Author Archives: Patricia Wild

September 10, 2012: “Are You Better Off Than You Were 4 Years Ago?”

It’s the wrong question.

Or, rather, it’s the wrong question if asked as a referendum re Obama.

Is Obama responsible for Citizens United? No.

Is he responsible for the NRA’s death-grip on Congress? No.

The Kardashians? Or weird and terrifying weather? No.

Racism? And how it impacts our criminal justice system? (In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s analysis re Obama’s constraints made me sit up and pay attention.)

That my beloved father died two years ago? C’mon!

Indeed, I heard in Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention a poignant reminder: “Hey! I’m the president. Not God.”

Here, in Bubbleland,* I feel God/Spirit moving. The real God—who shakes and moves through us. Whose love means that, yes, over the past four years my life HAS become better:

My family thrives. Which is another way to say: Grace happens.

My (diverse, integrated) neighborhood’s better connected—we even have young families living on the street, now. (How clear is that of God’s blessing? That parents have chosen to raise their children, here!) And one small action, a raised-bed vegetable garden in a neighbor’s back yard (we have little sun in our own), points the way to other shared, sustainable neighborhood initiatives.

Bubbletown streets are filled with bikes and hybrids, now; each a reassurance that, yes, the paradigm is shifting.

And speaking of paradigms, I sense that, WAY too slowly, the “Get tough on crime” mindset is morphing. And I take strength from my black and brown brothers and sisters who know, in a way that I never will know, that God’s time in not human time. And, like they have been doing/continue to do, to “hold on.” And, like them, keep showing up, keep praying.

More and more over the past four years I feel, my meeting’s been asking Spirit: What is asked of us? And listening for answers.

So: How does the truth Prosper among you?

 

* Bubbleland: My tiny Somerville/Cambridge world.

 

September 6, 2012: The opposite of love is . . .

. . . Fear.

That came to me so powerfully at meeting this week.

It’s so easy to “feel the love” when I’m in worship, with my family, in community, sitting around the flickering candles of our Wednesday evening circle for “the formerly incarcerated and those who care about them.”

But . . . (Don’t even have to finish that sentence, do I?!)

Just finished the “astonishing” The Hare with Amber Eyes , a memoir about the Ephrussi family. But also about netsuke—tiny, exquisite Japanese carvings once used as toggles. So have been thinking about carrying in my pocket/on my person some thing that I can touch (the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund De Waal, is a potter and has lots to say about touching things as a way of learning) to, ahem, feel the love. To be  sustained and comforted when I find myself in that scary and dark valley.

Sure beats a hairshirt!

 

 

Labor Day, 2012: Underneath It All

Remember when Clinton was asked, “Boxers or briefs?”

Why do I ask?

Because yesterday, after meeting for worship, as I was walking down Brattle Street towards Harvard Square, a group of college-aged Mormon women passed me on the sidewalk. (There is a Mormon church directly across the Longfellow green from Friends Meeting at Cambridge— so Quakers and LDS-ers often find ourselves in the same place at the same time.) Struggling, as I do these days, with super-anxiety about the election, their high-heels, lots of make-up, bouncy-curled ‘dos and Sunday-best clothes depressed me.

Tagging along behind them,  smelling their perfume, I found myself thinking some very dark, very weird stuff. (Because that’s how anxiety works.) “Oh, dear!” I thought, “getting all gussied up like that looks like fun. Appealing.” ( I suspect part of me was just plain jealous they were tripping down Cambridge’s notoriously treacherous sidewalk in heels, no problem!)

And, in that weird, crazy place I immediately connected that appeal, such a precious commodity these days, with the presidential race and wondered: “Is this how Romney wins? He taps into this let’s play dress-up for real thing?”

Crazy, right? But it gets worse. Because I live in this wonderful Somerville/Cambridge Bubble where most people don’t dress like they’re going to the most fancy wedding in their whole lives just to go to church, I couldn’t even trust myself to say: C’mon, Patricia! Because I KNOW I don’t really understand what going on in, say, Ohio. (Just to mention a critically important, must-win-to-win state.) I really don’t know how the sight of that gaggle of gussied-up women would play in Cincinnati or Cleveland.

But just as I was, once again, sinking into “Oh, God, we’re doomed and I have to move to Canada,” a tattooed guy on a bike whisked past. A tattooed angel. Because at the sight of him I remembered: Oh, right! Under those fancy clothes those women are wearing Mormon underwear!

Now I have no intention of getting all snarky about “temple garments.” I have no intention of making fun of Mormons. What I want to do is this: Remind myself, as I was reminded, yesterday, remind YOU that, yes, women have come a long way, baby. We can wear our underwear on the outside if we so choose (thanks, Madonna!).

