come to me in tiny pieces here and there, gathered over the years, and often secondhand or by inference. But I know he experienced combat. And I know he fired a gun, and that he is fairly sure he has taken life. There's more--but that's surely enough.)

Perhaps she doesn't know that, with a heroism I would sing songs of loud praise for if I could, he's entered therapy to deal with those most terrible of wounds--those of the spirit.

Probably, he doesn't know that he describes his therapist as "little--tiny, and the most terrifying woman I've ever met."

Because, of course, with her help, he must remember what his daughter does not, or will not remember: exactly what price her father paid for her veteran's benefits.

It is not my place to scold this daughter; I don't know her. But I want to shake her, and I want to shout at her, and I want to tell her: don't you ever put a poppy in your lapel on Veteran's Day, don't you ever wave a flag or get misty-eyed at a Fourth of July parade, until you understand just how expensive a thing you have received at your father's hands.

To us all, pacifist or not, I say: don't you ever say you hate war and heap derision on those who, believing they acted on your behalf, with love and honor in their hearts, were committed to that grave for you.

I have no room for a peace testimony that does not see soldiers as casualties, soldiers as human sacrifices. If you are opposed to war, but only care for the civilians who have suffered, you've missed half the horror of it.

I had it right at the age of nineteen, when I held my lover's pure and perfect body in my arms.

New at No Unsacred Place

2011-06-29T21:00:00.000-04:00

Cat has a new post, over at the Pagan Newswire Collective's nature blog, No Unsacred Place, "Not Greener-Than-Thou" on the hazards of trying to build up a repertoire of of environmentally friendly living skills.

(It turns out to be possible to make very expensive organic compost. Details here.)

Peter's Spiritual Journey, Part II: Leaving Home

2011-06-26T16:26:00.007-04:00

Prologue: A Liberal Christian With Balls
Part I: A Refugee Looks Back
Part II: Leaving Home

As a child, my mother and grandmother took me along with them to St. Andrew’s Methodist Church. The people there were all very nice, very sincere Christians, but it was a little bland. I think back on it and my most vivid memories are of the annual church picnic which was always in my grandmother’s back yard, overlooking Long Island Sound.

The closest thing to religious fervor in our household was my father’s agnosticism. You hear the word agnosticism and you probably think of something wishy-washy, a sort of intellectual shrugging of the shoulders. But that was not my father. He was finishing his doctoral dissertation in astrophysics and beginning a career as an academic, and he had a fierce integrity around intellectual honesty, including honesty with oneself. He was adamant in his assertion that we DO NOT KNOW if there’s a God. He didn’t strongly object to the practice of religion, though. I remember him once saying to my mother that he didn’t mind her going to church any more than he minded her eating yogurt, as long as she didn’t ask him to. He also didn’t object to her bringing me with her. The one thing he felt strongly about regarding my religious upbringing was that I not be baptized until I was old enough to make that decision myself.

I liked Christianity when I was growing up. I think what I liked most was that it brought people together to help them live good lives. But it lacked…something. I couldn’t put my finger on what, but it was a bit like a steady diet of oatmeal. You could eat until you were bursting at the seams and still be unsatisfied.

When I went away to Yale University, I began to explore. I took courses in world religions. I learned about Hinduism and Buddhism and I read the Tao Te Ching. I also dropped in on all the campus ministries—the Lutherans and the Baptists and even the Quakers (where I found I could not sit still through an hour of silent worship without literally twitching by the end of it). I spent most of my freshman year worshiping with the Congregationalists. They had a Wednesday night communion service and discussion group that I found nourishing, but at times I got kind of frustrated with them. It seemed like whenever things started to get really interesting or spiritually deep, they’d shy away.

I remember one night, one of the regulars told how his professor had said Hinduism and Christianity were really very similar in many ways. He was baffled by this, because Hinduism is so baroque, with all those gods and yogic practices. The Chaplain explained to him that it made sense because the professor was Catholic. “Protestant spirituality is very dry, by comparison,” she said. It was around that time that I came to wonder if there were mother loads within Christianity that I had not yet tapped.

The Catholics were the one campus ministry I’d steered clear of. The whole papal infallibility thing made it a non-starter for me. Plus, both my parents were astronomers; I’d grown up hearing about the Church's treatment of Galileo and their violent opposition to the heliocentric model of the solar system.

But it turns out there is a place outside the Roman Catholic Church where you can still find that juicy, baroque spirituality that Protestantism so lacked. Towards the end of my sophomore year, I signed up for a weekend retreat at an Episcopalian Benedictine monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It was like a child’s first taste of ice cream.

This wasn’t any Protestant oatmeal. Here, they had frankincense. They had Gregorian chant instead of those stolid Wesleyan hymns. And this wasn’t a little commemorative bread and wine; this was a freakin’ Eucharist!

Ice cream? No, it was more like some vital nutrient that my body had always lacked, and suddenly I’d found a food that gave me a rich source of it. That Easter I was baptized into the Episcopal Church at Yale, and I spent the following summer at another Anglican monastery, St. Gregory’s Abbey, wearing a cassock and testing my vocation to be a Benedictine monk.

For six weeks, I woke each morning for Matins at 4:00. Often I’d catch another hour’s sleep afterwards, but some mornings I’d walk the grounds with a wool blanket safety-pinned over my cassock like a cloak, and watch as the black night sky turned grey and then pale blue, before heading back indoors for Lauds at 6:00. Every day had a rhythm of prayer and meals, of work and rest. I learned how to use a pitchfork, how to weed a flowerbed, how to feed pigs, and even how young bulls were castrated. In the afternoons, we paddled out to the raft in the middle of the pond and skinny dipped—a terrifying experience, at first, to a young man prone to spontaneous erections, but after a couple of days I found I could relax and trust my body—at least that much. I swept and vacuumed, washed vegetables and dishes, and in its own way, everything I did there was deeply sensual. The Ordo slowed our lives to a pace that allowed us be fully attentive in each moment.

The monastic schedule looks rigid on paper, but I found it liberating. It freed me from distractions and offered me—offered everyone there—the freedom to go deep. Deep into prayer and thought, deep into reading and writing, and deep into the physical pleasure from ordinary things like strawberry jam on homemade bread or the smell of books in the library. I felt like a kid in a candy shop in that library. I’d brought a dozen or so books of my own to read, but left them aside when I discovered on their shelves writers like Carlo Carretto and Thomas Merton, and also Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. (A little odd, perhaps, that I spent so much of my time among Benedictines reading about Judaism.)

St. Gregory’s fed a deep hunger that I felt for a life that was orderly, focused, and centered, but more than that, the monastery fed my hunger for meaning. Life made sense at St. Gregory’s. It’s where I learned that there were such a things as spiritual communities, and people who lived their whole lives centered on the deepest levels of meaning. It was another of those major turning points in my life, and I think I might have signed up for the novitiate on the spot if it weren’t for one or two little things. I should finish my college education first, of course. And there was also the small matter of…

Celibacy.

At age 20, the thought of taking a vow of celibacy would have been about as easy as… I don’t know… scaling a 50-foot wall with my bare hands. I mean, people have done it. But standing at the foot of that wall, I couldn’t really see how.

So I didn’t stay. But I left feeling nourished and awakened in a way I’d never been before. I held onto the idea of maybe coming back when I was older, when I’d experienced more of the world, maybe slaked a few of my appetites and allowed the hormones of adolescence to subside a little. It wasn’t a definite plan, just a back-burner idea, but one that I kept gently simmering for quite some time. Decades later, no longer Christian, I still feel a connection there—enough to correspond occasionally with the guestmaster (now the abbot) and to read the Abbey Letter cover to cover.

But the inability to commit to a life of celibacy really bugged me at the time. It’s not that the choice was wrong; it’s that I didn’t really feel it was a choice. I felt I was simply too weak, that it had been a failure of courage, a lack of integrity.

Fear—facing it, owning it, and beating it—turned out to be a major theme of my spiritual journey.

To be continued…

Photo: Self-portrait at St. Gregory's Abbey, summer 1979

Peter's Spiritual Journey, Part I: A Refugee Looks Back

2011-06-20T19:23:00.015-04:00

Prologue: A Liberal Christian With Balls
Part I: A Refugee Looks Back
Part II: Leaving Home

My spiritual journey has not been a straight line. It has looped and twisted, sometimes out into non-Euclidean n-dimensional hyperspace and sometimes down into Hell and out the other side. But it has had two or three big turning points that were defining moments. You know, like when that Mesopotamian storm god first appeared in the whirlwind and said to Abraham, Go now, leave your family and your home and wander in the desert. Don’t worry about where you’re going; I’ll let you know when you get there.

So I’m going to tell my journey in medias res, beginning with a turning point at a Southern Baptist commune in rural Georgia when I was 22 years old and discovered I could no longer be Christian.

First came the Fundamentalists

The thing is, they were actually very nice fundamentalists. They were good, kind, compassionate people doing humanitarian work in the world, with a particular calling to refugee resettlement work. They were actively working to become the best, most righteous and loving people they could be.

I suppose their only failing was that they’d lost the ability to think critically about that process or about their religion.

They were fervently committed to surrendering all their pride and greed and willfulness to God, replacing their own will with God’s will, their own truth with God’s truth, and they turned primarily to the Bible for guidance in finding that truth. And this put them, at the deepest core of their being, in close company not primarily with other good, kind humanitarians, but with other Bible-believing Christians. I mean, sure, there was some overlap between the two groups. A lot of overlap. A great many Christians are inspiring examples of humanitarian compassion.

But where they didn’t overlap—where Christians occasionally came down on the side of bigotry and hate, and the humanitarians had the misfortune to have come from other faiths—their loyalty was clear: God’s truth, not our truth; God’s love, not our love.

This should not have thrown me as much as it did. I came to this Southern Baptist intentional community as a liberal high-church Episcopalian and as a vegetarian organic gardener at Oberlin College, one of the most persistent remaining strongholds of the countercultural values of the sixties.

I should have just gone back.

Instead, I listened to what the fundamentalists said. I don’t mean I took it all in unquestioningly or uncritically, but I listened very deeply. I looked at their arguments. I re-read the Bible through their eyes. I was shocked and horrified at a lot of what I found there, but I could not deny seeing it once it was pointed out to me.

Next came the brainwashing

And it wasn’t even meant to be brainwashing. Like I said, these were very nice fundamentalists. There wasn’t any autocratic leader living high on the hog by exploiting his followers; they genuinely functioned as a community, giving according to ability and taking only according to need and making decisions (at least among the permanent members) through a process that probably wasn’t very far off from Quaker corporate discernment.

They never set out to brainwash anybody.

But…

There are places in the human psyche that few of us ever explore. I’ve never been to outer space, but I’ve read about weightlessness enough to know that there are predictable experiences that the human body and mind will undergo in that condition.

At age 22, I had never lived in a commune, but I’d read about them enough to know there are some predictable experiences there, too. I remember a line from a textbook in a course in Christian Utopias and Communitarian Movements that I took at Oberlin, where a hippie in a 60’s commune said something like, “Man, you’re all inside my head and it’s freaking me out!” Reading it, the year before my own experience with intentional community, my reaction was, Wow, that sounds really interesting. I wonder what that would be like?

That summer, in the thick of it, the sensation was almost physical. My interpretation of Christianity was being remade through the intensity of the communal experience in a fundamentalist setting, and it almost felt like fingers inside my skull, probing down into the sulci of my brain.

I should have just gone home. The problem was I didn’t really have a spiritual home.

To be continued...

Photo: Jubilee Partners Summer Volunteers, 1981
I am third from the left in the back row.

Peter Meets a Liberal Christian with Balls

2011-06-13T16:44:00.014-04:00

Metaphorically, at least.

Yesterday, Cat and I drove to Boston to hear the annual Weed Memorial Lecture at Beacon Hill Friends Meeting. The speaker was Peggy Senger Parsons, the pastor of Freedom Friends Church in Salem, Oregon, and for the second time this spring I've met someone and think, If I'd known someone like that when I was 22, It's possible I'd still be Christian.

I picked up a copy of FFC's Faith and Practice while I was there. (For the non-Quakers in the audience, F&P is sort of equivalent to a catechism or a Book of Common Prayer.) There's a passage that she read aloud in response to a question from someone in the audience. I'm just going to quote it here for now. I'll get much more in depth about what it means to me over the course of the summer as I write my spiritual journey.

We renounce the intolerance of religious fundamentalism in all its forms. Free Christians need only to live according to Gospel Order and hold up Christ, in order to fulfill The Great Commission. We believe that God calls human souls in more ways than we can imagine, and that God abides with anyone who seeks God in spirit and in truth, regardless of how they name God. We can and will make clear the truth and power that has been given to us, our Gospel path, but in no way do we think that we possess the whole, or only, truth. We prefer to live in relationship to the Truth. We believe it to be blasphemous for a human, or human group, to claim to hold the whole truth.

In our experience, Fundamentalism, which we define as asserting the absolute truth and completeness of one's own beliefs and practices to the deliberate exclusion of possible truth in other beliefs and practices, often leads to pride, judgmentalism, strife, rancor, and in the extreme, to hatred and violence. We believe that religious fundamentalism is incompatible with holy living and grace, and we renounce it as sin.

It comes a bit late for me. I've found other paths to God, first as a Wiccan and Pagan, and more recently as a liberal, non-Christian Quaker. But it's surprising how powerful I still find that renunciation. And how angry it makes me, even today, that no one anywhere in the Christian Church had the balls to say that in 1981.

Peter's Spiritual Journey:
Prologue: A Liberal Christian With Balls
Part I: A Refugee Looks Back
Part II: Leaving Home

Peter Goes to Kenya, Part VI: Paths I Might Have Taken

2011-06-07T19:37:00.017-04:00

Part I: Culture Shock
Part II: A Society in Upheaval
Part III: Fairy Gold
Part IV: Oppressor and Oppressed
Part V: Speaking in Meeting, Kenyan-Style
Part VI: Paths I Might Have Taken

As a missionary in Africa today, Eden Grace doesn’t see herself as “bringing God to Kenya,” the way early missionaries would have, but rather as coming to Kenya to find the ways that God is already at work there. She accepts, with open eyes, all of the failings and all of the harm done by missionaries before her, and sees that still, on the ground, there is work to be done.

Eden gets both halves of the contradiction: the Bible is her source of strength and inspiration and guidance and inspiration and connection with God, and the Bible is full of fables and fallacies and failings and corrosive, destructive teachings. Eden has grasped both polar opposites and holds them both, where, when I was younger, they tore me apart. One thing I realized while I was in Kenya was that if I’d had a mentor like her when I was 22 or 23, I might still be Christian.

At the time of my religious crisis, there were only two kinds of Christians around me: There were fierce, Bible-believing evangelicals who worshiped The Book as if The Book were God, as if every word of it were a verbatim transcript of God’s personal instructions for each of us. And there were the nice, reasonable Christians—intelligent liberals who were largely oblivious to the Evangelicals and who didn’t understand why I couldn’t bring myself to recite the Apostles’ Creed or take communion any more.

It’s not relevant to me now, the way it would have been thirty years ago. Today I am not Christian simply because I am something else. I sit at the table with Christians and the fact that I was once one of them rarely comes up any more.

Christianity is deeply flawed. (A Christian might use the word “fallen.”) Christianity helped create a lot of the problems in Africa that Christian missionaries are now struggling to solve. But Christianity remains, providing health care and hope, when so much else of Africa is just gone.

Americans want to take the braid of God’s Word and God’s work and separate out the strands, holding onto the threads that seem untainted and discarding those that embarrass us by reminding us of our history. That’s not the answer. In Africa, there are no separate threads. The answer that I saw in Kenya is simply to be on the ground, doing the work.

When I began writing this series, I had imagined that this last installment would answer a lot of the questions that commenters raised about my feelings around Christianity. I realize now that instead, it serves as a jumping off point.

It is time to write my spiritual journey.

Stay tuned…

Photos:
Maternal Health Outreach Clinic by Peter Bishop
Mr. Bishop with Mission Statement by Vika K.

Join Our Celebration!

2011-06-01T19:32:00.001-04:00

Today marks the one year anniversary of following a leading to dramatically cut our plastic waste. We're celebrating over at the PNC nature blog, No Unsacred Place--come read about a year of living with less plastic, more local food, and more fun.

One Morning

2011-06-01T05:57:00.000-04:00

I love living where we do.

This morning, in the early gray, just after the alarm clock went off, I found myself stretching lazily to the sound of geese flying overhead--non-migrating Canada geese. I see them gleaning in fresh-turned fields or in the stubble of newly-mown hayfields at nearby farms, together with the local wild turkeys.

Such a sweet, wild music, the song of wild geese.

Moments later, Peter urged me out of bed. "Oh! Come see! There's a bear--two bears, a mama and a cub in the back yard!"

And so there were. Ambling along quite unhurriedly at the edge of the woods, down to our partially-rehabilitated perennial bed. We crowded the bedroom window, watching them out of sight. (Judging by the size of mama, the bear I saw last fall must have been an adult male.)

We decided to let the dogs out late, today. We trust the fence we built for their yard, but there's no point in tempting fate.

Such a persistent miracle, a glimpse of wild thing, living their lives in parallel with our own. As I think I may have mentioned, I love our home.

Peter Goes to Kenya, Part V: Speaking in Meeting, Kenyan-Style

2011-05-30T18:29:00.007-04:00

Part I: Culture Shock
Part II: A Society in Upheaval
Part III: Fairy Gold
Part IV: Oppressor and Oppressed
Part V: Speaking in Meeting, Kenyan-Style
Part VI: Paths I Might Have Taken

Our last day in Kenya was Easter Sunday. It began with hiking to the top of a mountain to watch the sunrise and to pray, asking for the blessings of Mother Earth.

Later, after breakfast, most of my students stayed at the guest house or went hiking to see a waterfall, but I had asked Eden to bring me along to experience a Kenyan-style Quaker worship service.

My own Quaker meeting, in the heart of New England, is unprogrammed. It’s what most people imagine when they think of Quakers: silent, waiting worship without a preacher, without a pulpit, without hymns or sermon. The pews are arranged concentrically, and messages are delivered when worshipers feel moved by Spirit to stand and speak. We sit at one end of a continuum of worship among American Quakers. At the other extreme are programmed, pastoral meetings that look and feel very much like Protestant churches, but there are many permutations in between.

Theologically, we also sit at one extreme end, with probably less than half of our members and attenders identifying themselves as Christian. One of the things that is most precious to me about the Religious Society of Friends is our ability to sit in worship together and experience Spirit together in spite of thinking about Spirit in radically different ways. Quakers seem to get it that religion is about encountering the Divine, not about espousing a creed.

Intervisitation with Quakers from different traditions within the RSoF is one way to keep that kind of corporate worshiping across doctrinal lines alive. The controversy I wrote about earlier concerning the Friends United Meeting personnel policy makes it especially important, in my view, between liberal American Friends and Friends in Kenya.

I’d been warned that such things often last for four or five hours, and that was on an ordinary Sunday. Purely by coincidence, the one day our schedule would allow me to visit a Friends Church was on Easter. Eden assured me that it would be fine for us to come and go. It would probably already be in full swing when we arrived, and would go on for hours after we left.

We were called up to the front when we arrived, to introduce ourselves. I conveyed greetings from Mt. Toby Monthly Meeting in America, and Eden made it clear that we just wanted to sit in the regular pews, not the facing bench behind the pulpit. It hadn’t occurred to me that, as exotic foreigners, we might be expected to sit in a place of honor. I was very grateful we didn’t; it would have been much harder to leave gracefully from the facing bench.

The service meandered from hymns to committee reports to more hymns and then a sermon. It wasn’t in English. In fact, it wasn’t even in Swahili. It was in a “mother tongue,” one of the local tribal languages. Someone—he seemed like a deacon or something—came and sat between us and leaned close to translate for us.

It was very long, and with only a few key phrases being translated, it got a bit tedious. We were beginning to pick up our things and get ready to stand and leave when the preacher all of a sudden looked directly at us—at me—and asked a question. Our deacon translated: “Do people in America lead good Christian lives, or have they gone off the tracks?”

It took some time for Eden to clarify, first for herself and then for me, that in fact we were being asked to stand up and offer comment. While we were figuring all this out, the preacher asked two or three more questions: “If your husband took a second wife, could you welcome her into your house? If your husband had a child by another woman, could you welcome the child as part of your family?” Eden and I, in whispered conversation, went back and forth a few times about whether I wanted to field the first question? She could stand up and do all the speaking if I preferred. She may have been a bit nervous about what I, as a non-Christian Quaker, would say to such a question. But I told her I wanted to take it on.

