Quaker Pagan Reflections

Writing Cheerfully on the Web , an anthology of Quaker writing, is now available for order . And Quaker Pagan Reflections is in it! Edited by one of my favorite Quaker bloggers of all time, Liz Oppenheimer , it also features the work of many of my other favorite Quaker bloggers, including Chris Mohr , Robin Mohr , C. Wess Daniels , Aj Schwanz , Peggy Senger Parsons , Micah Bales , Will Taber , and Peterson Toscano . Sections include Ministry & Worship, That Of God, Convergent Friends, and Love As A Testimony. Why should you buy a copy of this book? Well, besides the fact that I'm in it (and, did I mention, I am in it? ) there's the fact that all of the featured writers do a terrific job at voicing some part of the complicated choir of the modern Religious Society of Friends. Absolutely there will be points of view that will surprise you, maybe even provoke you a bit. But, if you are interested in Quakers, the book will offer a juicy, quirky, lively, and sometimes even...

Ask me where I feel Pagan, and I will hold out my hands. Ask me where I feel Quaker, and I will touch my heart. The other day, at my Quaker meeting, I had just come in the door before meeting for worship and was quietly greeting friends. I was, however, inwardly, already making the transition to worship in my mind, and as I was happily smiling at a friend who had just walked into the room, my hand found its way over my heart. My friend, thinking I was giving him a kind of New Age salute, returned the gesture. My hand dropped a moment, sheepishly; I am far more New Englander than New Ager, and hate like anything to seem grandiose or self-dramatizing. The gesture, as a gesture, seems terribly precious to me. Nonetheless, a moment later, I noticed my hand had returned to its position over my heart. See, there's this thing about my hands. There's this thing about my heart. There's this thing about the sensuality of Spirit, and the physicality of prayer. The thing about my...

I am just a tiny bit of a control freak. I'm not just the kind of person who alphabetizes the books on my bookcase, but for years, while I was studying Wiccan history, I had the books in our Pagan bookshelf organized by date of first publication. (There were little white date stickers on all the spines, too.) It bothered me a bit, deciding whether or not to list books like Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles by date of first publication or by date of first translation into English. This probably tells you more than you wanted to know, but I'm going somewhere with this--hang on. This past First Day was my day to "hold" meeting for worship at my Quaker meeting. All Quaker meetings do things slightly differently, but at most unprogrammed meetings like mine, the signal that the period of silent worship has ended is a handshake that passes around the room. When I first began attending Mt. Toby, I thought that that handshake just happened at the right time; that the ...

Many Quakers seem to get a lot of sustenance from the Bible. A Friend/friend of mine shared with me a few pages from her prayer journal the other day, and I was really struck by her careful, prayerful, Spirit-filled reading of the Psalms. I read the Bible, too , but not like that. I attack the Bible the way I would tackle an immense Rubix cube, or a crossword puzzle in a foreign language. It's an exhilarating intellectual challenge, and it's got me digging through history with the excitement of a puppy finding new smells in the woods...but it's not prayerful, and it does not, by any stretch of the imagination, bring me closer to anything I could call the living G*d. My friend's prayer journal got me asking myself, what is there that I could be reading with the same kind of attentiveness that Christ-centered Friends bring to the Bible? (What Cat, in a post a few months ago, called Lectio Divina .) What I came up with were mostly poets (even though I read very little poet...

Some things that feel odd at the time just get odder after the fact, in hindsight. There's this thing that has happened to me a number of times since I became a Quaker. I haven't heard any other Quakers talk about it, but I bet I'm not alone in having experienced it. For want of a better name, I've come to think of it as the Quaker confessional. Talk to any average person on the street, and if they know one thing about Quakers beyond the oats, they know that Quakers are opposed to war. Probably they think of bonnets, opposition to slavery, and serious Christianity too, but they will almost certainly know that Quakers are opposed to war. Which certainly makes sense where I'm concerned, since it was "war and the rumors of war" that suddenly and dramatically convinced me to become a Quaker. What I mean by the "Quaker confessional" is this: from the time that I became a Quaker in my heart--which was well ahead of my becoming formally a member of t...

I have a hard time writing about Herne . I think it's because I often try to explain him, or at least the history of my relationship with him. And that's just too big a job, and maybe not one even suited for the kind of stories I know how to tell. So I'll just say this, with no explanation. And maybe, incomplete as it is, it will stand better than something more reasoned would do... When the time comes for me to die, I hope that they will take me outdoors. I hope that it will be one of those unseasonably warm days in early October, when the sky is a clean, bald blue, and the maple trees are in flames and the oak trees have begun to smolder. And I hope that someone will lay me down in a big field, with trees all around and the sun in the sky overhead, so I can feel the heat and the life of it in my body all day long. And then, at twilight, I would like to be moved to the edge of the woods. Let someone kindle up a big bonfire, and let me see the flames lighting up...

Photo by Akuppa JohnWigham Have I mentioned lately that I love my monthly meeting? I do. Often, when I speak of my sense of God/the gods (whether using Pagan or Quaker vocabulary) I speak of my connections to people, to community. I do find that my lived experience of God most often comes through to me in encounters with community. Frail as we are, foolish as we are, it is in the refractions of human beings that I most often glimpse God. This is about one of those glimpses. Two weeks ago, in meeting for worship, Alan T. stood with a message. When Alan rose, he spoke, as he generally does, in calm, unpretentious tones, just giving us the truth of his experience, turning it over in his mind. Like many of us, Alan struggles with a family that is not always accepting of his spiritual journey. Like many of us, Alan still tries to speak about this part of his life with his family, his parents, whose version of Christianity is concrete, specific, and unyielding. One part of...