Quaker Pagan Reflections

Photo Credit: David Hawgood I was talking to my grown daughter on the phone the other day. I told her that one of the unhappy things about getting older is that loss becomes just part of the scenery of life. I told her that I'd spent years of my life learning not to sweat the small stuff, the losses and frustrations that don't really matter, only to arrive at a time in my life that's filled with losses that do matter. Live long enough, and loss, real loss, is inevitable, after all. We know it, but we live in the happy illusion in our youth that it is not so, that death and disease are the aberrations. Middle age knows they are the rule, and that soon or late they come for everyone we love. But, I told her, there's an up side, too. The older I get, the better able to weather grief I seem to become. It turns out that in this, as in so many things, practice helps. Grief is a skill that grows better with use, if we dare to trust it--to feel it, acknowledge i...

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

To A. This isn't written for you. You don't need to take care of me over this one; this is written for myself, and it is how I cope. I love you forever. I remember when I was small, not understanding why the adults around me were so serious. Everyone talked about how hard life was, and I thought that was a sign of how ridiculous adults could be. That says a lot for how good a job the adults around me did, on the whole, caring for me as a child, and what a happy childhood I really had. But I also remember when I learned for the first time about death. I was about eight years old. My parents had been away for the weekend, and they'd left us overnight with our babysitter's family, which had been all right except for the fact that the sheets all smelled funny and, in the middle of the night, the world was very gray and I was very homesick. But when they picked me and my younger brother up in the morning, about halfway home from the babysitter's, they broke the new...

I have a vivid memory, from a Quaker retreat I attended not so long ago. I remember coming across a friend, sitting quietly in a patch of sunlight, paging through his Bible. The sense of depth and worship that surrounded him was as rich as the silence in a forest, and I envied him his ability to sink so deeply into communion with his God, and to stay there so comfortably and restfully. (I often find that, after any extended period of worship, I need an even more extended period of silliness and ordinariness. I love the depths, but often find myself unable to bear them for long.) Today was one of those days in meeting for worship that the sense of living silence rolled out to meet me as I passed through the door. That feeling--the patient, watchful stillness--is sometimes as palpable as a fur cloak laid over my shoulders, and at times, I find myself savoring it a moment or two before I go to my seat. I love to stand and feel the warm light of morning on my face, and the even warmer ...

I stayed home for meeting for worship today. The two acres of woods immediately behind our house have not been woods for very long. They are still in that stage of growth where the trees are mostly of the same age, young trees that are stretching their heads up as high as the y can, seeking some light and air, jockeying for position among their fellows in a very close race. Only at the edges of the old field are there old trees: oaks, a hundred years old perhaps, planted behind (and apparently in) the old boundary wall. These woods do not belong to us. Of course, that is the nature of living things; properly speaking, all living things belong to themselves. However, the non-profit that is the paper owner of the woods maintains a loop path in the young woods behind our home, with a fire circle and benches in the middle of it. As far as I can tell, neither path nor fire circle get very much use. Only once have I ever seen another human being on the path, and the fire pit is almost ...

This is it... the last weekend before I return to full time teaching in a high school English classroom. And, if past years are anything to go by, teaching English will live me feeling wrung out and used up at the end of each day, somewhat resentful at the end of each week that I have such a narrow little window in which to fit the rest of my life. I don't want it to be like that. That's not new. But the both the desire and the challenge is keener now, since buying this house. I've mentioned before how important the woods behind the house are to me. I grew up surrounded by woods, and I've longed to live in the woods ever since I left them, to go out and try to create an adult life. As a child, I at least believed that I lived a life with a kind of balance. My parents had important, meaningful work, but also friends, time outdoors, a house and a garden they were able to take good care of... it looked good, and I both wanted a life like that, and have been afraid I...

So. As previously hinted, I do have more to say about New England Yearly Meeting. However, my ability to say it has been temporarily compromised by two issues: technical difficulties, and finally moving into that new/old house I've mentioned here before. Unless my personal life and Peter's holds interest for you, you might want to skip this one. The technical difficulties I mentioned are entirely the normal thing in this technological age; when we arranged to transfer our current telephone and Internet service from our old house to our new one, across town, the telephone company gladly accepted the commission, without mentioning that they don't actually provide Internet service in our new part of town. At all. Three weeks and six or seven phone calls later, we learned exactly why the carefully scheduled transfer of services was so unsuccessful when it came to our Web access. While I realize that it would be unusual for a service to refer customers to their competition...