The message I delivered felt right. It felt true. It felt like it had the *crack* of a baseball sent arcing out to the stands.

I had to turn around to face the congregation. We were near the front of the church, and I hadn’t realized how many people had entered since we first sat down. I said, “You have asked if Americans are living good Christian lives, or if we have gone off the tracks.” I paused for our deacon to translate, then went on: “The message of Jesus, as I understand it, is that we all go off the tracks at times, but that God is always ready to welcome us back.” They smiled. They loved it. Boy, did it feel weird as a Wiccan/Pagan Quaker to be preaching the words of Jesus to a bunch of Evangelicals, but they carried truth. I’d found the thread within Christianity that isn’t about sectarianism, and reminded them of it.

I didn’t need to speak up for Paganism. That’s not what it was about. And if I’d tried, I would have hopelessly muddied the waters, lecturing to people I didn’t know and whose culture I didn’t understand. It would have been disrespectful to our African hosts, every bit as bad as standing up in, say, a Hindu temple or a Shinto shrine and shouting at them about Jesus.

Further, one of the things that makes Paganism unique and precious is that it grows from the land and it sinks its roots into the land. Paganism isn’t about a set of beliefs; it’s a way of being. It celebrates the material—the Earth and the body—as well as the wheel of the year and the cycles of life. Paganism is not served by wealthy Americans jetting around the world to harangue subsistence farmers.

Instead, I found the spark of tolerance and universalism within their tradition. Speaking from a place of centeredness and truth, I reached out from where the Light touches me to where it touches them.

And I left it at that.

Eden handled the questions about polygamy. She had been puzzling over whether the minister’s sermon was about the need for women to be submissive—Eden would have had a very hard time with that—or whether his preaching was more about forgiveness. Eventually she figured out that what he seemed to be saying was that even when terrible things happen (and for a woman in Kenya, her husband taking a second wife is terrible indeed) you should trust in God, because God will care for his children.

She said afterwards that I’d done well answering the question. She’d seen other American Quakers in similar situations try to talk about how America is multicultural and not everyone there is Christian, and it’s just not a message that’s easy to convey clearly here.

I think it was actually easier for me, as a Pagan Quaker, to simply speak the words of Jesus as they moved me than it would have been for a liberal Christian, rather the way speaking in a foreign language can feel more natural than trying to imitate someone else’s accent in your own language. These were my Quaker sisters and brothers, and yet their religion was as profoundly different from my own relationship with the Divine as their mother tongue was from my English.

To be concluded…

Photo:
Friends Church by Peter Bishop

Peter in Kenya, part IV: Oppressor and Oppressed

2011-05-28T08:14:00.012-04:00

Part I: Culture Shock
Part II: A Society in Upheaval
Part III: Fairy Gold
Part IV: Oppressor and Oppressed
Part V: Speaking in Meeting, Kenyan-Style
Part VI: Paths I Might Have Taken

I said that Christianity in Kenya hasn’t sponsored a single pogrom since it was first introduced in 1902.

There are two possible exceptions. While Kenya hasn’t seen much religious warfare between rival sects of Christianity, Kenyan Christianity did supplant an indigenous (Americans might call it “Pagan”) religion. I know almost nothing about traditional African religion. I am told it was animist and that it involved ancestor reverence (both of which sound fine to me) but also that it was quite misogynistic. There were dietary taboos that effectively prevented pregnant women from getting protein. And it was the coming of Christianity that ended the practice of female genital mutilation.

If I were more connected to Kenya, it would be incumbent on me to learn more about African indigenous religious practices. As a panentheist, as one who reverences Mother Earth, I have an obligation to learn about the ways that the Earth has spoken to the people before me who have lived where I live and worshiped where I worship. I may find, as time passes, that I already have that level of relationship with the Kenyan soil.

Our final day in Kenya, I got up at 5:30 to hike with my students to the top of a mountain to see the sunrise. I left them with our guide and walked a little further up the trail to the very summit, where I knelt and took the pentacle from around my neck and pressed it to the ground, asking the blessing of Mother Earth, and then raised it so that as the sun rose, its light reached me through the intertwined points of the star and their encompassing circle.

Yes, I think I may already have that level of obligation.

I won’t necessarily like or approve of what I find out. Earth-centered religions aren’t immune from becoming destructive and oppressive, any more than Christ-centered religions. But I should learn at least a little something about it. My level of ignorance right now is profound.

The other area where I am not certain that Christianity is blameless is around the Kenyan attitudes toward homosexuality.

It is fiercely difficult, as a visitor from a wealthy, privileged, industrialized nation to go to a place like Kenya and understand what you see. Westerners who’ve lived half their lives in Kenya working to solve that country’s problems will tell you that it takes ten years (some will tell you forty) to even begin to see what the problems are, never mind the solutions.

In America, gays and lesbians are visible. We’ve all had the opportunity to see them form stable, loving relationships and even raise children. The struggle for GLBTQ rights has been a civil rights issue, embracing the same goals and the using same tactics as the fight for equal rights for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities and for women. Hearing about intolerance of gays and lesbians in African churches, many Americans’ first reaction is to want to take the fight on the road, as if we could arrive there new on the scene and with nothing but pure intentions and simply set things right.

Ironically, that’s exactly what the early missionaries did a hundred years ago: sweep into a culture they didn’t understand to impose their own values and ideals.

Kenyans can be forgiven for a certain amount of suspicion and ignorance around GLBT issues. Gays and lesbians across most of Africa are so deeply closeted that very few people would be aware of ever having met one. Like everything else in Kenya, questions about gay rights are complicated by its history as a former colony of the industrialized west. Many third-world countries have been destinations for sexual tourism—wealthy westerners traveling to impoverished parts of the world to buy kinds of sex that are illegal at home, like child prostitution.

I did not get to see the question of gay rights come up while I was in Kenya. It is certainly tempting to assume that Christianity would be supporting an attitude of hate. Many American churches were certainly full of hate when they came out in favor of neighboring Uganda’s death penalty for homosexuality a few years ago (mercifully, that legislation has just been allowed to expire). But I suspect that African hostility toward gays and lesbians is much older than African Christianity, and I’m fairly certain that that hostility was hardened by a century or more of colonial occupation.

I also believe that missionaries in Kenya—at least the contemporary Quaker missionaries—have been more a force for tolerance than for homophobia. I may be proven wrong when I read more history, but that’s my impression now.

American Quakers in New England Yearly Meeting have been agitating for years around a personnel policy in Friends United Meeting drafted by Quakers from all around the world, including Americans and Kenyans, that affirms the civil rights of all people, condemns violence against homosexuals, and recognizes “diversity among us on issues of sexuality,” but excludes noncelibate gays and lesbians from any positions of leadership. Many in NEYM advocate severing all ties with FUM, or at least withholding financial contributions, because of that discriminatory policy.

In the American south in the 1960’s, economic boycott was an effective tool for ending institutionalized racism. In dealing with Kenyan Quakers today, economic boycott would be a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon our brothers and sisters. Worse: we talk about withholding American money from Kenya on moral grounds, when so much of the American economy was originally built on the labor of enslaved Africans.

I once heard Noam Chomsky use the phrase “liberal humanitarian imperialism,” and I thought at the time that it was a complete oxymoron—a contradiction in terms. But it’s not.

The solution to homophobia, at home and in Kenya, is persistent, faithful witness around the right order of same-sex relationships. Yes, the legal battles have to be fought, the petitions signed, the votes cast, but the driving force behind any struggle for liberation is and will always be the recognition of the basic humanity of those crying for freedom.

To be continued…

Photo: Prayers at Sunrise
(photo by Robert Flynn)

Peter in Kenya, Part III: Fairy Gold

2011-05-23T20:51:00.012-04:00

Part I: Culture Shock
Part II: A Society in Upheaval
Part III: Fairy Gold
Part IV: Oppressor and Oppressed
Part V: Speaking in Meeting, Kenyan-Style
Part VI: Paths I Might Have Taken

Folklore has stories about objects that change as you carry them from one place to another, like Fairy gold that turns to clay in your pockets when you return home. Christianity did something like that when I traveled from America to Kenya. Waking up in another world, I took a piece of worthless clay from my pocket and saw it shine like gold.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m still not Christian. I still have no illusions about the incalculable harm that Christianity has done throughout history, and in particular, the harm that Christian missionaries have done in Africa. In many cases, they served as the vanguard of European colonial conquest, or they were used to pacify an occupied and oppressed people. But the picture looks different when you actually get there.

For one thing, the Quaker missionaries in Kenya have a more complex history than most. The imperialist occupation was British while the missionaries, by in large, were American, and to this day Kenya is one of the places in the world (one of very few, post-Bush) where you get a better reception if you’re a visitor from America than from elsewhere.

The missionaries in Kenya worked to alleviate suffering. When the British instituted a hut tax to be paid in hard currency, this forced large numbers of subsistence farmers off of their own land and onto British plantations where they could work for cash wages. American missionaries responded by helping to develop cottage industries like brick making, so that small rural farms could generate cash income. (Though one can ask why the missionaries never directly protested the taxes…) Among missionaries, the Quakers were unusual in having a strong concern for women’s rights. Many different missionary denominations started boys schools; the Quakers started schools for girls as well. Quaker missionaries were also a driving force in the elimination of female genital mutilation as a common practice, and pushed to eliminate dietary taboos that caused significant malnutrition among pregnant women.

Still, the harm is a fact of history that contemporary missionaries like my friend Eden Grace live with every day. There’s no escaping it—not if you keep your eyes open. And yet, on the ground, there is work to be done…

And on the ground, the landscape of African Christianity looks very different than it does from over here, peering at it through a telescope from the heart of the industrialized west.

In America, when a Christian exhorts you to read the Bible, accept Jesus, and be saved, the inescapable subtext is: Those people are bad. Those people are damned. Come join OUR group, do it OUR way, and become one of the good people. American Christianity exists within a pluralistic society. We have neighbors who are Jews and Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, Pagans, Wiccans, secular humanists, Native Americans, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses… All of us, if we’re willing to look around, can see people from a variety of religious faiths and spiritual disciplines whose every word and every action is grounded in faithfulness.

And we have all heard Christians decry even the best of them as unbelievers and damn our society for its pluralism. If you read the Bible, if you believe the words of St. Paul, then Mahatma Gandhi has to be burning in Hell. Not for any sin, but for being a saint bearing the wrong brand name. In a pluralistic society, believing in Jesus means believing in Jesus’ exclusive copyright. Nice Christians will talk about the “scandal of particularity.” Less nice Christians will talk about the heathens being cast into the pit. But all of them are aware on some level of the tension between a universal God who loves us all, and a salvation that is exclusive to the members of one particular sect.

When you step off the plane in Kenya and look around, the religious landscape looks completely different. Kenya does have lots of sects, Quaker and otherwise. Kenya also has a lot of intertribal mistrust (largely an aftereffect of the colonial occupation), but Kenyan religion didn’t seem, from what I saw of it, to be sectarian in anything like the way American religion is. It’s like, Americans are always asking for the best and latest diet; Kenyans are just asking for food.

Kenya did not have the misfortune of conquering half the world and then having to assimilate half the world’s cultures and religions. Kenya was conquered. And when Kenyan Christians exhort you to put your faith and trust in God, it’s not about My God can beat up your God; it’s about God can give you strength and hope when you are beaten and oppressed, watching your society torn apart and your family dying.

In Kenya, Christian faith shines like gold.

In Kenya, the task of throwing off colonial rule and building a stable and peaceful democracy has been (and still is) a desperate struggle. They don’t have a comfortable status quo to fall back on. Spiritual survival and physical survival are both tenuous, and when Kenyans find a way for Spirit to touch their lives, I think they’re less inclined to question the packaging.

There are certainly American Christians who try to see their religion this way, casting the struggle not as one of Christianity vs. other forms of religious expression, but as Christianity vs. chaos and destruction. Often what they’re talking about is the chaos brought on by gay marriage, universal health care, teaching evolution in the schools, and the worldwide conspiracy of scientists to dupe us into curtailing global warming.

But in Kenya the chaos is real. It’s hunger and malaria, poverty, displacement from the land, and the ghastly spectacle of intertribal genocide in neighboring countries.

A second reason that Kenyan Christianity is so different has to do with history. It is hard for me to turn to historical Christian writers for inspiration or guidance because, before I can open myself to any real message of Spirit they might have for me, I have to ask to what degree they took part in religious wars or the violent suppression of rival sects and how much of their writing is just an apology for the theological views of the winners against those of the slaughtered.

That question just doesn’t come up for Kenyan Christians. The missionaries came, and they offered hope. Kenyan Christianity doesn’t date back any further than 1902, and to my knowledge it hasn’t sponsored a single pogrom in that whole time.

To be continued…

Photo: Inscription at Kaimosi Friends Mission Hospital

Peter in Kenya, Part II: A Society In Upheaval

2011-05-21T09:53:00.010-04:00

Part I: Culture Shock
Part II: A Society in Upheaval
Part III: Fairy Gold
Part IV: Oppressor and Oppressed
Part V: Speaking in Meeting, Kenyan-Style
Part VI: Paths I Might Have Taken

I’ve been to Kenya. That doesn’t make me an expert. I haven't read the history books (though I’ve had a couple of good titles recommended to me). What I know about the place, I know from being there for one short week and speaking with a handful of people, mostly my friend Eden Grace, but also several Kenyans who I got to know at least a little.

One of the drivers who was hired to shuttle us around was a man named Anthony. Our party had divided up into small groups for the day, and Anthony drove two students and me to a village to observe an outreach maternal and child health clinic being run out of a Friends Church. While we were there, since we were in the neighborhood, he said he wanted to show us his grandfather’s farm.

We piled into his truck again and he drove us out to the house where he grew up (yes, it’s the little hut in the photograph, with mud walls and a corrugated metal roof) and the plot of land around it that he inherited. He was very proud of his farm, though he and his family live in town now and he rents the farm out to a family that works the land for him. He took us around to see his fields of corn, the little stream that provides all the fresh water, and also the graves of his grandfather and grandmother. Kenyans usually bury their loved ones on their own land, and you almost never see anything like a cemetery. He had a crew of men working on building a structure of some kind over the graves. They had only done the foundation, but it looked at least as large and as substantial as most of the houses we’d seen.

Anthony’s grandfather had had four sons, so Anthony inherited only a quarter of the original farm. This is happening more and more in Kenya. Families have been dividing up their farmland among their sons for several generations now, until the plots of land are no longer large enough to sustain a family. Anthony is unusual in that he moved his entire family to a house in town. What happens more often in rural Kenya is that the husband will be forced to live in the city for eleven months out of the year, earning money to support his family back home.

Polygamy was once legal in Kenya. It isn’t any more, but polygamous behavior continues, and the economic necessity for husbands to live apart from their families is one reason why. Men from the country take on disposable girlfriends in the city. In a very real sense, all that was accomplished by outlawing polygamy was to strip these women, who would once have been second and third wives, of any legal rights or protections.

Kenya has been going through significant social upheaval ever since the conquest by the British at the end of the nineteenth century. People who had been nomadic were suddenly restricted to whatever land they happened to be on at the time of the conquest. Common land that had been used for grazing was made private property. Subsistence farmers were forced to pay a hut tax in hard currency, which forced many of the adults off of their own land and into the British plantation system where they could work for cash wages.

When the British finally left, the land was returned to the Kenyans, but with no regard for who had originally owned it. Population pressure is now making rural farms unsustainable. And in a society where they elderly have traditionally been cared for by their children, AIDS is wiping out an entire generation, so that instead of being cared for, many of the elderly are struggling to raise young grandchildren. Demographic and economic forces are shifting underneath Kenyan society like tectonic plates, and I cannot envision what the social landscape will look like in another fifty years.

After we saw his farm, Anthony took us back to his house in town. His family runs a brick-making operation in their back yard. This and other cottage industries were first developed by missionaries during the time of British rule as a way of providing the rural populace with cash income and an alternative to being displaced onto plantations.

Anthony brought us into his living room, introduced us to his wife and children, and said it was the first time he had ever had “guests like you” sit with him in his house. It felt like a real honor.

To be continued…

Photo: Anthony's Farm

Peter in Kenya, Part I: Culture Shock

2011-05-15T11:48:00.009-04:00

Part I: Culture Shock
Part II: A Society in Upheaval
Part III: Fairy Gold
Part IV: Oppressor and Oppressed
Part V: Speaking in Meeting, Kenyan-Style
Part VI: Paths I Might Have Taken

The idea started a few years ago. My Advanced Placement Biology class was discussing AIDS and health care in the third world, and I mentioned that I knew someone who administered a couple of AIDS hospitals in Kenya. One of my students made an offhand comment about how it would be fun to go out and visit and see, and when I told this to Eden Grace at that year’s Sessions of New England Yearly Meeting, she said, “Yes! By all means, come! Bring your students!”

It was a pie-in-the-sky idea, and nothing came of it for several years. But when I mentioned it to last year’s AP class, their interest was seriously piqued. Could it really happen? I said it was unlikely, that there were about 800 things that would have to line up just perfectly for a trip like that to happen, and if it did, it would be very expensive, but I’d make inquiries.

An hour later, when my tenth-grade bio students came in, they were literally jumping up and down saying, “Mr. Bishop! Mr. Bishop! Is it true?!? Are we going to Kenya?!?”

A year and a half and 800 detailed arrangements later, nine students, two parents, and one other teacher arrived with me in Kisumu to spend a week touring the Friends mission hospitals at Kaimosi and Lugulu, doing rotations and shadowing the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other clinicians. The purpose of the trip was to experience third world health care, but along the way we learned a tremendous amount about Kenyan society and African culture. Although our host was a Quaker missionary, the trip was entirely secular. Still, for me the visit also brought deep spiritual insights.

The culture shock was intense. The friendliness of the people was downright unnerving. We had a seven-hour layover in Nairobi, where we spent the night camped out in a shabby little airport coffee house, playing Scrabble and studying for the AP Bio exam. A man walked up to us and said, “Hello again! I know you, yes? You’ve been here before?” He shook my hand, asked me all kinds of questions about where we were from, and it took some convincing before he accepted I had never set foot on the continent of Africa before. In America, someone like that would have been a panhandler, a con artist, or a shill for a thief, but in Kenya he was just a friendly stranger, and he thought he’d met me before because, quite seriously, all mzungu look alike.

I began the week with the instincts of a tourist trying not to be tacky: Keep your eyes down and don’t stare at the natives or shove your camera in their faces; be quiet and polite and don’t go trying to show off the two or three words of Swahili you’ve learned as if that made you bilingual. My first day at Kaimosi hospital, I approached some of the patients at one end of the men’s ward and asked them, shyly, if they minded if I took some pictures. They smiled and said, “Oh yes, that’s fine.” I took a couple of pictures and left, and then an old guy in blue pajamas came shuffling out of the ward and said to me “Some of the men have been complaining…” and I thought, Oh God, I’ve overstepped. I’ve invaded their space and been a pushy tourist. “…that you didn’t take their picture as well.” I blinked. Oh! I went back in and photographed the rest of the patients and talked for a while with the old guy, whose name was Wilson. In America, he would have come across as a crazy street person, but once again, in Kenya, he was just an old guy who felt like talking. I was working so hard at suppressing all my western instincts around boundaries and personal space that when he said “I want to know more Americans. Can I have your phone number?” I was completely at a loss for how to respond, and I actually gave it to him and watched while he programmed it into his cell phone. And then asked myself, Oh crap, what did I just do?

By the end of the week I was adjusting. I pointed my camera at groups of strangers, and invariably they smiled broadly and waved. I learned to walk up to people with a great big smile on my face and announce, “Jambo! My name is Mr. Bishop! I am a biology teacher from America! These are my students! We are here to learn about hospitals in Kenya!” which always elicited an enthusiastic, “Karibu! Karibu Kenya!” (Welcome! Welcome to Kenya!)

Eden has talked many times about how volunteers often come to Kenya with very American ideas about what we think the Kenyans want and need. We come wanting to build schools and wind up taking away construction jobs. She told us of an American volunteer at one of the hospitals we visited who spent weeks sewing privacy curtains to go between the beds in all the wards—only to have the Kenyans knot them up out of the way. Kenyans don’t place the same value on privacy that westerners do. An American’s instinct, upon seeing great poverty, is to reach for our wallets, but what Kenyans mostly want from western visitors is to make connections—to have us sit with them, talk with them, sharing meals and stories and time.

