Quaker Pagan Reflections

This past weekend, Mt. Toby Friends Meeting held a weekend-long retreat. About sixty Friends gathered at Woolman Hill, a Quaker retreat center that’s about half an hour to the north. Many of us stayed there Friday and Saturday nights; others commuted. The Friends attending included slightly more than half the regular attenders at our meeting. One of the queries that was asked early on in the gathering was, “What do you most long for in your faith family?” Some of us felt more comfortable with the phrase “spiritual community,” but the question was valid for all of us. What I said I most craved—what I have been longing for my whole life, really—are spiritual intimacy and a sense of shared meaningful work. I have had this at a couple of points in my life. At Oberlin I felt like organic gardening and left-wing Christianity could save the world, and in the Oberlin Farm Co-op I felt like we were beginning to do it. In my 30’s, in the Church of the Sacred Earth, I felt like we were inv...

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 o...

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 ...

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.

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.) ...

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 ...

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 su...