To be continued...

Photo: Wilson, a patient at Kaimosi Friends Mission Hospital

Cat, It's Beltane

2011-05-01T10:13:00.001-04:00

I'm feeling a bit torn this morning. It's time to head out to meeting for worship, and I've been kept away from worship far too often this winter; I really feel the need to be there.

On the other hand, I've been just a little under the weather for the past two weeks, and physically exhausted for no reason all weekend. If I go to meeting, I doubt I'll have the energy for anything else: not shopping for groceries, not cooking the staples for the week, not grading the stack of student essays on my desk.

And certainly not celebrating Beltane. And that does not seem acceptable to me.

So I'm staying home, but, as I said, I'm feeling a bit torn by all that needs to be done, and how little energy I seem to have this week to do it with.

Which puts me in mind of a story...

Once upon a Beltane, Peter and I were at a Church of the Sacred Earth retreat in northern Vermont. Despite being almost on the Canadian border, it was warm that year, and we were all tenting in a colorful extempore village outside the cabin of one of one of our members. The birds were singing, there were flowers blooming, and it was one of those perfect mornings in spring, when the world itself seems to slow down to drink in the sights and sounds, and sunlight pours as slow and rich as honey between the green leaves.

Peter and I woke up in a tent together, and the bright sun warmed us and basted us in laziness as we lay in one another's arms.

This was during the period after I'd separated from my first husband, but before I moved in with Peter. We were, in general, playing it cool about our romance, as my young daughter deserved a chance to adjust to the end of her parents' marriage before having to accept a new love in her mom's life. So when we were in public or around my child, Peter and I worked as hard as we could at being undemonstrative of our feelings.

You could have cut the erotic tension with a knife, and I was learning all about the downside of life in a small village in Vermont. Peter, who lived two hours away from me, was busy moving his fragile and elderly grandmother in with him in a new home for the two of them to share, and could not visit me often. And when he did, I was painfully aware that simply taking a walk down the street with him would turn heads.

Everything is everyone else's business in a small town.

Here, at Beltane, however, among my Pagan community, the fact that we were a couple was known and understood. My daughter was with her father that weekend, and we were among friends, some of whom had supported me through the worst of the ending of my marriage, and most of whom had been there from the beginning of this new love.

It had been a long, hard winter, with a lot of grief in it.

Now, however, it was Beltane, and the sun was bright on the yellow fabric of the tent over our heads as Peter and I lay woven together in a little nest of sleeping bags, luxuriating at being together, luxuriating at the morning.

I don't know how long we had been lying there, in that pleasant warmth and that pleasant state between waking and rising, when I realized that the sun was now quite high.

The Church of the Sacred Earth was not just my family--it was an obligation, and I take my obligations seriously. (Seriously enough, perhaps, to grieve the gods themselves, who may not feel particularly honored by feelings of guilt, anxiety, and resentment.) I was serving on the Council of Elders that year, and one of our semi-annual meetings for business was about to begin. I realized suddenly that everyone was up except for us--we could hear them, bustling about, getting coffee, sharing food, calling and chatting just as the birds were doing--and I was late! Late to a business meeting!

I suddenly sat bolt upright and began searching frantically for my clothes. "I'm keeping everyone waiting!" I panicked. "They can't begin until I get there!"

And Peter, delight of my heart and love of my life, laughed at me, sat up beside me, and turning my face to look deep into my eyes, reminded me:

"Cat. It's Beltane."

Oh. Yeah. Right. Beltane. Day of joy, day of sweet optimism, sensual celebration, laughter. Love. And a day when love trumps obligation, if ever it can.

Only I could turn Beltane into yet another guilt trip. But only Peter could remind me what the day is really for. (And he did. And he has. And, if the gods are kind, he always will.)

I did get up, and made it to the meeting, and no one minded even that I took the time to pour myself a cup of deep, strong black coffee before we began, or that I took the time to greet my friends, to savor the sun, and to kiss my new love under the new green leaves before we pulled out our notepads and took notes. For it was Beltane, and it was understood, that there are things more vital than efficiency, and obligations deeper than the ones we can put in words.

May each of you remember Beltane, and keep it well, in whatever manner suits you best. Blessed be.

I'd Rather Be a Pagan

2011-04-30T11:53:00.002-04:00

There's another of the periodic discussions going on online over the word "Pagan" to describe a religious movement. (These things tend to recur, like malarial fevers, every so often, despite the best efforts to settle them once and for all.)

As has happened before, the point has been made that Paganism, as a religious movement, is hard to define because there are so many things that can't be said categorically to define us all. Some of us aren't polytheist (or theistic at all); others aren't earth-centered. Some revere ancestors and attempt to follow their ways, while others don't. And so on.

As is probably clear, I find attempts to define the word "Pagan"--or to get us to abandon the word--frustrating. Still, just because I keep having the same conversation again and again doesn't mean it isn't a good conversation to have. And Scott Reimers, at Patheos, has a point when he says that, to the extent that Pagan is a label that defines us as what we are not (Christian, primarily) it is a label that dooms us to live in a certain amount of tension and distrust with our culture. To the extent that this is true of us, it may indeed distort who are, and who we become. I do appreciate Reimers' point that we need to focus on the inclusivity of our movement, rather than on a label that may simply hold us in tension with others.

But I like better Jeff Lilly's point, over at Druid Journal, that, while Paganism is a somewhat slippery and imprecise term, that doesn't mean that it is meaningless, or that it's only connotation is a negative one, as Reimers suggests.

In fact, Jeff sees the very process of reclaiming the word "Pagan" to describe us as part of a process of creating a community that has its own cohesion, with or without being easy to define. And more importantly, like many words, the word "Pagan" has a "forest of meaning"--a rich, if imprecise, cluster of living and related ideas that are growing in relationship to each other, and to the community that claims that word. "A word is a knot, a tangle of prototypes in the forest of meaning," Jeff observes, and I agree.

He continues, "In fact, the desire to hammer down the meanings of words, to draw sharp lines around concepts and say for sure who belongs in the club and who doesn’t, is antithetical to the Pagan aesthetic."

I think that he is right. Deep within the core of meanings of Paganism, as I have lived it, is an organicity that evolves, shifts, and yet has a balance of its own--like an actual forest. It is not static, not amenable to sharp borders and definitions, because its heart is dynamic.

I responded to Jeff's post in this way:

I, personally, need the word "Pagan." Its meaning may be a cluster of loosely related ideas, but that's exactly why I need it--because my own religious identity is complex enough that less complex words distort it.

Should I say that I am Wiccan, because I have trained in two Wiccan traditions? While my Wiccan roots matter a lot to me, so do the bits and pieces of idiosyncratic ritual and lore I've accreted over the years--stray bits of shamanic practice, Hellenic traditions, rituals created by people I love, and insights gleaned directly from gods and spirits I've encountered in trance. None of that is recognizably Wiccan to an outsider, but it's as important to me as my starting point.

Should I describe myself as a Druid, because my current theological and philosophical leanings are in that direction? But I've never formally trained as a Druid, and I am, frankly, unwilling (at my age, but more importantly, at my level of experience) to go back to the beginning and train again in a new tradition, just to say I belong to it.

Should I simply call myself a Quaker, and be done with it? But I'm a Quaker who celebrates each full moon and the turning tide of every season, who leaves offerings to her ancestors and to the spirits of the local woods. However many meetings for business I attend, committees I serve on, or Quaker journals I read, is it enough to call a follower of Herne and the Lady of the Spindle "a Quaker"?

I need the word "Pagan" the way my friend R., who married a man who later transitioned to life as a woman, needs the word "queer." R. isn't lesbian; R. isn't trans. But her life isn't summed up well by describing her a cis-female and straight, either.

Paths are sometimes convoluted, when you bother to explore them and follow where they lead, instead of sit down comfortably beside the roadsigns that mark them.

The older I get, the more Pagan I become. What other word is wide enough to hold me?

Fresh Greens

2011-04-29T17:02:00.001-04:00

Now that I have about six quarts of washed, tender young dandelion greens, the question is--

Sauteed with garlic, or in a salad?

(The chives are up and doing nicely, too.)

Cross posted from Chestnut House.

Thinking Of You Singing

2011-04-27T21:05:00.000-04:00

I have good friends.

Knowing I've been wrestling with Hard Things this winter, my friend, the poet Penny Novack, sent me this poem--originally written for another friend, but, thinking of me recently, she said reminded her of me, too, and how she enjoys listening to us singing.

I'm honored.But also encouraged. And grateful to have such a friend.

Penny wrote:

Thinking Of You Singing

You are woven into the falling leaf, the budding branch
The daffodil white with snow.
You are still running through bright leaves which the great tree
Of your life has dropped.
You are the day's end and dawn and carry water drawn
From rain pools of childhood.
You travel on a carpet of life laid down by all who lived,
All who died
And you are birthing futures which will be shaped
By your will and hand.

Never say when death or destruction sweep the world
That you have not shielded love
That you have not made music
That you have not mattered.

--Penny Novack


Photo: Zorba the Greek

Never say when death or destruction sweep the world/ That you have not shielded love/ That you have not made music/ That you have not mattered.

Reading those words yesterday morning, I nearly wept, I so needed to hear them.

To all my friends--and there are many--who have been struggling this winter too, I join with Penny. Never say you have not shielded love. Never say you have not mattered.

On Hold

2011-04-24T16:24:00.004-04:00

I have not been posting to this blog as regularly as in the past. Partly that is because I'm writing other things in other places. But that is not the biggest reason.

"A Silhouette of Sadness"
JinKY Lin

Truth is, this has been a really difficult year. And most of what I write about on this blog is the way my spiritual life and my daily life intersect. I write about what is hard for me, what I am wrestling with.

Unfortunately, I can't really do that this year. Most of what I am wrestling with involves stories that are not just mine--in the sense that they are not mine to share.

One thing I learned early--the world is much less anonymous than we sometimes think it is. If there is one person who should not see themselves discussed in public, you can count on their seeing any public discussion you put out there. And I feel strongly that I can't write what it would harm or embarrass other people to write.

It's one thing to make myself vulnerable, another to make other people that way without their consent.

So here I am, actually struggling a lot this year with a kind of heaviness of heart and sometimes spirit, sometimes feeling overwhelmed and discouraged and at other times just dog-tired. And I'm doing a lot of wrestling with feelings of failure, and what failure really means, and whether in fact thinking of life in terms like failure and success isn't really a symptom of some problem I'd be better off without, and whether it is possible to be a failure in terms of results--even important results--and yet have been faithful.

At least mostly faithful. At least most of the time.

And I could go on, but in the absence of detail, how on earth is this anything but a litany of abstractions?

I am trying not to feel like not writing here is another sort of failure (or not) to judge myself on (or not). After all, the point is not regular publication, but "blogging in the spirit of worship."

There are times I do not feel Spirit very close to me this year. And there are times when I do, but I'm too tired to be encouraged anyway.

And other times when I am sure everything is going to be just fine--and when I remember that, in fact, it already is.

I'm not actually in despair, and I have good and loving support available to me. But it's still been a tough year... It's sort of like one of those days that you can get even in the middle of a glorious summer, when you're socked in with mist and there doesn't seem to be a lot of life anywhere but in the drone of mosquitoes.

This, too, is part of the journey. I know it. But it's a part I'm not well able to share at the moment.

I'm not experiencing the dark night of the soul. More like... being on hold, waiting for something to break through the muzak that I can write about for public consumption.

I'll be back, when what my Spirit is wrestling with--or celebrating--is something I can share.

No Unsacred Place

2011-04-10T19:28:00.000-04:00

This is just a quick note; I've joined a new project of the Pagan Newswire Collective, their new nature and Paganism blog, No Unsacred Place.

I'll be blogging there on an irregular basis, probably about twice monthly, in a column of my own, Earth Matters. But there's a host of amazing bloggers who will also be writing regular columns and opinion pieces there, including Ali Lilly (whose project it is, and whose own blog, Meadowsweet and Myrrh, has long been one of my favorites), Heather, of Say the Trees Have Ears, and Ruby Sara, of Pagan Godspell. In addition to several of my particular favorite writers, there will also be contributions by geologist, environmentalist, and Druid Meical abAwen; by the very talented Pagan writer S.C. Amis; and by the Druid of the sacred in suburbia, John Beckett.

I suppose the trick for me will be focusing each of my blogging projects appropriately. I don't think that will actually be so difficult, in fact; Quaker Pagan Reflections will likely stay focused mainly on what's fairly obviously spiritual material, whether Pagan or Quaker in outward form. Chestnut House I will probably refocus to be quite practical, focusing even more on the nuts and bolts of living as plastic-free and non-polluting a life as I can. And the newer space, Earth Matters, I think will lend itself more to the hows and whys of environmentalism, and perhaps (my fingers are crossed) to a few interviews with local farmers, activists, and environmentalists of various sorts.

If you head over to Earth Matters at the moment, you will find two posts ready and waiting for you. But do take the time to explore the rest of the site, too; there's a lot of talent assembled there at the moment. And for anyone who loves this planet of ours, listening to so many wise voices for change should be a real pleasure.

A Different Kind of Knowing

2011-04-02T21:22:00.000-04:00

The woods are so much more naked now than at any other time of year.

Yesterday, we had an April Fool snowstorm that left enough on the ground to close the schools. Today, it is nearly all gone--only a few rags remain in shady corners of the woods to show where it had been the day before. Today was warm, and sunny, and though I really should have been doing a hundred other things, I stole away for two hours late in the afternoon, to hike in the naked woods.

The wonderful thing about this bare and barren time of year is how far I can see through the trees. Even from the house, the effect is noticeable, but in the deep woods, it is easy to leave the established trails and explore. Deer paths, not even noticeable once the green comes out, are almost as clear and plain as highways--highways marked by darker brown along the ground, where their droppings slot between the rotting leaves, and by drifts of hemlock needles, chewed off the nearby trees in such profusion, it looks as though a mad topiarist has been at work off in the middle of the woods.

I am becoming quite familiar with stretches of wood I had not even entered a year ago. There's a spot where an old woods road--which will be obscure and hard to follow in a month or two, but at present is practically an airport runway peppered with stumps and mountain laurel scrub--passes between granite boulders the size of golf carts and small sheds. One of these huge rocks still bears the scars of an attempt by some long-gone farmer to split it. I cannot imagine why. To clear the slope for farming? So many other rocks remain, it hardly seems worth the trouble. To obtain building stone? Surely there are rocks as useful downslope, nearer to whatever needed rock. It remains a mystery to me--and a landmark.

Today I took the faint tracing of a deer track that continues when the woods road fades away all the way down to the flat and shadowed valley at its foot, a grassy space of interlacing streams, quiet and secret-seeming (though I have seen the tracks of other hikers there). It rests between two ridges of wooded hillside, and today for the first time I made my way up the steep slope across the farthest stream, past stands of mature beech and oak, as well as the everpresent hemlock.

Over the crest of the hill, I saw the sky. Seeking further, I glimpsed two houses through the trees, and a little ways from both, a fenced-in hillside pasture. The ground fell away steeply from the little gate at the top of the pasture, and the view was astonishing--waves of bruise-purple wooded hills, punctuated by the taller, greener spikes of white pines, and beyond those, the startling blue of the Mt. Holyoke range of hills, far away against the eastern sky. A deeper shade of blue may have marked the Connecticut River, winding past the mountains.

The sun was at my back, and I could see, far away across the valley, white spires of churches, and down the hill from me, the occasional flash of sun-glare, caught by a passing car at the road at the bottom of the hill. No sound rose up to me from where I sat, however, and the little farm whose pasture it was looked like a toy farm, almost to pretty to be real.

I have not been so startled by the beauty of a view since I left Vermont. Both the height and the slope of that pasture reminded me of Vermont.

I sat for several minutes, letting the sweat of my scramble up the slope cool, appreciating the faint scent of woodsmoke on the wind, and hearing alternately the rush of wind through hemlocks, and the negotiations of a pair of chickadees.

On the way back, I missed my deer track, but I had no fear of getting lost. I knew where I was, if not well enough to be sure of avoiding inconvenient thickets and streams, well enough to be sure of striking my trail before very long. And indeed, I did, but not before I learned a little more of my woods by heart.

I thought, before we bought this house and moved here, how much I would like the chance to live in the woods again, and know again as I did once as a child how every fold of the land looked and felt at every season of the year. I think so still, and I notice how much more of the world around me I can track consciously than I could as a child. Now, as I walk in the woods, I can identify species of leaves on the ground, different animals' droppings, tracks, and signs, and a little of the geology and history that is written on the landscape that I see. I may guess which stumps are oak, and which are hemlock, and I have theories about what may have caused a scar on a tree trunk, or the odd shape of a pine.

But there is another, deeper, wordless kind of knowing of the land, and that I had when I was young, as the deer have it still. That is the kind of knowing I am seeking for--the kind of knowing that runs deeper than words, that recognizes the beloved even in the dark, by touch, by smell, by unconscious bonds of relational knowing.

I think it will take a lifetime to properly learn even this one small New England forest.

I'm grateful for the chance to begin.

Things I Need

2011-03-30T21:03:00.001-04:00

Things I am in need of, to restore my spirit:

Solitude. Lots of it.
Mornings (plural!) of sunlight, coffee and home.
Meeting for worship, and an encounter there with God.
The smell of an old book.
Baking bread and hanging laundry in the sun.
The sound of birdsong.
Rushing water.
The smell of clean earth, and the living light of the forest.
The sight of a deer through trees, a hawk in the sky, and an indignant red squirrel, tail thrashing at my impertinence.

(Soon. Please, Lady, soon.)

Photo: Jarle Nystuen

Paperclips

2011-02-24T11:04:00.006-05:00

I worked as a therapist specializing in the treatment of survivors of trauma--mainly poor women--for about twenty years. And I am seven years into a career of similar length, working as a high school English teacher in a small and chronically underfunded high school in the foothills of the Berkshires.

Both of these careers, and my life in religion, evince a certain level of idealism. I won't bother to recite the ways that each career has involved hard work and, at times, a degree of selflessness and certainly empathy, because I think most people know that, and I'm not really interested in glamorizing a choice to "make a difference." These are the jobs I have felt led to do in the world, and it is a nice thing that they do seem to have been lines of work that have some direct impact on making people's lives a bit better, at least some of the time.

What I think is less obvious is the way that, like all meaningful work in the world, they involve an awful lot of attention to seemingly trivial, energy-sucking, ordinary real-world details. Taking notes. Returning phone calls. Paying bills. Organizing filing, grading homework, keeping a seating chart, and making sure to have enough pencils and worksheets on hand each day.

One Red Paperclip; Kyle Macdonald

This is what I think of as the paperclips of my life. And no matter how much meaning and purpose anyone tries to build into their life, they will never really make a difference anywhere unless they are handling paperclips.

I'm thinking about this today because, like many Quakers, I am examining the tension between faith and works. Now, Quakers, as most people know, set quite a store on being active in the world. We are told to

Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you.

We are to let our lives preach, by living out the values (sometimes summed up by Liberal Quakers as Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, and Equality, or "SPICE") we hold.

As a client of mine once said, speaking of her own work against domestic violence in the aftermath of her daughter's murder, "Whenever I go to a vigil or a protest or anything like that, there they are--those Quaker people. Who are they? They're always there!"

Quakers have a habit of showing up, out of all proportion to our numbers.

On the other hand, Quakers also counsel each other to "test our leadings" and not "outrun our guide," meaning to wait for Spirit to prompt us into our work. Perhaps one reason Quakers show up and continue to show up for work in the world against violence or injustice is the care we counsel one another to take to keep our work rooted in Spirit, not in ego.

How many of us have seen the phenomenon of the angry activist, feeling so isolated from a society that can seem indifferent to crying needs in the world that they have gotten into the habit, not of persuading others toward change, but ranting at others about their inability to change? Who, rather than being fed by their work, are consumed by it, leaving a burned-out shell in place of their-once committed selves? Anger wins few converts, and rage and cynicism are lousy fuel for struggles that can take decades.

This, in part, is the reason Quakers work to keep their witness rooted in the inward stirrings of Spirit. (In part. In larger part, this is because the purpose of Quaker activism is faithfulness to Spirit, not effectiveness in changing the world, however deeply we do want the world to change.)

This is the theory, at least. In reality, there is a constant sense of tension, as some Quakers are drawn more toward outward activism and others, to holding a spiritual center for their communities, through eldering, deep listening (to God and to others) and prayer. Prayerful Quakers sometimes suspect activist Quakers of becoming secular and cut off from the deep well of Spirit that should water everything we do... and activist Quakers sometimes suspect prayerful Quakers of becoming quietist, or worse, self-indulgent navel-gazers.

Both of those fears are of stereotypes, but there is just enough truth in the stereotypes to fuel tension. And some individual Friends, and some meetings of Friends, do conform closely enough to one or the other stereotypes to make us all worry, sometimes in a pretty counterproductive way.

I worry a lot... about myself, not about Friends as a whole, so much. I understand, in theory, that I need to be both active and outward in living out a witness in the world, and that I need to simplify my life and carve out "times of retirement" as the old-time Quakers would have said, to become still, center down, and really listen for that Light to guide me.

I'm not so sure I'm very good at either of those things, but I know I worry more that I am complacent--no, lazy. Sedentary, a home-body. Does Spirit need a crow bar to so much as get me out my front door? Do I refuse to even hear leadings, simply because I'm tired, or it's cold outside, or I don't want to get back into the car at the end of a day of work? I love to go to meeting. I love to center down, feel the Spirit close to me, like silk on my skin, sunlight on my upturned face... but is that just another form of spiritual sightseeing, New Age bliss?

"Am I doing enough?" I wonder.

Or is it possible that "Am I doing enough?" is the wrong question? Should I be asking, "Am I listening? Am I being faithful?" and releasing the questions about enough and not-enough, lazy or not-lazy, effective or not-effective.

Am I, perhaps, doing just what I am supposed to be doing? Is it enough (that word again!) to try to teach fifteen year olds something about compassion and listening and a delight in the written word--under the pretense of teaching grammar and vocabulary and Shakespeare--while trying to live a life that is inwardly as well as outwardly consistent with the Spirit of Peace I feel in meeting?

Is my end-of-day, end-of-semester, end-of-school-year exhaustion from grading essays, running off photocopies, not shouting at the provocative teens and listening to the lonely ones perhaps spiritual work after all?

Are my paperclips mere distractions, or are they the shape the Work actually takes in my life?

Quakers set a high bar for action in the world. I know Quakers who have helped bring clean water to villages in Cambodia and Kenya, who spend many of their weekends in prisons teaching alternatives to violence, teach traumatized survivors of African genocides to become trauma counselors themselves, or who carry a message of forgiveness and compassion in the aftermath of the murders of their own family members.

I know Quakers who are in prisons themselves for their non-violent resistance to torture and war, and who have risked their lives to bring food to hungry people in war zones. And these are not men and women with trust funds who do this as a hobby, and they are often men and women who must hold down other, paying work (as I do) in addition to their witness in the world. They, too, must often be tired. Perhaps they, too, are reluctant to leave their homes behind, get in a car, board a plane, be hot, be cold, be inconvenienced--let alone have cause to be afraid or alone.

One of my Quaker heroes is Eden Grace. Eden Grace is what, in the old days, would have been called a missionary--and she is fully aware of, and struggles to rise above the the reasons for the negative implications of that word. Her job is not converting anyone to a religion. Indeed, her job is one that, were it not for the setting of her work, might be considered to be a fairly prosaic one, in the world of human services: she is a hospital administrator.

She's a hospital administrator for some chronically underfunded hospitals in Kenya, at the heart of an AIDS crisis. Which is kind of cool, and definitely takes a kind of courage--just the act of uprooting your family, your husband and your two kids, and flying halfway around the world to live takes that. But I'm sure the job itself involves all the minutiae--the paperclips--of administrative jobs anywhere. Checking the books. Figuring out how to meet payroll. Anticipating what resources will be needed--staffing, supplies, medicines, and so on. I suspect that, 90% of the time, Eden's work is hard to tell from similar work anywhere in the world. She just happened to have the right set of skills, and the leading, at a time when this program needed her to do this job, and so she is doing it. That is not why Eden is my hero.

The reason Eden is my hero is because of one story she tells of one day, when she was at work in her office at the hospital. She was, as it happened, going over payroll, trying to figure out some way to make the limited resources of the hospital stretch enough to meet it, when she happened to glance out of the window.

Now, in Kenya as in much of the developing world, many small things we take for granted are simply not there, by way of infrastructure. Most Kenyans dispose of their waste, not by sending it to lined landfills, but in trash pits, where they burn their refuse. This hospital had such a trash pit; waste from the hospital, including medical waste, is burned on premises.

Eden looked out her window and saw the hard-working hospital custodian at work at the trash pit, burning their waste, compacting it and stamping it down where it needed to go.

In his bare feet.

Remember, this is an AIDS hospital. (Think, needles. Think, sharps. Think, HIV.)

And, of course, her heart fell. Because there he was, the living, human, individual illustration of the equation she had in front of her on a spreadsheet: as she struggled to find a way to meet payroll at all, there stood a man whose life was literally endangered by her inability to pay him a wage sufficient for him to afford a pair of boots.

She did buy him a pair of boots. That is not, however, the point.

The takeaway for me is something about those goddamn energy-sucking, time-eating, heart-breaking paperclips: the spreadsheets and budgets and photocopies and worksheets of our world.

They matter. Matter in a life and death kind of a way, actually, even though it never, ever feels like it.

From the outside, a lot of the things Quakers do, from going to prison for non-violent resistance actions, to bringing clean water to a rural village in Cambodia, look dramatic and sweeping and grand.

But up close, I'm willing to bet it's almost all paperclips, every single day.

And if we are looking to a sense of making a difference in a sweeping and grand kind of a way, for confirmation that we're Doing It Right, we're going to blow it. Because it's in the details of faithfulness, those everlasting paperclip details of any significant work, that most of what we do really gets accomplished... whether in Kenya, or in small schools in New England.

It doesn't answer the question, "Am I being faithful?" to notice this. But it is one important way for me to stay sane. In any meaningful work in the world, the second-by-second willingness to attend to prosaic details probably matters as much or more than any grand sense of leading, or of purpose. Yeah, we need those, too, and we need to listen for them when they come.

But then comes the carrying it out. In actions that are small, patient, and often tiring. Focusing on the small is also part of the job; it doesn't mean we're doing it wrong.

Peter on Tending Both Wells

2011-02-22T22:28:00.004-05:00

Cat has been involved lately with a spiritual accountability group through our Quaker meeting. The idea is that small groups of Friends meet and talk on a regular basis to help each other stay fresh and focused in their spiritual lives. It got me wondering, what would “spiritual accountability” (or “spiritual faithfulness” to use a term I like better) mean in a Pagan context?

I have no desire to be part of a spiritual accountability group in a Quaker context. I think I do a pretty good job of holding and living out my Quaker values. I listen for God. I look for the integrity in other people. I hold myself low down to the Truth. I stay rooted in experience. I participate fully and deeply in corporate discernment. And I know when I need to lay things down to simplify my life, and one of the first things I would lay down, if I had one, would be a spiritual accountability group.

But I am not as good a Pagan as I am a Quaker. Spiritual faithfulness as a Pagan would mean…

Remembering always the sacredness and the energy of the Earth, and never straying very far from that connection.
Checking in with my Gods and staying connected with Them. Being open, not just to the Transcendent Spirit, but also to the very personal and intimate relationships with my Patron Deities. Remembering to listen for the ways They love us, support us, challenge us, kick us in the ass, and goad us to become more than we already are.
Maintaining some sort of regular magickal practice, whether it be Tarot or trance journey or spellcasting or whatever. Something that keeps the psychic centers of my brain pried open so that when I return to Quaker meeting, I can hear the silence better and feel the presence of Spirit covering the meeting.

Quaker readers and Pagan readers will both be confused by my talking about the Pagan Gods and the Holy Spirit in practically the same breath, but over the years of having a dual faith I have grown comfortable with using both sets of vocabulary without bothering to stop and add qualifiers to either one. God and the Gods are both manifestations of the Divine, perhaps at different focal lengths, or different levels of the Kabalistic tree. Both sets of images are indispensable to my spiritual life. But my practice of the worship of the Old Gods has withered considerably over the past decade, and along with it, a too much of the juiciness of my Quaker worship has leeched away. The two practices are not in competition for me; they complement one another. Pagan ritual opens me up to the movement of the Holy Spirit, and Quaker worship deepens and makes whole my relationship with the Old Gods. Both suffer if I neglect either one.

I remember a time at a Pagan gathering a few years ago when I was thinking, wow, it’s a full moon and I’m here at this gathering and there’s a ford in a stream that I have to cross every time I go to my tent. Wouldn’t it be cool to take my sterling silver athame and consecrate it in that ford under the full moon? And deciding, no, I’m too tired and it’s late and it’s dark and it would be too much trouble right before going to bed. And then discovering that I had lost my athame, that it had fallen out of its scabbard somewhere between the dining hall and my tent. I went looking for it with a flashlight, muttering under my breath about what a pain in the ass it was. And found it—yes—glittering in the moonlight amidst the pebbles at the bottom of the water right in the middle of the ford.

The message I take from that (if you can reduce such an experience to a “message”) is that the magick will always be with me, that it will follow me whether I pay attention or not.

But the other message is that I should open my eyes and look, now and then, because there are magickal things to see.

Note: This post arose out of conversations with Cat about her recent post, "A Ministry of Brokenness."

A Ministry of Brokenness

2011-02-22T08:10:00.013-05:00

A few weeks ago, a Friend in my meeting approached me, and in the gentlest and tenderest way possible, suggested that some of what I had spoken in meeting for worship was less Spirit-led ministry and more a need to seek and receive support for personal burdens.*

I am still holding this Friend's concern close to me. For those who don't already know: messages in a Quaker meeting are, at least in theory, prompted not by our personal lives, however keenly felt, nor by our own thoughts and ideas, but by Spirit. Friends describe a variety of discernment tools for gauging which promptings are rooted in Spirit, and which are not, and, having attended a few "meetings for good ideas," I can say with no question that I prefer meeting for worship.

It is a painful thought, that I might have spoken from any root but a leading of Spirit. I am trying to respond neither with defensiveness and a hasty denial that I might do such thing, nor a wash of shame and an immediate acceptance that the Friend's suggestion must be correct simply because it was made at all.

The truth is, I do speak often in meeting for worship, and I do speak often from the sometimes painful edges of my personal experience. On the other hand, I'm confident that I do not generally turn to speaking in meeting as a substitute for other forms of support and discernment in my life--because I know I have good support for my emotional needs.

However, it is true that I speak easily and freely, and that I don't have a lot of shyness around public speaking to hold me back. What's more, I am not one of those Quakers who feels great reluctance to speak in meeting; when Spirit does move me to stand and share a message, I love the feeling of it--not for the attention I garner, but for the deep joy flowing through me with the nearness of Spirit.

That's not a problem... but it is reason to be wary of speaking too freely and too often. I may do that. I need to be open to that possibility, and go carefully.

However, I've heard it said that genuine vocal ministry will avoid the words I, me, or my. This, I think, is untrue.

It's a fact that the writings of early Quakers--including their memoirs--seem oddly impersonal by the standards of a modern reader, and I'm certainly not implying they were "doing it wrong." But perhaps the place of the Bible in the early Quaker movement, much more familiar than it is in modern Quaker meetings, allowed for personal identification with the characters of that book. In the stories of the struggles of figures like Job, or Moses, or Saul and David, I suspect early Quakers were able to see their own struggles reflected, and that what today seem like fleeting and indirect mentions of this passage or that would bring up whole stories and states of mind for early Friends.

I don't think that Biblical allusions accomplish that in modern meetings, even where all Friends present might be Christian.

Partly for that reason, I think that there is a place for the personal, the experiential, the subjective, and the real in vocal (or written) ministry today: for I, me, and my.

I know that such ministry is often what touches me the most, whether from a Friend in my meeting, or a Quaker or Pagan blogger, or a published mainstream author, like Anne Lamott. I respond best to spiritual witness that is personal, real, and vulnerable.

I am aware that I have made such messages something of a stock in trade, here as well as in worship. I've come to think of it, in fact, as a ministry of brokenness.

It's not that I'm reluctant to share my joys too, but I think that my best writing often comes out of my fear and pain--my weakness, and not my strength. I think I just sense the nearness of Spirit more clearly when I am afraid--and I think Spirit speaks through me best when I allow that sense of vulnerability and brokenness to be visible, not safely tucked away.

I often speak and write from that place.

A number of us at my meeting have begun exploring something going under the name "Spiritual Accountability Groups." The idea of spiritual accountability is that, in a religious practice that is grounded in community as well as in Spirit, we owe one another a duty to help each other discern how best to be faithful to that Spirit--to give and receive what corporate (in the old-time Quaker sense of "the body" of a church community, not in the newer sense of CEOs) help we can.

This is a touchy notion in a society as individualistic as that of modern America, even in the context of the Religious Society of Friends, a group with 350 years of practice in corporate spiritual techniques. It can be hard to speak in any language of things as inchoate and personal as leadings and gifts. (I know it is for me--far more than speaking of my struggles and faults!)

And it can be frightening to name these stirrings to others if we are not sure they know how to listen deeply before rushing to judgment.

This is tender work, and real pain could result either from an accountability group deteriorating into advice-giving, condemning, or even flattering or praising without really understanding a leading being shared.

On the part of a listener, there's a need to move slowly and listen deeply, and to stay low while we do so. And on the part of a sharer, there's a need to be courageous, and to speak the truth as clearly and with as little gloss as we can manage, holding all things up for clear-eyed examination together in Spirit.

I was speaking with another Quaker engaging in this process, who is beginning to feel the stirrings of a newly-named gift, and contemplating contacting others who are said to have similar gifts. She spoke of her fear and her hesitancy in doing so. (I very much had the sense that her naming her fear was not in order to be reassured, but for the same reason a Buddhist names a powerful emotional state: in order to see it clearly and not be controlled by it.)

We sat with that for a bit--I have no doubt she will make those calls if and when it is right for her to do so, for she is a remarkably courageous woman.

Then I commented that, when I feel what seems to me to be a similar fear, I write about it. And then I publish it on the World Wide Web.

She laughed, with a sudden, ringing laugh. It sounded like a laugh of startlement, even a laugh of recognition--though it might have been recognition of difference as much as similarity.

It is pretty funny, when I think about it.

But this is how I name my demons. I mean, once you've put them onto the Internet, for everyone who knows you, including your mother, to see, well, what is left to be afraid of after that, right?

I do not mean to imply that simply being publicly vulnerable is the same thing as vocal ministry. I am told--though it was well before my time--that there was a bit of a fad during the 1970's for using meeting for worship as if it was an encounter group, with lots of personal confessions that were... well, personal. TMI--too much information. I don't want to contribute to that, and I don't want to be guilty of that--though in truth, I don't want to be guilty of speaking what is not a Spirit-prompted message in worship ever, at all.

I want to be faithful.

And for me, part of what keeps me faithful is my willingness to be thoroughly visible, warts and all. I'm not advocating exhibitionism. Radical plainness of presence, maybe?

I'm not actually strong enough to allow the whole world to be my spiritual accountability committee. I know that: I flare up in instantaneous anger around some people, and there are ways of communicating I find so alienating that I'm almost unable to listen beneath them to the heart of the person who is using them.

But allowing the world to step forward and tell me when I put my foot wrong has been very useful to me in developing a kind of 24/7 Quaker practice. I would not say that I feel the Presence of the Light of Peace every minute of every day, nor anything like it. But I do feel it a lot, and especially when I'm writing.

That doesn't make everything I write a message. But my willingness to be open and vulnerable, and my sense of the nearness of Spirit as I write... does make some of what I am writing here a kind of ministry.

Sometimes I do write about my brokenness and my struggles because I trust you, my readers, to help shine light on my dark places.

But also, very often, I write them because I know that not only is this what so often speaks to me in the words of others, but because I know that my words do often speak to others in that same way.

I know because you have told me so. But even more importantly, I also know because sometimes--not all the time, but sometimes--I can feel the weight of Spirit moving in my chest as I write. I feel an urgency that has nothing to do with the personal, despite the fact that what is personal is what my stories are couched in.

At those times, I can feel a kind of joy when the words leave my lips in meeting, or when I hit "publish" on my blog. It's like watching the flight of an arrow that has left the bow, and I don't want praise for it, or admiration, or envy. I just want that arrow to fly true.

Glenn Larson

There is a place in my work for caution, discernment, and self-questioning. And there is a place in that work for sudden laughter, lightness, and watching something that shines as it cuts through the sky.

*I should probably note that this Friend has a history of service on our Ministry and Worship committee--is, in fact, recognized for a kind of gift in eldering--and has also enough of a relationship with me that she could know of my longstanding concern for ministry, and that I would want her to speak to me as she did. Generally speaking, most liberal Quaker meetings have a committee which undertakes to provide feedback--"eldering"--where it is needed, and individual members are discouraged from approaching one another with even implied criticism of vocal ministry.

This was an example, in my opinion, of genuine and loving eldering. My Friend was faithful. I am attempting to be faithful, too, in really sifting and discerning her insights.

I do not, however, want to give the impression that "vigilante eldering" is in any way a good idea. This is sensitive work, only to be undertaken in great love and humility, and ideally, after discernment and prayer.

Chestnut House: Deepening Into Impurity

2011-02-19T17:20:00.001-05:00

My environmentalism is not perfect. It's damned important to me... but it's full of contradictions, errors, and changes in my understanding.

A Pagan Is One Who

2011-02-03T12:37:00.000-05:00

A Pagan is one who, when you ask him what he holds most sacred, pauses a moment for thought. And then he answers, and when he answers, it is with a list.

It will be a long list.

Photo by Lin Kristensen

For This Year's Brighid Poetry Festival

2011-02-02T11:17:00.006-05:00

Let the candles flame
Soft against the cutting cold
Ice and mounting snow.

For the fire wakes
Soon, and leaps into the sky.
Ice will melt; sap, flow.

Today, sleet whispers
But deep within the branch and
root of Life lurks spring.

Chestnut House: Sinful Lettuce?

2011-01-25T18:04:00.002-05:00

I am a woman who loves to eat. This weekend, I had just about the same reaction to salad I used to have to Double Chocolate Mega Death Cake--oddly enough. Here's why.

(I still eat chocolate, by the way. You know... in case you had some to spare, and were wondering if I'd eat it.)

Put Some Woods On It

2011-01-18T11:06:00.002-05:00

I'm starting to feel like the character of the Greek father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding--the one who recommends Windex as a miracle cure.

"Put some Windex on it!" he recommends, for everything from warts to blemishes.

My drug of choice, however, is the woods.

It has snowed here recently--a lot. I'm not sure how much is on the ground at the moment... something between 12" and 24" at a guess. And I've been grateful for my mom's gift of a pair of snowshoes.

U.S. Forestry Service photograph

They are so much lighter and easier to use than the pair I once owned--can it really be twenty-five years ago?--that I was initially really surprised at how much I hurt after I had been snowshoeing for a few minutes. Not an all-over, out of shape kind of a hurt, but a very specific, hard pain, in my hip muscles, with a little answering pain in my knee tendons.

Now, I have been somewhat duck-footed all my life, but it has seemed to me that, in the last year or so, since I had severe problems with my lower back, it has been worse. No tracker could fail to pick out my footprints in a crowd--I am always the most splay-footed set of tracks around.

I have wondered if something about how my feet or hips align contributed to my back problems, or if my back problems caused my odd gait. Perhaps it is a bit of both, but it is certainly clear that as I have aged, my body has begun to twist and gnarl like an apple tree. This is disconcerting.

The pain in my hips was as tight as a charley-horse at first, and I had to stop often. After a while, however, it eased as the muscles warmed and stretched, and by the end of the walk, I was aware of a pleasant ache in my thighs and lower back--the muscles, not the injured disc.

And then, later that day, I thought I felt something different about how I was walking. I asked Peter to confirm it, and, indeed: my feet are pointing more directly ahead. Not only that, but my body feels straighter, freer.

Snow-shoeing is physical therapy, apparently.

Now, I could leave it at that, but that would be ungrateful, I think. Because I know I also noticed last year that not only was walking the best pain reliever for my herniated disc, but walking in the woods was far more helpful than walking on a sidewalk or indoors.

We could, no doubt, analyze the demands made on muscles and joints by both walking on the irregular surface of a woods path or by snowshoeing through deep snow.

But I think I'm going to allow some credit to the woods themselves. Is it so far-fetched, to think that the woods I love may love me back?

Well, maybe. But then, too, there is the whole notion of biophilia... the idea that being present with and participating in the natural world can bring us health benefits all on its own. I am not so sure it is unreasonable to believe that we can be in relationship with specific landscapes, nor that our love for them is unrequited.

Put some woods on that!

Bad Quaker Bible Blog: Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters

2011-01-16T07:59:00.002-05:00

I am an occasional contributor at the Bad Quaker Bible Blog, a site for the exploration of how Biblical passages can speak to us individually. For me, that book sometimes can speak with the voice of poetry, or through the lives of faithfulness it has inspired.

This set of reflections is on how the famous lines from Amos, alluded to by Dr. Martin Luther King in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, echoes through my struggles to uphold the rights of gays and lesbians, while also honoring a world where courage, justice, and prophetic understandings are needed in many places.

And In My Other Life, I Am a Tree-Hugging Dirt Worshipper...

2011-01-07T16:35:00.006-05:00

Over the past few years, I've become more and more concerned about the way I am part of a huge problem: the disrespect with which we humans treat the only home we'll ever have: the earth.

Starting this past June, first alone, and then very soon after joined by Peter, I've been attempting to live a life as free from plastic waste as I can. Plastic is not my only concern, but it was the initial spark--along with buying a house in the woods that I love better than chocolate itself--to make some increasingly important changes in my life.

I've written about that a bit here at Quaker Pagan Reflections, but for the most part, that story has been told elsewhere, at Chestnut House, a blog which is dedicated to following those changes specifically.

When I began the "plastic fast," I did blog about it here. But I've been keeping the two blogs separate, partly because not every post at Chestnut House is in keeping with what I've taken the mission of this blog to be (blogging "in the spirit of worship"), and partly because it has seemed to me that there may be those who are interested in the environmental information, but who are not interested in Peter's and my spiritually-oriented posts here.

The Chestnut House anti-plastic project and blog have taken more and more of my focus and thought this year. I think that's fine... but it has left this blog a bit empty at times. I've decided that it still makes sense to treat the two subjects separately, but, especially since the environmental concern really does seem to be rising from a spiritual root, I'm going to begin cross-posting the titles and a few photos from there over here.

If you look below, you'll see I began with December--though it might have been more logical to begin with our Six Month Check Up post, where I gave an update on our plastic use for the first six months of that project.

Feel free to check that out, if you are so inclined. Or, if you are not, I'll just say that I will make it clear in the titles and tags for these cross-posted entries which are Chestnut House specific... and to run only a link and a bare description, so you can decide whether you want to visit, or not.

Chestnut House: Ugly Carrots

2011-01-04T16:13:00.001-05:00

In which we learn to look beneath the surface of winter-stored crops.

Chestnut House: Our 1 lb, 3 oz. Holiday for Six

2011-01-01T16:09:00.004-05:00

In which we explore the anti-plastic greening of our family Yule week.

Chestnut House: The Learning Curve

2010-12-24T16:05:00.003-05:00

In which we explore our recent attempts to keep eating locally, now that winter is here.

Peter on the Minute of Sending Forth

2010-12-05T10:28:00.007-05:00

The annual Sessions of New England Yearly Meeting this year was unusual. The 350th anniversary of NEYM was declared a Jubilee year, and items of business were squeezed into very brief discussions or simply handed down from the clerks’ table in a “unity agenda” for approval without discussion, leaving the bulk of our time together free for “meetings to hear God’s call.”

The week ended with the drafting of a Minute of Sending Forth, which was an attempt to capture succinctly all of the currents of discernment and passion, despair and hope, which had been rising during the week. The minute included a brief statement that had been composed by one of the anchor groups—small groups of a dozen or so that had been meeting in between the gatherings of the entire body. This small, three-paragraph statement proved to be very controversial. It was prefaced with “noting that we as a body cannot claim all these words as our own” and followed by “with pain and regret and gratitude for their faithfulness ... we record that [half a dozen] Friends wish to stand aside from this minute.”

The controversy arose from the opening two sentences of the anchor group statement: “There is only one testimony, and it is the testimony to the transforming power of God. There is only one witness and it is the witness of the body of Christ.” In the context of a liberal Quaker body that included both Christ-centered and non-Christian Friends, it seemed wildly inappropriate to conclude our annual Sessions with a declaration that seemed to say that everyone in the room was Christian and that Christianity is the only true religion.

The clerks would not permit any wordsmithing in the language of the anchor group’s statement, and there was no time, at the end of the week, to compose a statement of our own that would reflect the leadings of the entire body. Their statement was simply cut-and-pasted in, making it look as if it were ours. The minute as adopted was especially painful because it came so close to capturing the essential truth: that we really are one body with one witness, and that in worshiping together, we really are all gathered under one Spirit.

Some Friends angrily stood aside. Enough others were so uneasy that the Minute of Sending Forth ended up saying more about our disunity than about our unity. Me…I kind of shrugged with a feeling of, Oh well, we blew it that time. We’ll do better in the future.

Months passed. Then, a couple of weeks ago, a f/Friend from the Boston area, who had also been at Sessions, was in town and stopped by to have dinner and spend the evening in conversation. Like me, he has a painful history with Fundamentalist Christianity. Like me, he has an appreciation for the universalism and diversity of liberal Friends. And as we were talking about the Minute of Sending Forth and about the anchor group statement, he said two things that got me thinking.

One was that Quakers (at least liberal Quakers) in using phrases like “only one witness and it is the witness of the body of Christ,” mean something very different than Southern Baptists would mean with the same phrase, and he was disappointed that people at Sessions had been unable to trust that the anchor group had been using the phrase in the Quaker sense.

The other was that he was disappointed that those first two sentences were the only part of the anchor group statement that anyone ever talked about. So much of worth later on in the statement was being ignored or completely missed.

Thinking about this, I realized I couldn’t remember a single word of the statement except for those first two sentences. The conversation that night led me to go back and look at it again, first transcribing it into my Lectio Divina notebook and then simply rereading it and sitting with it.

There is only one testimony, and it is the testimony to the transforming power of God. There is only one witness and it is the witness of the body of Christ. There are many pieces of work which will require the particular gifts, ministries, and passions of all of us, because the desire of God for healing and redemption of this blessed creation requires profound change.

We refute the lies of the present situation: the lie that causes movements for transformation to see each other as competitors; the lie that says that social action is spiritually shallow and spirituality is socially passive; the lie that says that war and destruction are inevitable and efforts for change are hopeless; the lie that says we can’t change the world until we have perfected ourselves.

We declare that with God’s help, we stand ready to be agents of transformatory witness to God’s promise. We pray for the wisdom to perceive the patterns of thought and behavior within ourselves which conform to the present darkness. We pray for the strength to take bold, prophetic and concrete action in the world. Some of that action will be local, some global, some individual, some corporate, some immediate, some long-term. For action which is rightly guided, we can trust that we have already the resources required for faithfulness. Use us Lord!

My first reaction to those opening sentences was to simply skip over them. (In fact, it was suggested on the floor of Sessions that the statement be included with the first two sentences removed—a suggestion that was summarily dismissed by the clerks’ table.)

I remember once hearing a Chinese physicist talk about how incredibly difficult it was to write a basic physics textbook in communist China, not because the physics was difficult, but because “you had to have Mao on every page.”

I remember in the weeks and months following 9/11, how antiwar activists wore red, white, and blue and used slogans like “Peace is patriotic,” not because patriotism was forefront on their minds just then, but because you simply couldn’t participate in the conversation about war and peace without first establishing that you loved America.

And I think about how Quakerism came into being in a time of religious wars and religious terrorism. Like patriotism after 9/11, Christianity in the 1600’s was simply a prerequisite to participating in the conversation. Religious freedom, freedom of conscience…these concepts might or might not apply to Puritans or Catholics or Dissenters, but to extend them to Jews or other unbelievers was unthinkable, much the way it was unthinkable for Americans in 2002 to identify with the struggles of Muslim societies to maintain their cultural and religious identities in the face of western globalization.

So my instinct, on trying to read the anchor group statement with an open mind, was to skip over Chairman Mao and go straight to the physics, so to speak.

It took a long time before I saw the elegant parallel structure within the statement. It begins by talking about spiritual/religious unity, and then it uses that to affirm the underlying unity in our various gifts, leadings, and actions. The first two sentences are not just a perfunctory acknowledgement of an obligatory creed. They matter, and if you can avoid choking on the word “Christ”—take the word to mean “Spirit-as-they-perceive-it”—then it is a beautiful and powerful statement.

For me, the parallel structure shows up better (and I am less likely to have a gag reflex to the Christocentrism) if the sentences and some of the clauses are simply reversed in order:

Use us Lord!

We can trust that we have already the resources required for faithfulness in action which is rightly guided. Some of that action will be local, some global, some individual, some corporate, some immediate, some long-term. We pray for the strength to take bold, prophetic and concrete action in the world. We pray for the wisdom to perceive the patterns of thought and behavior within ourselves which conform to the present darkness. We declare that with God’s help, we stand ready to be agents of transformatory witness to God’s promise.

We refute the lies of the present situation: the lie that says we can’t change the world until we have perfected ourselves; the lie that says that war and destruction are inevitable and efforts for change are hopeless; the lie that says that social action is spiritually shallow and spirituality is socially passive; the lie that causes movements for transformation to see each other as competitors.

There are many pieces of work which will require the particular gifts, ministries, and passions of all of us, because the desire of God for healing and redemption of this blessed creation requires profound change. There is only one witness and it is the witness of the body of Christ. There is only one testimony, and it is the testimony to the transforming power of God.

The anchor group seems to have been entirely faithful to their leadings in every word of their statement. But I cannot believe that they ever intended it to speak, as written, for the entire gathered body. If they had so intended, I think they would have had the discernment to use the word “Spirit” instead of “Christ,” knowing (as they surely must have) that the Spirit that covers us and gathers us together in worship is known by some of us as Christ and by others of us by other names, or by no name at all.

And Another Thing About Spiritual Authority...

2010-11-26T13:24:00.001-05:00

And another thing...

I remember my daughter's teenage years. You would not know it to meet her now--she's poised, charming, generous, clearly intelligent and lovely. But her teenage years were scary ones for us, her parents. (More than average, I think.)

I have a gift for guilt and worry, insecurity and obsessiveness. And I clearly remember when I realized that I just had to set that aside.

It didn't matter if it was all my fault, or not. It didn't matter if I was a terrible mother. It didn't matter if she was going to hate me or blame me or if I was going to hate or blame myself. The only thing that mattered, the only thing, was the question, what do I do now?

What am I supposed to do, what will be in any way helpful, now, today, to help my kid survive being an adolescent?

Spiritual authority is like that. It's about when you don't have the luxury of blaming yourself, or worrying about whether or not you're adequate or lovable. You have to set all that aside. Because, if you look, you can see it's stopped being about you at all.

It's not about you. It's about the Work you're being called to do.

You don't get to have insecurity or defensiveness or guilt. You don't get to let that even matter. Your job is to do the Work at hand, and trust that what you need will come to you when it's time.

12th Century Icon

There's this story I've heard Quakers tell. Maybe you've heard it, too: about when this guy Moses got his marching orders from a burning bush on a mountain, to get himself into Egypt and walk up to Pharaoh and get all up in his face and tell him, Let my people go.

Get it done, Moses.

Moses pointed out he had a speech impediment.

God essentially said, Hey, whatever. Take Aaron along to back you up. But it's on you, kid--Aaron is just the B side. Pack your bags, son--you've got a job to do.

And Moses went.

And that's what spiritual authority is.

But for me, it's also that thing in me that broke, the year I was most fearful for my child, and I understood that it wasn't about me any more.

Spiritual authority is what happens when the Work is bigger than we are, and when the only question left is, "How?"

Spiritual Authority

2010-11-25T10:44:00.002-05:00

About a month ago, near the end of meeting for worship, I felt something rising up in me and nudging me for attention.

Sometimes a leading is a deep, powerful, physical thing. When I was a teen, I used to go out sailing on a sailfish with a single piece of wood, a daggerboard, that was thrust through the heart of the little boat to act as its keel. In a strong wind, you could hear and feel that keel moaning and keening with the work it had to do, keeping the boat headed where the rudder directed it.

Some leadings are like that--almost unmistakable piercings of the heart that power us forward.

Others are lighter, gentler, and more subtle. At times I have thought of myself in worship as feeling like a cork, floating lightly and easily, able to respond to the lightest of touches, moving here or there at a mere breath. At such times, I may feel drawn to talk to this person or that, not even perhaps knowing why, just that it's what's right to do.

Those leadings are delicate nudges, mere taps on the shoulder by Spirit.

On this particular day, the nudge I was feeling was somewhere between those two extremes; closer to a tap than a piercing, but something that felt valid nonetheless.

One of our members, someone who might describe herself as a non-theist, had spoken that morning, on the sense of loss she feels since letting go of her belief in a personified deity. Her message resonated in me. Not only do I experience the power of Spirit in this Friend's vocal ministry on a regular basis, I feel that her concern for not labeling her experiences with words she is less than clear about is one that speaks to my own condition as I struggle to make sense of experiences framed in the language of two theologies. And I believe her integrity and her radical willingness to allow Spirit to take whatever shape it will (including even the possibility of no shape at all) is not a reflection of confusion among liberal Friends, but of a deep trust in the Light to find us and lead us.

I've long felt troubled (and sometimes annoyed) at the way many Quakers feel that the theological diversity among modern liberal Quakers is not rightly led. I feel like I have to dispute this because of the depth of worship I find among us, diverse as we may be, at least in the meeting I normally attend.

But I have heard from many sources the critique that modern liberal Quaker diversity is only possible only because of our silence--and that silence has become a form in its own right for us, and one that holds us safely back from hearing and being alienated by the extreme diversity of beliefs among us. And while I don't think that is true, I do think that it is easy to forget that the silence in waiting worship does not mandate perpetual silence on matters of spirit among us.

I think Quakers need to talk to one another more. And on that morning, I felt an urgency about having a conversation on that day, in the context of that particular gathering of Friends.

So I stood up when it was time for introductions and announcements and suggested a conversation outside for anyone who wanted to talk about what it was we were sensing together in the silence of our worship. After rise of meeting, I took a few chairs with me outside in the sun beneath a favorite tree, and little by little, Friends who wanted to join me in the conversation came out.

As things turned out, it was a good conversation, and I was glad I had felt the nudge to suggest it.

There was, however, a fly in the ointment. In at least one important way, it was a bad day for deep conversation.

Meeting for worship had run long that day--as it sometimes does--and it was the second Sunday of the month: meeting for business was looming fast.

I very much wanted to be in the business meeting, not only because I like following rules and being On Time in and of itself, but because my husband Peter is this year's recording clerk--and another friend is this year's clerk. And most of all, because meeting for business is often rich and deep.

So it was a somewhat hurried opportunity for us to connect with one another. And what's more, none of us happened to have a watch.

Just about the time I began to worry seriously about time, another friend came out to let us know that it was almost time for the business meeting to start, and to let us know she felt it was important for us to be there.

We wrapped up our conversation and went inside. And were late. Which is bad manners, and--much worse--disruptive to those attempting to center down in order to attend to business properly. This was stressful... but it still did not feel that we had been wrong to spend the time as we had.

It is the custom at Mt. Toby for the clerk to begin our meetings, after a period of silent worship together, with a piece of reflective writing or a set of queries for us to sit with; a period of worship sharing generally follows, before we move into that month's agenda.

As it happened, the excerpt for that month's meeting for business was from Bill Taber's The Mind of Christ: On Meeting for Business, and the query that followed it was, "What do I value in Meeting for Business? What challenges me?"

As I took my seat, the Friend who had let us know we were going to be late spoke out of the silence.

"The clerks in meeting for business have been given the task of holding the meeting, and it is important for us to be with them in their service. As people straggle in late, it is sometimes a challenge to see ourselves as a corporately discerning body joined together in worship."

She was talking about me. Not me alone... but, yeah. My actions had been a problem for the clerks, and for the meeting as a whole.

In the context, it was difficult not to feel stung, or tumble into feelings of shame. But I called my heart to heel, and centered down firmly. What the Friend had said was true, after all.

Was it possible I needed to approach her after meeting to see if she needed to speak to me directly? To see if I had offended her in a way I needed to make right?

Being stern with my heart, keeping it on a short tether, I decided that I could trust my Friend to let me know that directly; if she was offended with me and needed me to make something right, she would say so.

Did I have anything to say to her?

Yes, I decided. I did want to thank her for calling us in to meeting for business when she did. I was glad she'd done that. I did not feel that our holding the conversation had been wrong... but I was glad someone had kept an eye out for the time and for us, even if the reminder of it was uncomfortable.

I centered down and gave my attention to the meeting for business.

At the end of the meeting, I sought my friend out. I did thank her, and she spoke of how keenly she'd felt a sense of the clerks struggling with the way our meeting as a whole was straggling in that week. While she recognized the value in what we were doing, her heart and her empathy were with the clerks, who are both new and both carrying a heavy weight on our behalf. (She said it much better than that, by the way.)

And she was right.

Another Friend, who had been outside with me, said that she had felt stung by the words spoken in meeting for business--scolded.

And she was truthful.

Finally, I shared that I had been aware of the awkwardness of the timing, but that I'd felt a nudge that I had believed was rooted in Spirit.

I believed, in other words, that I had been faithful.

Each of us had just spoken truthfully and painfully to the others.

And each of us could see and acknowledge that we each had been attempting to live up to the Light we'd been given in our small, individual way. While we felt tender, and could easily have slipped into either self-righteousness, or anger, or shame, none of us did so.

Instead, we'd listened, not just to one another, but for "that of God" within one another. And we'd heard each other.

Sometimes a community is like a large and complicated family, and we are called to serve different parts of it in different ways. And just as in an ordinary family, there are awkward bits. Sometimes the family car is late getting home to give Meagan a ride to softball because Mom's still at the parent-teacher conference for John; sometimes Dad is late to Terry's concert because he had to bind up William's skinned knee.

Sometimes the awkward bits are avoidable. Sometimes they aren't. But what a loving spiritual community, seeking Unity in Spirit, can do for one another is to hold each others' bumps and bruises compassionately and proceed with trust in each other.

Trust and courage have to bridge the rough places.

Trust and courage of a particular kind; as recently as six months ago, I don't think I'd have had what I needed to listen and speak as plainly and non-defensively as I did.

What I needed to know is this: when you are busy doing the work that has been put in your hand by Spirit, you have all the authority you need. You owe nobody apology, and you do not need to defend yourself or your actions; you can trust the work and the truth of what you are doing to justify themselves to those who care to know about it.

I am beginning to understand that when we do the work of Spirit--not the work we appoint ourselves to in the name of Spirit, but that which we have been asked to take up by the Light itself--we stand in a place of simplicity and strength. We have all the authority we will ever need.

Gordana Adamovic-Mladenovic

Which is pretty cool.

Afterward: And Another Thing About Spiritual Authority...

On Hunting

2010-11-15T12:11:00.006-05:00

On Saturday morning, Peter and I put on our blaze orange vests, and took a walk together in the woods behind our house.

There's an old woods road back there, maintained by the local snow mobile club, and used by the vocational school's forestry program, as well as various hikers and hunters. Since bear season is in progress now, I often see a jeep parked at the top of the V.A. Center's access road, the most common point of entry. There's a muddy spot there made by the action of tires coming and going, but otherwise, the road is paved with leaves, generally in a loose, ruffled layer.

When we were out this morning, however, we noted that the leaves were flattened--clearly there had been vehicles driving farther along the road than is normally the case.

There were other signs to be read in the road, too. I'd told Peter of a recent discovery, of a scenic outlook off a spur trail, an abandoned logging road that branched away from the main woods road to the east, and how I'd found many, many disturbed areas in the leaves. At first I had wondered if it was the deer; I'd been surprised last winter to discover how like rock stars wrecking a five-star hotel a group of deer could be, rummaging down through snow to churn up layers of (presumably warmer) leaves beneath.

But it is only November, and the weather has been mild. There is no snow, and the rut has not yet properly even begun. Deer yarding up made no sense to me. And yet, there was such extensive disturbance among the leaves.

I had noticed that in many of the disturbed places, the leaves had been raked back to expose the bottommost layer of leaves--the ones that, blanched and fragile, are perhaps one winter away from crumbling entirely into the black soil that lies beneath them. And I noticed that in many of those places, I could see the small, deep holes of burrowing insects--rooting for food in the leaf mulch in just the way you can nearly always find a few squirming bugs under an overturned log or stone.

Was the disturbance the work of an animal, hunting for grubs and insects to eat?

Could the animal possibly be a bear? Eating grubs seemed more in character for a porcupine or a skunk, but bears are surely working to pack on all the pounds they can, this late in the fall. And there were an awful lot of churned-up leaves.

That morning, walking along the woods road, we found more areas of disturbance. Here, however, the leaves had been scraped back to bare earth. There were marks that seemed suggestive of claws, but the road is hard, and amid the leaf litter and stalks of weeds, it was hard to be sure of that.

Until we found one area where the leaves had been raked away over moister earth than usual, and there definitely did seem to be claw marks there.

What's more, over the claw marks, we were able just to make out the faintest hint of a human boot heel. And in a dozen yards more, rounding the bend to where my spur trail left the road, we saw a big shiny SUV, parked across the trailhead.

I was annoyed. I was annoyed to find an SUV parked at the trail I'd hoped to take to my scenic outlook, which seemed both less safe and less bucolic with a hunter close by. And it seemed safe to presume he was close by. Why drive a car so deep into the woods unless you were averse to walking through them?

Which also annoyed me. Like a lot of liberals, I have mixed feelings around hunting. Though I'm not a vegetarian, I do have problems with eating the meat of mammals. My personal standard is "don't eat it if you wouldn't be able to kill it," and it isn't entirely a lack of skill that would prevent me from killing a mammal. Nor is it Bambi-propaganda; the more time I spend around animals, the more clearly I see that there intelligence and emotion is not so different from my own.

A clam I can kill without a qualm. I've dissected their nervous system--they haven't got anything you could really call a brain. Fish? I've killed fish before. More dying goldfish than fresh-caught perch or trout, but I've never seen much sign of emotion in the eyes of a fish. Perhaps it's speciesist of me, but there it is; I got no issue with killing a fish. Birds? I get a little hinky about birds, which can be so much more intelligent than we give them credit for. But it's getting so much harder to find sources of fish I can be sure are not endangered or harvested in ways that endanger other species that I've almost given up eating fish, and I'm not a skillful enough cook to do without meat altogether. So I suffer some pangs of... something, conscience or aesthetics--it's hard to tell--but I do eat chicken and turkey from time to time. And I do believe I could take their lives, if I had training to do it skillfully and well.

Not the big stuff, though. Not deer. Not cows. Not bears. (I am told by local hunters that the bears taken in hunting season here do, in fact, get eaten, for the most part. And do not taste like chicken--more like pork.)

But that's just me.

I recognize that there has been a long and interwoven dance of farmer and livestock, hunter and prey, involving my species for a very long time. I recognize, too, that it does not harm the environment to hunt within the limits set by law, and that hunters can be among the most passionate of environmentalists. So I try to do without an attitude around hunting. A lot of families around here engage in it, and a lot of my students, of both genders. And certainly, in comparison with the horrible conditions of factory farming for meat, and the appalling environmental toll of huge commercial feedlot operations, hunting for meat is among the kindest things for the earth or for animals that human beings engage in in their quest for food.

I know this. But, as I say, I have mixed feelings. The woods fill up with people firing guns, if nothing else. And I really never want to find myself on the receiving end of a bullet fired stupidly in my woods.

The SUV, though. That really ticked me off.

You're coming into the woods to take a life, I thought. And you can't even get out of the damn car and smell the air first? Why not just stay home, eat nachos, and play a video game about hunting?

A friend pointed out to me that a black bear can weigh as much as 600 pounds. And it's gonna be tough to move that much body back to civilization if the car is very far away. Which is true enough, I suppose. But, hell, comes a point when you might just as well bring your ATV, doesn't it? It just grated.

That was in the morning.

That afternoon, about an hour before sunset, I hiked out into the woods again, following the deer trails this time.

I stopped several times, listening to the sounds of the woods. The leaves are drifted so deep right now that even a squirrel hopping across it sounds very loud. I'm not sure that a bear in the woods would make as much sound as a squirrel does, come to think of it.

I was pretty sure the noises I was hearing were from squirrels. But I kept coming across churned up patches of leaves. And I had seen a bear not so very far away from where I was, not too long ago.

It occurred to me more than once that I find bear hunters more frightening than bears. A bear hunter is much more likely to harm me accidentally, after all. A bear is mostly likely to ignore me, and walk away, should we chance to meet. And it is unlikely to kill me if I forget to wear orange.

Neither is the hunter. Normally. Most hunters. But there have definitely been more New Englanders killed by hunters than by bears, and I can't help but think about that when I'm out for a walk in fall.

I did not see a bear today. I did reach the place where the SUV had been parked, and either that was a surrealistically tidy hunter, or he did not take a bear out of the woods with him today.

I did not see signs of the hunter down the side trail where I'd found the earlier patches of disturbed leaves. But I did see, in several places, more signs of bears: unmistakable claw marks this time, in the lowest, palest strata of fallen leaves.

The bears are here. They just stayed safe from whoever was seeking their lives this morning.

I'd be lying if I said I minded.

November

2010-11-11T21:04:00.000-05:00

I've been home the last two days, yesterday on family business, and today because it is a school holiday.

I got to make soup, and bake a cake to freeze in slices for snacks next week, and tend my indoor garden. And the day was mild and sunny, and I woke up very early, so I was able to wash a week's worth of laundry and hang it outside to dry one last time.

My dog is always very happy when I am drying laundry outside. He gallops alongside me as I walk across the yard to the clothesline, and lolls about munching the grass--or rolling in it--as I clip socks and tee shirts onto the line.

Sometimes we stop together and peer overhead, or into the woods, at mysterious rustling animals or the wild cold calling of geese passing by.

Female wild turkeys

There is a quiet to November. After the flurry and rush of September and October, November's hush is a surprise and a relief. Parent conferences, in-service days, school holidays and Thanksgiving punctuate the school year, but it's more than that. I see it on my drive to school and back each day. The woods, so passionately on fire just days ago are faded now to shades of dun and brown and gray. Brown wild turkeys graze golden stubble in fields of deep, turned earth, and grass fades pale under frost.

The year has finished its long, long out-breath, and is resting, gathering for the in breath at midwinter and on into spring. A Friend said as much at Quaker meeting this week, but I had been thinking the same before he spoke. We gained an hour, setting all our clocks back in time, and it has been strange how that hour has affected us all. Awake now, with just that one more hour's rest, we see how weary we've become. We feel the need for quiet in our bones, and in the weak cheer of the midday sun.

November is the rest measure in the music, the quiet of the year. Through tree-trunks stripped of leaves and color, I see the embers of the year lying on the hearth of the horizon.

I love November, as the weary love to rest. I love November, the pause between the breaths.

Remorselessly

2010-10-29T18:22:00.002-04:00

One trait I've always had is "buyer's remorse": that tendency in human nature to regret commitments made, and to wonder if we haven't made a terrible mistake as soon as a decision is irrevocable.

For instance, when I brought home Morgan, our 185 pound English mastiff and the dog of a lifetime, I spent at least a week fending off a sinking feeling that I had ruined my life (and this dog's), and that it would never, ever work out! It did--Morgan eventually joined me in my therapy practice, working with me and with my trauma-survivor clients on a daily basis. She was enormous, she slobbered, but she could sense a painful emotion a mile away, and loved nothing better than to rest her head on someone's knee and look up at them with the big, sincere gaze of a mastiff, telling them without words that she would never have treated them that way.

Of course, there is a difference between a dog, a living, breathing animal who can give and receive love, and stuff. I have a long and bitter history around buying stuff--I don't like to.

So ubiquitous has been the experience of buyer's remorse that I have learned to question closely every craving I have, every keen desire for yet another Thing. Shoes, cars, books, computers, houseplants and appliances... whatever the Thing is that I'm contemplating bringing into my world, I stare at the decision for as long as I can, fending off purchases as long as possible.

I ask myself, endlessly, "If you get this nifty new Thing, six months from now, will your life be any better? When the money is spent and the novelty has worn off, will this actually make you any happier?"

For me, at least, when I'm honest with myself the answer almost always turns out to be "no." And then I'm left holding my remorse. (And maybe a big bill.)

We Americans love our cars. And I admit it--I drive mine until they are unreliable hulks, real beaters, and when I get one that I can be pretty sure won't break down and strand me on the side of the road--maybe even one that has AC can actually cools the car--I like it. I like riding around in a new car as much as the next person.

At least, on the day I bring it home.

But six weeks later, stuck in traffic or driving home after working late? My satisfaction in life is no higher with the new car than it was with the old beater. (Though admittedly higher than it would be stuck at the side of the road.)

It's that way with almost everything: new outfits, faster computers, even (though I'm ashamed to admit it) the new book purchases I convince myself I can't live without. Six months later, I might as well have tossed my money in a well for all the satisfaction it has given me. And I'd very much better have saved it, or given it away.

Stuff doesn't make me very happy, at least, not for very long.

But.

I asked myself these same questions when we were looking at buying our house two years ago. I asked myself if it would really make any difference to me, say, on a day when I was home with the flu, or came home late and weary... if on a steamy August afternoon or a frozen November morning, it would actually make the least difference to how I feel to be alive, knowing that there were woods behind the house, or that it was built in the mid 19th century, or had a garden outside.

I worried I might find it did not.

I was wrong.

I love living in the country. I love my commute, past the small town beach where I swim in the summers, under the red pines that stride in even rows back to the chaotic jumble of the real woods. I love hearing geese honking overhead as I pin my laundry onto the clothesline each week. I love my multi-layered view from the dining room window: phosphorescent-green lettuce growing on the windowsill flaming against the deep rose color of an autumn shrub just outside, hemlock tree jutting upwards in the middle distance, and behind it, down the hill, the vehemence of blazing oak and maple leaves catching the last of the afternoon sun.

I love my sloping ceilings; I love the deep blackness of the sky overhead at night, and the stars that are farther and cooler than they seem in the city. I love watching "my" oaks reemerge from the cluttered foreground of swamp maples and poplars as the lesser trees shed their leaves, and I love having the ability to plant and love and care for seedling trees of my own.

Even last winter, when pain from my back would not let me sleep, I loved to pace from room to room, chilled with night, waiting the emerging gray of morning, with the line of pine trees marking out the old boundary to this property. Even as I have worked long and hard hours this fall, with scarce the energy to climb my stairs to bed at night, never mind hike in the woods I love, I have been glad.

It may have taken the economic meltdown of 2008 to make it clear to everyone: a house is not necessarily a good investment. What goes up can indeed go down.

But love lasts. I am in love with my home; I am in love with the sweet autumn hills of New England. And I'm so glad I did not allow thoughts of caution or thrift or a faux-simplicity (for real simplicity is about clearing our lives of clutter in order to grow closer to Spirit, and living here has done that for me) to turn us aside from buying this house.

I am remorselessly grateful to be home.

Bear Magic

2010-10-09T17:09:00.000-04:00

I just came back from a walk in our woods, and for the first time, I have seen a bear.

Oh, I've seen cubs before, even before we moved out of downtown. As woods have grown up around the small cities in Western Massachusetts, bears have found places to live that are awkwardly close to humans; about a year ago, for instance, the wildlife police had to remove a mother bear with cubs who had made a den in a drainage culvert in the heart of a thickly settled neighborhood. We even had a treed bear in a sidewalk oak tree just off Main Street a few years back. That took some pretty skillful work to remove the bear cub without killing him.

And it's well known that only a fool leaves a bird feeder in place once the snow starts to melt. Bears love bird feeders. And garbage, so it's a good idea to plan accordingly, especially if you have dogs or small children.

All that is common sense. So, yeah, I've seen bears before, and I've known about bears for years.

But it's not the same.

I was out hiking the trails behind our house, admiring the views just starting to emerge where the leaves are thinning to a scrim of green and gold at the crest of the ridge, and thinking to myself, "I know there are bears in these woods. I wonder why I have never seen one?"

I've seen so many deer that I've almost become blase about it. (Almost. There is something so regal about a deer, particularly with antlers, that I can't imagine ever taking them truly for granted.) I see turkey, wild geese, red-tailed hawks, red squirrels... all kinds of critters. But not--until today--a bear.

I'd reached the place at the top of a steep scramble through dense hemlock trees--I was meditating on the place of hemlocks and chestnuts in New England forests, past and future, and wondering how the few deciduous trees would respond if woolly adelgids remove the hemlocks from slopes like the one I was on--when I turned onto a sunny bit of path, glanced up, and saw the bear. Fully grown, large, alone. A male?

I had been singing, quietly, as I walked. When I saw the bear, I froze for an instant, the hairs on the back of my neck riffling in the breeze... and then raised my voice a bit louder in song.

(It was a nicely appropriate song. One of my own, with very few words, in a minor key but with an upbeat tempo, about turning the Wheel of the Year. Suitable to the occasion of encountering a bear feasting in preparation for winter, I thought.)

The bear, unconcerned, continued on his way upslope, into a beautiful stretch of white pines and oaks behind barbed wire, posted against trespassers. Bears, of course, pay no attention to such signs.

I admired the smoothness of his walk, the beauty of his shape, for just a moment more, then bowed, called out a blessing, and turned back and returned along the same trail I had been following.

I'm not a very theological Pagan. I take my gods and my spirits as I find them, and they do not necessarily have a place in any historical pantheon. There is the Dark Lady of Vernal Pools, for instance, whom I sometimes sense at the bottoms of muddy spring puddles and streams. There is the spirit of deer and forest and time, whom I call by the name Herne, though that is almost certainly not his name. There's Rosie, the Lady who spins at the root of a great tree in a vast cavern of dreams...

And there are the elder brothers and sisters, the deer, the oaks... the bears.

All things, in their right places, are filled with magic, with numen. And today, I got to see my elder brother, the bear, in his home. It was not surprising.

But it was very, very good.

The Orchard and the Hedge

2010-09-22T22:05:00.000-04:00

Last April, as I may have mentioned, Peter and I planted a sort of mini-orchard of eight semi-dwarf apple trees.

Our new old house sits on a main artery. Behind the house are literally hundreds of acres of woods, filled with deer, red squirrels, bears, and every sort of tree--including a few old, abandoned apples, and even some lingering chestnut trees. Before you've gone a quarter of a mile into the woods, the road sounds have faded away, and there's nothing left but the sighing of leaves and the clacking of branches, the cheeky tunes of chickadees and the perpetual scolding of jays.

By the house, however, especially at rush hour, there is a regular flow of sometimes noisy traffic. Last year, there was often trash in our yard, thrown out of the windows of passing cars. And the constant flow of traffic makes the yard feel somewhat too exposed and public.

It was for those reasons we decided to plant some trees, hard up by the road, though back behind the salt splash line. Many people advised us to plant cedars, so that, eventually, we'd have a thick green privacy curtain between us and the road. I like cedars well enough, and I've seen some hedges I really liked, too, for that matter, but it didn't quite seem right. And besides, who can eat from a cedar tree? We decided to plant apples, though we planted them close enough together that--we hope--their branches will touch and seem to intertwine, when they are grown.

They seem to be doing well, and there is much less trash in the yard this year.

A little bit before school started up, my friend Margaret came to visit. Technically, she was there on business with Peter, but when he had to leave for a committee meeting, she lingered. We wound up taking a long, leisurely walk in those woods, talking about everything I most wanted to talk about. It was one of those wonderful conversations that go deeper than a confessional could, in letting you see and air out your deepest self, the kind of give and take that's a blessing wherever you find it, but especially with a friend.

It was a very good walk.

When we returned from the woods, the shadows were getting long, and the air was getting cool with those first hints of fall that come sometimes at the end of August. The air smelled so clean and so good, and our conversation had ranged so wide and deep, it was only natural that we plunked ourselves down on the grassy hill outside the house, and kept it up watching the way the trees at the edge of the wood blew in the breeze.

But up on the road, the traffic was building to its evening peak. After a few minutes, Margaret commented on it.

"Yes, well, it's true--that's the one thing about the house we don't really like," I admitted. "Still, I'm sure that's part of the reason we were able to afford it."

I glanced over at the road, not so very far away, and somewhat spoiling the otherwise idyllic mood created by the late sun on the cool green grass.

"And yet, " Margaret observed, "you chose to plant apples, instead of a hedge."

Yes.

We chose to plant an orchard, not a hedge.

Source: Small Tees for a Yard or Garden

I think Margaret meant that to be a metaphor. I think it works as one, too. It is easy, in this life, to work at planting hedges. But sometimes, the toughest hedge in the world will not really keep the world out. And maybe it's better to plant a few apple trees, instead. Maybe there's a thing, in embracing the world or in turning away from it, that is very much analogous to planting an orchard, or planting a hedge.

Pieces of an NEYM Mosaic

2010-08-22T05:21:00.003-04:00

We have set aside most of our usual business agenda, and are holding instead something we are calling "Meeting to Hear God's Call."

We are hearing a lot of messages about world suffering, economic injustice, environmental destruction. We hear a lot of despair.

Some of the messages feel rooted in Spirit to me; if others are, it is not in a way that I can discern. I wrestle with my own anxiety over doing "enough." I know that I live in a manner that is far more comfortable than 90% of the planet's humans ever will; I know that my lifestyle is unsustainable. I know that I have not sold all I have and given it to the poor (though I'm also grateful that, as a non-Christian among Friends, that one is not a given for me, but one whose social justice message must prove itself to me on its own terms, not just because Rabbi Yoshua said it back in the wayback.) (Mind you, it's message is pretty damned compelling.)

I am in the weeds; I am in the tall grass. So, I suspect, is my meeting. And we are wrestling not just with the need to walk our talk, but with despair.

* * * *

Will T. rises. Gives a message about Abraham. About God talking to this childless nonagenarian with an almost equally ancient wife. Taking him out under the stars and telling him to look up: if you could count all the stars in the sky, that's how many your descendants will be one day. God promises this.

The message is about Moses. About wandering in the desert with the children of Israel, and about the Promise: there's a land. I'm leading you there. Just follow me, and you will be in the Kingdom of God. About God keeping promises, and about the present reality of the Kingdom of God.

I remember my sense, last fall, sitting with Janet and her friends, as her wife Abby lay dying, and amid the grief and the sadness, feeling the love and the commitment we all had to one another and to both of them: my sense that I was, that moment, witnessing the Kingdom of God.

There is never reason to despair. That promise is kept every day. Filled with betrayals and pain though the world is, sick unto death though it may be, we are in the Kingdom as soon as we are faithful to where we are being led.

The promise? The Kingdom of God? That is the place, surely, where we stop ignoring or objectifying the poor, we stop killing the earth, we stop distracting ourselves from loving and forgiving each other with our favorite addictions.

I have a sudden, almost overwhelming sense of what it would be like, to live into that Kingdom, and I'm almost overcome with joy--and with impatience at all the things we allow to interfere with our faithfulness as individuals or as a body. Every moment I spend not heeding the call of Spirit is a moment I delay the Kingdom; every moment we listen, as a body, to our own wills, however altruistically we think we are motivated, is a moment we are not entering that Kingdom.

I want to weep. But I no longer want to despair. And my worship deepens.

* * * *

Note to self: Re: ministry. Is it possible that despair is one of the signs that a message is not of God?

* * * *

Later on, I have the chance to tell Will how much his ministry meant to me. I tell him both of my joy in the sense of the immanence of that "place" where we live faithfully in the world into the promise of justice and mercy Spirit gives us, and my deep, deep sadness that we are so good at delaying our entry there.

He reminds me that the Kingdom is present, and that there is a way we cannot delay it. I share with him the story of being with Janet the night of Abby's death. He nods. While my vision of the Kingdom is not necessarily his, it is not too alien to be recognizable.

* * * *

N, a close friend from my home meeting, is surprised that Will's message spoke to me, both because of its Biblical imagery and on its own terms. Far more Christian than I am, she found the talk of kingdoms off-putting. "My God is not a King," she says. I understand her point.

But I do keep having the sense that the Holy Spirit is a helluva translator.

* * * *

Later, the same meeting as Will's message. I feel a leading to speak; test it, sit with it. It recurs. I stand.

We are using "mike spacers"--both to deal with accoustics in this large, unfriendly space, and to assist the hearing impaired, when we rise with a message, we are asked to wait for one of two microphone bearers to bring us a microphone to speak into. I wait patiently.

My message feels like a bookend to Will's. It is not one that is natural to me, but, for the first time I am to give vocal ministry within the yearly meeting, that is good.

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled."

Spirit's promises are kept.

* * * *

I stand. I wait for the mike runner. I am handed the mike, recognized, and I breathe in to speak.

But I am standing in the clerk's blind spot, and she does not notice me, or that her mike runner has brought me the microphone. Just I open my eyes to speak, I see that she is starting the handshake that signals rise of meeting.

For a moment, my inward gears clash and grind, caught between the imperatives of delivering a message and the social forms of politeness, and recognizing the form of the end of meeting.

I speak, but I hesitate. I stammer; my voice is not clear. While I did not get in the way of the message fully, neither did I get out of its way with perfect faithfulness.

I suppose that does not matter. I hear Moses had a speech impediment, and vocal ministry is not a performance art. But that moment of hesitation, between human forms and simple obedience, has made me clumsy. I don't know how many people heard the message.

I did speak. The handshakes paused as I spoke, then resumed, and we parted for lunch.

* * * *

Later, I take a long walk with my friend K., and I need to talk about that stumbling message. At first, she misunderstands me, thinks I am concerned that the message was inappropriate or not faithful. She assures me that it felt Spirit-led to her.

One of the advantages of being non-Christian: when the Biblical stuff takes hold of me, it's so against my grain, my personal preferences, that I can be at least reasonably sure it is not ego-driven! It's an odd thing to be grateful for, maybe, but I'm grateful for that.

My point is much more superficial, much more shallow. I'd never spoken in yearly meeting before. And the interruption by the handshake--it hurt. It just hurt.

"Why don't you just give me a nice paper cut, and pour lemon juice in it!?" I complained, in my best Miracle Max voice. And I spoke about how it felt like being smacked, being stung by a hornet, the way it happened.

At the same time, I'm well aware that my sting is not important, and that no one had intentionally done me any harm or disrespect. I was just raw, open and vulnerable, the way one is when trying to open to Spirit. And you know, shit happens.

Shit happened. I was sitting/standing in a blind spot for the clerk's visual field. Perfection does not exist among us humans, and there you go.

I begin to appreciate the importance of making a serious study of the art of forgiveness. Because, short of hiding in your room for a lifetime, you're going to need to forgive a lot of people. Sometimes including yourself.

What would be worse than rising with vocal ministry, being recognized, and being cut off by the handshake to end meeting? What is worse than getting a paper cut with lemon juice in it?

Being the clerk who made the error. Being the person who gave the paper cut and poured the lemon juice, however unwittingly.

We're human. We're going to play both roles again and again and again. We're going to need that forgiveness stuff--a lot, I'm pretty sure.

Incapacity

2010-08-20T17:41:00.000-04:00

I appear to be completely incapable of writing my impressions of NEYM Sessions this year.

*sigh*

Becoming Giants

2010-08-11T17:26:00.000-04:00

I'm here at New England Yearly Meeting Sessions, the big annual Quaker business session and gathering for worship. This year is unusual, in that the agenda-driven business sessions that normally shape the rhythms of our time together have been subsumed, mostly, in a much more open-ended "Meeting to Hear God's Call"--a kind of back-to-basics discernment session about our spiritual condition and where we may be being led by Spirit, as a body.

My attention, however, has been much less on the spiritual condition of my meeting, and much more on myself. Since I arrived here on Saturday, I have been wrestling with almost overwhelming feelings of self-doubt, excoriating shame, stupidity, and a temptation to be severely critical of others.

This feeling has alternated with moments of extraordinary grace and quiet strength, in which I have found my heart more open and intuitive to the needs and longings of others than I can ever before remember being, and moments so filled with the Spirit of the Holy that I have half-expected to see Light burst from beneath my fingernails and shine out through my open eyes.

I have been teetering on the lip of a new level of spiritual maturity, seeing men and women around me clearly, both in their gifts and in their folly, able to love them deeply and fully in one moment, without sentiment or illusion... and the next moment, finding it all I can do to hear them and care for them at all in the wash of my shame and self-consciousness.

I am passing through yet another spiritual adolescence, and I don't like it much... though today I am beginning to hope I have traveled through my adolescence, and I'm emerging on the other side. It has not been an easy journey.

Like all adolescents, I've been alternating between idealizing and judging the "grown ups" around me. Unlike biological adolescents, I've been down this road before, and I've known from the beginning of my association with Quakers that the day would come when I would see their faults and follies in such a clear focus that I would be capable of forgetting the things they do right, or to hold each individual Friend in a kind of regard of mercy, understanding how impossible it is to move through life without hurting anyone, ever. We all blunder; we all hurt each other. Only the adolescent believes otherwise, or thinks that they themselves will be held to such a standard.

There are so many Friends here I want to engage in deep conversations with. I want to be fully present to an absolute laundry list of remarkable Quakers, men and women I will likely not even get to see again until next year. I've had a wonderful, growthful year, and I want to share it with them. What's more, I want to be seen by them, loved by them, given a chance to give them my love in return--and admitted to a kind of full adult friendship I don't think I was quite capable of before this year.

I'm almost a grown-up, now, in "Quaker years" to coin a phrase. I'm almost ready to be giving something back, to the people who have given me so much. I want to sit with the grown-ups, and be real to them and real myself, open and transparent to Spirit.

And a lot of that is happening. I've had some amazing heart-to-heart talks, and amazing quick conversations punctuated by a hug, or even just a brush of the hand. I had a brief conversation on Sunday, for instance, with Viv Hawkins, one of two plenary speakers, and a woman whose warmth and genuineness in ministry is as rich and good as the smell of sunlight on loam. She asked gently after some of the sources of the sadness I was feeling on that day. Her questions and her attention were wonderful, but more wonderful still was just the ordinary touch of her hand against my wrist as she made some passing remark. She was so simply present in that moment, to me and to God, that it made my whole heart still and glad.

There have a lot of moments like that, and I'm aware that I have given as well as received that kind of presence. Moments of grace, as I said.

But at other moments, my damned teenaged awkwardness has gotten in my way.

Two days ago, feeling as naked and skinless as a newborn, but also filled with love and a sense of Spirit, I got a chance to walk between commitments with my friend Will T. It was really just the down-payment on a longer conversation we were able to have later, and I hope my perception was correct, that despite his busy-ness at Sessions, the company was welcome.

But then, moving to give him a hug goodbye as we parted, I stepped on his foot.

Pretty hard, I'd guess. I wouldn't know for sure, unfortunately, because I was in hiking boots. (He, of course, was in sandals. Is there some cosmic law that this must always be the way?)

That's such a perfect metaphor for what it is like to be a human being, trying to be in a loving, friendly spiritual connection with another human being. Even when we are guarding with all of our strength, all of our vigilance, all of our love against harming each other, we are apt to come down hard on each others' toes. Right at the moment we mean best.

Will, of course, was good-natured about it. I, however, was mortified.

Unreasonably so, actually. But you know, it's one thing to know that in your head, and it's another thing to overcome your adolescent self-doubt long enough to be able to let something like that go. Now, out there in the world, I could have put that blunder behind me with a laugh and an apology. Here, trying so hard to live without armor, I am without the instincts that keep me from wounding myself.

It turns out that when you take off your skin to try to get really, really open to other people, you not only feel every bump and bruise and careless touch of theirs against your own vulnerable baby soul, but you feel every wound you inflict on them, too.

And we inflict those wounds on each other all the time.

What clumsiness of mine have I missed, in my eagerness and gladness to greet Friends or rejoice in Spirit--or even just in tiredness, humanness, ordinariness?

My teenaged self is ashamed. My spiritually adult self is beginning to know--really to know--this is just how it is, and that it needs to be accepted, acknowledged, and released. My emerging spiritual maturity understands that this is really a lesson in the absolute imperative of forgiveness and mercy.

(Don't worry--I have forgiven myself for stepping on Will's toes. I'm pretty sure he's forgiven me, too--though I think he's entitled to stand a little farther away from me if I hug him again while in steel-toed shoes.)

The advantage of growing up is gaining an empathic inner eye, one with perspective that can level out the bumps and valleys with a little hard-won wisdom. Wrestling with my own feelings of shame and stupidity lets me see other people more clearly. And one of the things I'm watching unfold before me at sessions is a parade of men and women who, like me, find themselves a bit overwhelmed by their vulnerability here. We truly are trying to live into the Kingdom of Love--and that's something that's very hard to do, in a world that teaches us to wear our armor even among our closest friends. We who are trying to move beyond being defended castles of one into becoming members of one another are doing something new, and we are feeling more, loving more, grieving more than most of us are really in condition for just yet. We get tired. We get hurt. And we too easily imagine we are the only ones in pain, the only ones who wonder if our spiritual gifts will be welcomed, if the love that we want to give one another will be acceptable.

Jan Hoffman delivered a memorable message on the pain of spiritual gifts not accepted by our communities; whether gifts of ministry or eldering or healing or just love and tenderness.

Whether through error, a rejection of what seems too far from our understanding, or simply through the ordinary bumps and bruises of a life in Spirit where some of us are in sandals and some of us can't quite see where our boot-tips are landing, our gifts are not always welcomed, let alone drawn out and nurtured, in this community.

It hurts when it happens to you.

And it's going to happen to you.

There's not a damn lot we can do about that, except keep trying: keep trying to give, keep trying to receive, keep trying to stay skinless and real and loving with one another, and to reject that little voice in the backs of our minds that suggests that we're the only ones who have been hurt like this, or that those who have hurt us did it on purpose, are Bad Friends, unloving, unfeeling, unkind.

Mostly, it won't be true. And even when it is, it's not going to change by judging and labeling it. It's going to change through tenderness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness.

And, yeah, telling the other guy to get off our foot--or going back to our meetings and reaffirming we've got a ministry, or a need, or a problem that is being forgotten. Plain speech belongs in the equation.

But always, always, remembering to let love be the first motion.

The more I see of ministry and eldering in action, the more I see gifts in both that never become ripe. Because the bearer of the gift had been hurt... and had not been courageous in forgiveness.

We must be giants in forgiveness--giving it, asking it, receiving it, accepting it. Or we will not be able to carry the gifts we bear.

Home

2010-08-06T14:22:00.000-04:00

It is a breezy summer day today, and I can smell water on the wind, though the air is dry and clear. The world is full of rustling leaves, and I have set up a recliner underneath a maple tree, where I divide my attention between my novel and the beauty of the undersides of leaves.

Want to know how beautiful my home in summer is? It's so beautiful that I'm actually reluctant to go to New England Yearly Meeting Sessions.

Oh, I'll go, I'll go. It is the spiritual cornerstone of my year, these days. I would even regret it if I didn't.

But I am loathe to leave. The days are precious here.

Nearly Lammas

2010-08-01T06:52:00.001-04:00

Here it is, a little before dawn, at the turning of the Wheel of the Year. It is nearly Lammas, and I am awake early, listening to birdsong. The highway rush of traffic outside my house has not yet begun, so early on this Sunday morning, but the birds are in full chorus, and I cannot sleep.

I am awake, and I can feel the turning of the Wheel. Summer is already beginning the downhill slope toward fall, and my heart and my body are full of the sense of that.

Partly it is simply a matter of there having been a break this past week to the stifling heat waves of July. Partly it is that fireflies have given way to crickets, that the black raspberries are past, the native corn and tomatoes are in, and the blackberries are beginning.

And partly, for me, a teacher, it is that the rising and falling plot of summer is already past its climax.

July is the unmaking month for teachers; it is the month when we forget our classrooms, forget our students, and forget our armored, dedicated, laser-focused selves. It is the month of forgetting appointments, losing track of time, and drifting through hot days the way we might have drifted, when we were young, down a slow river while draped over a pudgy inner tube. It is the month when we forget to be old and wise and full of plans, but putter: Peter on household carpentry projects, and me in the kitchen, learning to make pickles and jam. July is when we slip outside of time.

Unmaking the selves responsibility and effort have hardened us into during the year. For no matter how much we may love our jobs and our students and our lives, there is something about wise, carefully-planned, tightly scheduled living that is inimical to something else inside us.

I remember when my parents retired, after a lifetime of work as teachers and school administrators, how the habits of often-frustrated, hard-working people seemed to melt away, and they seemed to recover their youth. I watched them play with my daughter, teaching her to swim or to drive a boat, and I watched as faces that had been tight for years in concentration relaxed again into laugh lines I could remember only from when I was very young, from the days when a piece of ironing turned in my mother's hands could be a benediction, and my father read us poetry at supper.

For a while, when I was older, they seemed to go away, those happy people who begun my life. But when they retired, they seemed to find those selves again. They seemed to remember who they really are.

We all need some retirement.

We all need some times of letting go, remembering, coming home to give thanks and rest, and to remember who we are. Lammas is that climax of that time within the teacher's year--the time of fullness, contentment, relaxation and drift.

My face is a different face when I have ceased to look into mirrors for a week, a month, a season. This is especially true when the mirrors I have not been watching are the eyes of thirty adolescents, reflecting myself back to me, but in images colored by their anxiety, their newness, their anger or hunger or boredom or (rarely) their joy. My face is a different face when I have lived for myself alone a little while.

And I like it.

But the Wheel does not stop turning, for me or for anyone else. And I can feel the beginning of the end of this season out of time. As surely as the crickets' song will end, summer will not last.

This morning, lying wakeful in the hours before dawn, I thought again of school. I remembered my students. I remembered my classroom. I slipped again, as if I had never left it, into the state of mind that plans lessons and wonders how to reel my students in, get them popping, get them thinking, arguing, listening, and learning to write it down.

I imagined the first day of school. I thought about whether to buy a better pencil sharpener for my room, or to have the students write journals again this year. I thought about the school newspaper I will be helping build, and what my new classes would be like.

Lying there in bed, I put my armor on, donned, just for a moment, my professional self: just tryed it on for size. Just oiled the joints, looking for rust or worn spots that will need repair before I go out to the lists again in fall.

August is when teachers step back into time.

August is when the sheaves of wheat are put up in the barn, when the flour is ground, the vegetables set by, the fruits of summer preserved against the long winter. August is not the end of summer, but it is aware of endings; it is grateful, but it remembers the coming times of want.

The Wheel turns, and I am turning with it. No summer lasts forever, and here I am again, back in the flow of time.

Images: Farmstand Products from Campbell's Farm Stand. Woman Kneading Bread, from the National Archelogical Museum of Athens, via Wikimedia Commons.
I love the way the second image looks not only like a woman kneading bread, but also like a teacher standing before a class.

Every Minute Kindness

2010-07-20T23:19:00.031-04:00

There's a story I heard once, about a couple of enlightened Zen masters. One of them goes to see the other one rainy morning, and when he gets there, the one he's come to see says to him, "When you came to see me today, did you leave your umbrella on the right side of your shoes, or the left?"

The visitor realizes he doesn't know, and that he doesn't know because he wasn't fully present when he put down his umbrella out in the entryway. So, without so much as drinking a cup of tea, off he goes, back home to study Zen some more. He puts in another twenty, maybe thirty years, getting himself well and truly enlightened this time, so he can really call himself a master--

--a master of every minute Zen.

Which is, I suppose, a pretty good thing to be. But it's not my goal. I want to be an every minute Quaker; I want to practice every minute kindness.

I think I already know what that would feel like, at least a little. It would feel like this:

When I was a little girl, my grandparents owned a cabin--a "camp" in the Maine vernacular--out on a lake in Maine. There were tall pine and cedar trees, but there were also humming birds, loons, and neighbors stopping in to talk to my grandfather about fishing, or to trade recipes with my grandmother.

And on the door to their cabin was a screen door. Not a cheap metal screen door, mass produced and for sale at Home Depot, but a proper wooden screen door, with a tightly coiled spring halfway up the door to pull it closed, and a hook and eye you could use to fasten it if you chose, but no real latch.

That screen door stood open, the only barrier between the warm, lumber-smelling inside of the camp and the pine-needles and sunlight smells outside. That door was always full of breezes, and birdsong, and family and friends coming and going all day long. And every time it would open, as whoever it was would run lightly out into the world or the world would run lightly in to visit, that door would say the same thing...

ScreeeEEAk... BAM!

My whole childhood, all the memories of water and sunburn and mosquito bites and love, somehow can be translated with the cry of that door: ScreeeEEAk... BAM!

That, that memory, that sound... that is the sound of a heart that is fully open. Friends can come, friends can go... ScreeeEEAk... BAM!

Or maybe just the sound of the soft breezes in the pines overhead, or the leaves on the swamp maples, the far-off whine of somebody's motor-boat, or even the call of a loon. The screen door is open to them all, welcomes them all, stand merrily in the midst of the flow and the ebb of them all.

If my heart becomes like that door--if I can learn to stand open and ready, like that door, I will have learned the art of every minute kindness. I will have become an every minute Quaker. If friends stop by, I will greet them.

If God stops by, I will be ready.

Hello, God! So glad you're in the neighborhood. Want some iced tea? A sandwich? I was just sitting down to lunch. Come on in and sit for a while. Or--I know! Wait a sec-- I'll be right out to you!

ScreeeEEAk... BAM!

(May my heart be open to the breezes, filled with a cheerful noise. May I grow kind; may I have a welcoming heart.)

Images: Deeds of the Zen Masters, Hotei; Lake and Dock, Peter Bishop.

An Experiment in Scriptio Divina (Peter)

2010-07-19T09:12:00.007-04:00

This came out of something we did last month in NEYM’s ministry and counsel working party on spirituality and sexual ethics. That group has been charged with promoting discussions at monthly meetings about sexual ethics, and also going through a process of deep and spirit-led discernment ourselves to draft a sexual ethics statement of our own, with the ultimate goal of bringing the results of all of this for consideration at the Yearly Meeting level.

Last month, one of the things the working party did was to go into worship and, from that place of worship, write down questions each of us would have had about sexual ethics and sexual behavior when we were younger. It turned into a sort of written worship sharing—not something I’d ever done or even heard of before—and it was pretty powerful.

I decided to try writing during my regular meeting for worship at Mt. Toby. Call it “scriptio divina”—divine writing. Or call it written ministry, analogous to vocal ministry. Or call it, as the subtitle of QPR says, “blogging in a spirit of worship.”

It felt like what I wrote was coming from Spirit. Not just that, it felt (like vocal ministry often does in a really good covered meeting) like it was tapped into the same Spirit that had us all gathered. I was on the fence about standing up and sharing it aloud during meeting. In the end, I didn’t, but I’m sharing it here. The first and second drafts both came during meeting. The second is more writerly, the first perhaps a little closer to the root.

LET LOVE BE THE FIRST MOTION.
SPEAK FROM LOVE
BE SILENT FROM LOVE

SPEECH WITHOUT LOVE IS AGGRESSION
SILENCE WITHOUT LOVE IS SHUNNING

WE ARE NOT CIRCUMSTANCES IN ONE ANOTHER’S LIVES;
WE ARE PINPOINTS OF GOD’S LIGHT.

WE CANNOT BE HARMLESS
ANY MORE THAN THE SUN
BY WITHDRAWING ITS HEAT
WOULD CEASE TO CAUSE HARM TO THE EARTH

LET LOVE GUIDE OUR SPEECH AND OUT REFRAINING FORM SPEECH

And the second draft…

HARMLESS

Speak form love.
Be silent from love.

We cannot be harmless
As if we were circumstances
In one another’s lives;
We are pinpoints of God’s light.

We cannot be harmless
Any more than the sun
By withdrawing its heat
Could cease to cause harm to the Earth.

Let love guide our speech
And our refraining from speech.

Image credit: Scribe Writing, posted without attribution at Manuscript Anxiety.

Stops. (And Openings.)

2010-07-17T12:00:00.003-04:00

Part 3 of 3.
(Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.)

The most dramatic illustration of experiencing a stop, and what came of it, is the experience I had on September 11, 2001, the experience that made me a Quaker. But I've written about that before, and it is so woven in with the story of how I grew a peace testimony that I think I'll set that aside for a moment, and travel just a little further back in time, to a different kind of a Stop--more personal, less dramatic, but one that is, I suspect, still unfolding.

Sometime around the year 2000 or 2001, I began to feel waves of something a lot like grief, and a lot like fear, around my work life.

At that time, I was working as a psychotherapist, a trauma therapist specifically, and if I am to speak plainly, without preamble or apology, I was good at what I did. For many years, I had worked specifically with survivors of childhood and adult sexual abuse and sexual assault, and for a number of years beginning in the mid 1990s, I worked with surviving friends and family members of homicide and vehicular homicide. I know that I made a difference for a lot of people, and though it was demanding and often stressful work, it was also deeply satisfying, standing hand in hand with another human being, at their heart's center, looking for what their life's experience meant to them.

In describing the nature of that work, I often remember the time a Pagan friend asked me if I didn't feel sometimes distant and detached from the gods during the intervals between Pagan gatherings and the large, dramatic rituals that punctuate our years. I realized that I did not, and that there was something in the skinless intimacy and empathy of a psychotherapy session that made me feel close to the gods, to Spirit, all the time, on an everyday basis. Just sitting with people in their grief and their pain, and being open to it and to them, was actually deeply sustaining to me as a human being. By holding them as humbly and fully as I could, I was somehow finding my way, day after day, to a spring of tenderness that watered us both.

And that was wonderful. I have enormous gratitude for having had the privilege of sharing that with so many men and women over the years.

This is not to deny that the work could also be very hard. I remember times when I would leave a group or a family session, especially early in my work as a homicide bereavement therapist, where I would feel as used up and limp as a soiled and wrung-out dishrag. And I remember how I was always careful to leave at least thirty minutes between client appointments, so that I could, if I needed to, go outside to a green, leafy spot, to literally lie down flat on the ground and let the pain and tension of a hard session drain out of my body and into the earth. There were certainly times it hurt to hear the secrets of a human heart, and more times it hurt to remain open to understanding the depth of fear and despair such a heart can hold.

Perhaps it is not surprising that so many of my friends, when I eventually shared the information that I thought I needed to stop being a therapist, nodded sagely and mouthed comforting words about "burnout," that scourge of the professional healer.

But I wasn't burned out.

At the time, I didn't have a language for what I was experiencing... but I knew burnout. Every therapist knows burnout--we play along its edges all the while, and I was not so dishonest with myself that I would pretend I had not slipped over the lip of that canyon if I had. While there was stress in what I was experiencing, it wasn't stress that made me lay down being a psychotherapist--it was distress: a particular kind of distress.

It was, I now believe, a stop, in the Quaker sense. The waves of feeling--of grief and fear--that rose up for me around my work as a therapist were the closing of a door. I wasn't supposed to be a therapist anymore; I was supposed to do something else.

What I'm saying sounds a bit melodramatic and self-important when I say it straight out. Still, it's what I have come to believe is true: God (whether I know what I mean by that term or not) wanted me to do something else now. It was time for me to let go of being a psychotherapist.

Now, being a psychotherapist is not like being a dishwasher or even an account executive. There are jobs and there are... identities. To be good at being a psychotherapist, you have to let the imperatives of listening and caring seep down into you--you have to find within you what the job demands, and let it flower. Psychotherapy is one of a number of tasks humans do that are whole-person identities, not just 9 to 5 wage-earners. It's like being a parent, or a writer, or an artist--it's who you are, not just what you are.

And being a psychotherapist is also a source of prestige in our society, too. Love 'em or hate 'em, psychotherapists are the wisdom figures of our culture. People look up to psychotherapists, even if it's just to lob rotten tomatoes at us.

So, when I began to experience this strong and growing feeling of sadness around my profession, and I began to feel pangs of loss that were my first clue that I wasn't going to be, as I'd always imagined, a psychotherapist for the rest of my life, it wasn't a lot of fun to admit that to myself. Stopping being a therapist meant letting go of a lot of things other people admired. It meant that, while who I am as a person would not be less, I might very well be seen as less. And I had never, in all the years since entering graduate school, been anything but a psychotherapist. I didn't know what else to be. I didn't know how else to earn money, but I also didn't have any idea, suddenly, what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Hence, the fear.

I remember calling my dear friend Laura, to talk with her about the increasing sense I had that I had to find something else to do for a living, and how I had no idea what that would be.

"Well..." she began, clearly at a loss. "It's too bad--how you're feeling. But... you have to get over it. You have to! You have to earn a living, Cat."

True. (Probably.) But not enough.

But there are careers out there where "earning a living" is not sufficient justification for holding the job, and psychotherapist is one of them. I knew I was becoming less than I had been, in at least some ways: I was beginning to confuse the funny uncles and the abusive stepfathers, the Klonapin-takers with the Xaanex-prescribed.

It didn't feel like burnout. But that didn't mean I could ignore it, or start "phoning it in" in a line of work that is all about being present. Instead, I had to let being a psychotherapist go, along with all the sense of certainty and all the things I loved about standing so close inside the human heart each day.

I would guess that ministers who lose their calling (or find themselves called away from their pulpits, which I bet does happen a lot more than we have language for) might feel the same way.

But you have to be honest about it. There's no way to do certain jobs if you do not do them with full integrity. And sometimes things that are very good just come to an end.

It was scary. But it wasn't like I actually had a choice.

Fortunately, around that time, my daughter was bringing home her friends, a band of the most charismatic, interesting, intelligent middle-school girls in the world. I realized I liked teenagers--a lot. Not as psychotherapy clients. (I'd been there, done that, and I have to say, teenagers were just ghastly to work with for me; something about that skinless intimacy and the developmental stage of adolescence are, I think, just not a good fit.) But as people, in their natural habitat, laughing and exclaiming and emoting among their friends.

I have also always loved books.

Is there a profession that combines love of books with love of teenagers? (Hm. Let me think...)

I knew that I did not want to teach English the way it had been taught to me--could not, in fact, imagine how I could teach English in that way and still be me--but around that time, Peter, who was in the process of becoming a teacher himself, brought home a book, Nanci Atwell's groundbreaking In the Middle, and (as the Quakers say) Way Opened.

The details of finding a teacher training program, winding down my private practice, and finding a compatible student-teaching assignment were absorbing to live, but are beside the point just now.

What is my point?

God/Spirit spoke. She said, "let go," and I didn't want to, but I did.

I didn't want to; I didn't have any conception of that time of any kind of God or Presence beyond the Pagan gods of woods and earth and sky I knew already; I didn't have any prior experience doing the things I eventually found to do, and I found it hard to develop the skills I needed to do them. The whole process hurt and was full of sorrow.

But it was right.

How do I know it was right? I just do.

It is not that Quakers hear the Voice of Spirit giving them leadings and stops that is the unique thing. It is that they have a language for describing it, and a tradition of honoring the discernment of spiritual promptings even in the absence of rational understanding of the reasons behind them.

I really like that. I like being able to name that overwhelming experience that took my life, shook it briskly, and set me down somewhere else.

The experience, though, is primary. Especially because working as a therapist meant working with the kind of open heart and integrity that marks spiritual depth, there was no way to be true to who I was without becoming Someone New. There was no way to deny the stop, with or without a word for it, with or without a sense of where it would eventually (hopefully) lead... nothing to do but let go, and trust God.

I do not know why I was supposed to stop being a psychotherapist. Maybe I'll be one again some day. But I still don't have a clear sense of why I had to lay it down; I just know that I did. Not because I was burned out, not because some stories had begun to seem very familiar, and I needed to work hard to remain fresh listening to each new client. I don't know why it was time to end. I just know that it was.

But I still don't know why I am supposed to be doing this now, not therapy. I like teaching, I like the house I can afford on a teacher's salary (and never could have afforded as a psychotherapist, many of whose clients were poor and un- or under-insured). But I have a sense that the question raised by my stop--"Why?" Has not yet been answered.

Is it because I am supposed to live here, in my so-loved woods? Is it because I will one day be led to teach somewhere in particular, like Ramallah or elsewhere in the world? Is it so I will one day have a pension, and be free to write or do something that will matter then? Or is it because, while it is less dramatic, what I am doing in the classroom is itself just what Spirit has in mind? Is it--I don't know.

I just don't know. And yet, I am content to let this part of my life unfold. It does feel like I'm headed in the right direction--it just doesn't feel like I'm at a destination yet.

I guess I'll just keep walking.

Image credits: Stop sign, Heart of the Matter, Mitch Ditkoff's blog.
Butterflies and Blooms, Joe Mabel.

Why I Love the 4th of July

2010-07-05T09:10:00.000-04:00

I inevitably cry at small town parades.

I don't think anyone should mistake love of country for love of all decisions of its government or as a boast of all of its actions throughout history. I don't think anyone should mistake love of country for blind patriotism or jingoism. There is so much more to a country--to any country--than a military or a flag. There are its people, its landscape, and its unique history, of joy and idealism and hypocrisy and loss, all blended into one unique, unfinished story.

I love my country--not blindly, but deeply, and (I hope) well.

My own love of country is founded in the blue and rolling hills that bound my horizon, the murmur of the leaves of trees in the distance, old (and not so old) church ladies sharing pickle and pie recipes at a church social, small town high school bands, and the smell of a small swimming hole at midsummer. It is the love of rivers, of sky, of wild things and of sun-baked city streets.

It also embraces the sweat and fear of a soldier in Vietnam, the agony of the slaves whose efforts built virtually all our civic monuments up until Emancipation, the horror of the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, and the triumphant, insistent moral courage of the civil rights movement. It celebrates the fine day in May when Massachusetts recognized gay marriage, it grieves the deaths at Gettysburg, goes on trial with the Berrigan brothers, runs for president with Susan B. Anthony, and presses close, hushed and reverent, with the hundreds of emancipated slaves who met Lincoln as he toured Richmond, Virginia, during the last days of the Civil War.

That's my patriotism. I am neither proud to be an American nor ashamed to be one : I am humbled. I am the heir of so much history, so much pain, and so much love.

May I be worthy of the struggle so far.

Images: Aldermen in July 4th Parade, The South Hero, Vermont 4th of July parade, July 4th 2000, courtesy, Wikimedia Commons.

The Trap (by Peter)

2010-07-03T10:24:00.002-04:00

There’s a blogger named Colin Beavan who calls himself the “No Impact Man.” He’s become slightly famous in environmentalist circles, with a book and even a movie about him. The blurb for the movie asks, “Can you save the planet without driving your family crazy?”

That is one of the things Cat worried about when she started our plastic fast. She never demanded that I join in, and I’m not doing it to the extreme degree she is, but I also have a concern about plastic—have had since about 1980, when I was in college and became (for a couple of years) an avid organic gardener. I’ve been setting aside and weighing my own plastic waste as well, and I’ve been avoiding plastic packaging a little more in the last few weeks than I always have done.

But we’re contending with one of the biggest traps in this and a good many other worthy causes: Gray-faced, grim obligation.

About twenty years ago, when recycling was really starting to take off in our area, someone wrote an essay in The Valley Advocate called “Recycler’s Rush,” about how good it felt to sort the glass and paper out of your trash, even cutting those little plastic windows out of envelopes. Believe it or not, the essay got some angry letters in response, the gist of which was, You shouldn’t be doing it because it feels good; you should be doing it because the environment is in crisis and we’re headed for ecological Armageddon.

That’s an all-too-common failing of activists on the left of a great many issues: If it doesn’t hurt, if it doesn’t make your life an unending misery, then you’re doing it wrong. (I suppose this is just one specific instance of the basic human instinct that turns every earthquake into a punishment from an angry deity.)

And Cat and I are dealing with it ourselves. We photograph and weigh our plastic trash every week. (OK, we didn’t get to it last week. Bad, bad us.) The trash gets picked up on Mondays, so putting out the trash is part of the Sunday night rush getting ready for the coming week (which, for teachers, is considerable). The photographing and weighing takes a twenty-minute chore and turns it into an hour-long, multi-step project, and the temptation is always to think, That’s what you get for being such a bad citizen of the planet. If you didn’t generate so much plastic, this job wouldn’t take so long.

In case it’s not obvious, here’s why that’s really messed up: When I first started tagging along with Cat’s leading on this whole no-plastic lifestyle, I took the position that this shouldn’t be about personal purity, it should be about having an impact on the environment. I was doing things like writing letters to food manufacturers and talking to my school’s food service director about replacing their plasticware with compostable flatware. I felt energized and effective. I do less of that, the more that the weekly weigh-and-photograph feels like a burden.

Where Cat feels energized and effective is around finding new ways to run a more eco-friendly kitchen: baking all of our own bread and rolls, canning and freezing locally grown fruits and vegetables, making homemade chocolate syrup. She also finds herself noticing plastic in the world around us more, and finding more ways to avoid buying it, like getting our cheese from the deli counter wrapped in waxed paper. But that also means noticing all the times when we mess up and find that, Woops, we’ve brought home yet another plastic wrapper.

There are two ways you can go when you start noticing that your organic BGH-free ice cream from local grass-fed dairy cows comes with 0.016 oz. of plastic around the rim of the cardboard lid on the cardboard carton: You can start to think, Maybe we need to radically disengage ourselves from consumer culture altogether, or you can think, This sucks, I’m not doing this anymore.

Neither one leads to a particularly effective ministry. There are people like the Amish who have so radically disengaged from consumerism that they might almost qualify for corporate sainthood, if there were such a thing. But really…nobody ever says to themselves, Gee, I think I’ll be Amish too. The Amish don’t minister to the outside world; they simply shun it. They don’t offer any handholds that the rest of us can use to follow in their ways. So while they may not be contributing to the downfall of the Earth, they’re not going to save it, either.

George Fox said, “Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone” The Amish aren’t a pattern; they’re a one-shot, limited edition, break-the-mold collector’s item. Because they don’t engage. And the same thing has happened to countless other left-wing save-the-world movements that have gotten too caught up in their own precious purity to continue caring about the mass culture.

So where does that leave me and Cat on a Sunday night? Not, I hope, beating ourselves up over every plastic coffee lid. Not making the weekly photo into a ritual of liberal self-flagellation. But developing habits. Learning to see, and to act, but in ways that feel sustainable, even energizing. Choosing the plastic-free product when possible, or going with homemade, but also rolling with the occasional slip-ups and the inevitable shrink-wrap. Doing the weigh-in on Friday instead of Sunday, to leave a buffer for when we can’t get to it on time.

And reminding ourselves and each other, over and over again, If it’s a misery, we’re doing it wrong.

Leadings and Stops and Gods and Trees

2010-07-02T11:11:00.001-04:00

Part 2 of 3.
(Part 1 is here.)

What does it mean to listen to a god? What does it mean to say gods or spirits talk to us?

Well, for the most part, it's subtle even when it's life-changing, and it's nothing someone with a good, hard case of skepticism couldn't explain away without even trying. Which would be a shame, because listening to and speaking with the world of Spirit is a source of so much meaning and wisdom and strength. I know some people need to go without it; I need not to.

I remember, for instance, the first time I "heard" a tree speaking to me, specifically.

My daughter and I were living in a tiny little apartment only a few streets from the downtown of the small village where we lived. I had a car, but we rarely needed to use it: in good weather, we could walk almost anywhere we needed to go, from my daughter's day care center to my office and work. I knew all the short cuts and back streets, and I enjoyed walking everywhere.

Which is what I was doing, ambling along a cracked stretch of sidewalk on a back street in town, when the maple tree "spoke" to me.

I say "spoke" because there isn't really a word for what I sensed. It came out of the blue, at a moment when I wasn't looking to have any kind of unusual or paranormal experience. I was just walking down a public street in broad daylight, with little kids and barking dogs and the occasional whoosh of a passing car, when all of a sudden a large, ample-limbed maple tree, sort of went, "Mmmmm."

At me.

No, it wasn't a sound. Not really. What it was like most, perhaps, was the way a cat who likes you will brush up against your legs as it walks by. Only I was the one walking past the tree, and it wasn't a touch in a physical sense. More like a sense of the tree's life, the tree's being, brushing up against mine. And you know? The tree had one--a life, a being, maybe even a self--and if it wasn't exactly an "awareness" in there, it was something. And that something was friendly, and it had just done something a lot like a friendly greeting. Toward me. Personally.

Which was startling. And cool.

So I stopped, turned back toward the tree, and (glancing over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching) stood with my arms and my shoulders and my aura open, relaxed my mind and my heart as best I could, and thought something like "Hello," back at the tree.

And then walked home.

Almost all of my encounters with Spirit are a lot like the encounter with that tree. As in, they happen in broad daylight, during the course of ordinary life; they are usually non-verbal; and often they are as simple as a sense of another being who also seems to be sensing me. Sometimes that being or spirit seems very large--as large as an entire hillside or forest--and sometimes, it seems very small.

This feeling is a lot like the feeling I sometimes get in Quaker meeting, at the touch of a hand against mine, or on my shoulder. Sometimes there can be such tenderness and connection even through the most fleeting of glances after worship that it can stand in quite effectively for a long, warm bear hug from a friend of many years.

I have come to trust that the love and tenderness we feel for each other in the silence is real and solid and true. That doesn't mean other human messiness in incapable of coming along and messing it up, or that Quaker meetings are utopias.

What I think it means is that, sometimes, for a few moments, we are privileged to be able to see into one another's deepest selves, into the part that connects with God.

What about God, then?

For a moment, I will set aside the various forms of communication I've had over the years with Pagan deities, and focus on She Who Gathers Us in Quaker meeting.

I've written before about what the touch of Spirit is like for me in a Quaker meeting. Sometimes, She is a flood of Light, and a rush of such simple, physical joy that I feel the way I used to feel at four years old, playing outside in my sandbox on a sunny morning. Other times, what I feel is simply a trembling that seems to well up from the heart of everything--a deep, resonant vibration that reminds me of what it felt like to stand on a bridge over a Vermont river in flood, feeling the pavement and the railings quiver. That impression is of a great power, waiting within all things and discoverable by the lightest finger-touch on the surface of everyday reality.

Sometimes there is just a sweetness and an ache in my heart. (Despite the fact that I feel self-conscious about how affected it may look to do so, I often worship with my hands over my heart, focusing on and feeding that sensation, that God-feeling, within me.)

So much of my experience of Spirit is physical, is in images and metaphors for non-verbal experiences. At times I remember what it was like as a girl, to sail alone on a lake in Maine on my parent's Sailfish--a sailing surf-board guided by a wooden daggerboard thrust down through the center of the boat to act as a keel. When I feel Spirit moving and stirring in my heart, I remember how that daggerboard used to vibrate and thrum, almost moaning with the force that moved the boat, carving it forward through the waves. I feel as though that daggerboard is vibrating again, only this time, it passes through my heart, laboring to keep me on course as Spirit moves me.

And at other times, I think of myself as a cork, bobbing so lightly on the surface of the water of Spirit that I am almost more a creature of air than water. A needle, magnetized and passed through me, can spin me and guide me easily toward North, effortlessly and freely, as long as I can stay light and open to Spirit, to God.

Some leadings are light, drawing me quickly and easily, like that cork-and-needle compass. I might, after worship, feel a nudge to speak to this person, or to that. I might understand what someone has to say to me in a way I would not have otherwise done; I am more open to what That of God within that person may have to say to me. The sensation of this is light and free and gentle, and I am usually left feeling glad and good.

Other leadings are strong, hard, and heavy, like the action of the daggerboard of a sail boat reaching in a powerful wind. The work at New England Yearly Meeting sessions, laboring with other Friends around our relationship with Friends United Meeting and our concern for GLBTQ Friends has been like that: powerful and hard and strong, laboring to stay low in the water of Spirit, and feeling the ache of God's love and pain over our injustices and intolerance of one another, even in the name of justice. This feeling is hard--but I would not trade it for anything. It is full of sadness, but deep and rich with love. Though it exhausts me to carry it for very long, I crave it beyond anything else in the world of Spirit.

Now, none of these feelings, these sensations, come to me with much verbal content. I don't hear a voice saying, "Go talk to Joe Smith," or "Anna Jones needs you to tell her about X," or whatever. It's more either an easy mobility to be lightly moved to where Spirit (I think, I guess) wants me to be, or it's a deep groundedness that lets me stay there, even in the face of pain or conflict. It is more like a balanced stance and a readiness than the spiritual equivalent of kata; my movements are not directed, I'm just open to responding quickly and intuitively from a spiritually centered place.

Most leadings are like that. They are not so much guidance to, say, go to Africa and teach English classes there (though wouldn't that be fun!) as they are a way of keeping myself open so that, when the God-in-the-world brushes lightly up against me, like the spirit of a tree, I will be ready; and when people with need pass me during the course of the day, I will see their need, and, if it is my turn to meet it, I will do so.

Doesn't that sound pleasant? Doesn't that sound good? And it is--almost entirely, even when it is hard, or tiring.

But a lot of the time, it's not enough; or I get too bollixed up and distracted with the business of daily life and my so-important SELF that I lose the center of it, and no longer notice the gentle nudges and tugs of those leadings.

For those occasions, there is the divine 2x4. There are stops, as the Quakers term them. And those are important, too.

(To be continued.)

Image credits: Old Maple Tree, Jemima Malkki.
Wooden sailing boat Kleine Freiheit, courtesy Wikimedia Commons