That verb “choose”? It’s ours.

So I’m trusting that on November 6th, a significant percentage women of this country, with or without make-up or high heels, will make the right choice.

 

 

August 30, 2012: Oh! So THIS is what all the fuss is about?!

We absorb, we learn in so many ways.

At a recent Meeting for Theism with Attention to Jesus (at Friends Meeting at Cambridge), our attention centered on the Loaves and Fishes passage. Skillfully led by Chris Jorgenson*, we interacted with chapter and verse in a variety of modalities. We listened. We read. We meditated. We spoke. (We might have written but didn’t have time.) And we stood to offer a gesture illustrating a favorite verse; in other words, we embodied.

Embodiment. Have been thinking about that. So wanted to post this:

I was raised a Unitarian-Universalist—which means that in Sunday School and in sermons, Jesus always seemed to get lumped together with Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and other “great prophets.” The Bible, I recall being taught, was a crudely translated, politicized text and not to be trusted. Depictions of Jesus in art and movies or plays seemed to depict either a pretty/ pretty simpy guy or gruesome and bloody.

So although I now embrace Jesus’s teachings—thank you, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time—I’ve spent years not getting Jesus!

Until I met Ralph Greene.

The occasion? He was the leader at a NEYM workshop entitled “Civil/Revolutionary Strife and Radical Witness.” More and more pulled to radical witness but not knowing a thing about Ralph Greene, I signed up.

So did over 30 other people! Which completely threw our “befuddled and tongue-tied” leader! (Who then proceeded, over 2 days, to give an excellent presentation on Benjamin Lay, Ralph Sandiford and William Hunt.)

Let me be clear: I’m NOT saying this elderly, Quaker pastor from Downeast Maine is Jesus Christ. I’m saying that for me, this gentle and kind man so embodies that love and compassion girding Christianity that for the first time in my life, I got all that devotion to Jesus Christ! I’m saying that the moment this thin, tall, slightly stooped guy in a baseball cap and chinos walked in the room I felt that love. I experienced a life spent in service of the ideal: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

And, I guess I’m saying, to strive to embody such love as we cheerfully and gently walk over the earth just might be the most radical act of all!

*Much-loved member of FMC, former coordinator for youth programs for New England Yearly Meeting (NEYM), Alternatives to Violence trainer; the list goes on and. . .

August 16, 2012: “To Friends Everywhere” (Continued)

[And welcome to the world, Lilian Jane Sanchez!]

When Quakers gather for their yearly, regional gathering, they collectively write an “epistle” which sums up what they’d done in their time together. So as New England’s yearly gathering progressed, epistles from yearly meetings from around the world were read aloud. Which always began: “To Friends everywhere.”

This year, the epistle from Cuban YM was read aloud by one of the visiting Friends from Cuba. (In Spanish, of course. We heard and sang many tongues at YM) And I had a little frisson I’d like to post:

I GOT our global, Quaker connection. I got our solidarity with the Quakers of Africa, of Australia, of Indiana;  Everywhere! I GOT that all over the world, people as hard-working and centered as the people surrounding me in a too-cold auditorium in a college in Rhode Island work just as hard on issues of peace, social justice, interrupting racism, healing this broken planet.

It’s so easy to feel overwhelmed. it’s so easy to wonder, “What can I do?” It’s so easy to think that Quaker witness is well-meaning but kind of pathetic.

And it’s so wonderful to FEEL our collective strength!

August 14, 2012: “To Friends Everywhere” (Introduction)

Hit the ground running since returning from this year’s New England Yearly Meeting (the annual, early-August, week-long gathering of Quakers from all six New England states.) A weekend spent with visiting, beloved grandchildren—and their equally cherished parents, a very successful but exhausting block party on Saturday (I was one of the organizers), a family-strong effort on Sunday to help my daughter Hope and her husband, Kristian, ready their house for their just-about-due baby and, tragically, yesterday, learning that a wonderful young man from our weekly sharing circle had died from a bee sting so, stunned and grief-stricken, attending his wake and prayer service last night.

God!

So much as I’d hoped to write about a moment at YM, simply haven’t had time. Or energy.

But as one line from “Swimming to the Other Side” says (a song we sang a lot at YM):  “I’m preparing to do my part.”

And I THINK my part is, among other things, to post at this site.

July 23, 2012: “Could we but see”

Fra Giovanni’s Christmas Prayer

I salute you! There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much that, while I cannot give, you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take Heaven.

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in the present moment. Take Peace.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach is joy. Take Joy!

And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you, with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

Went to a lovely baby shower*, yesterday, at the home of one of the hostess’s grandmother, an antique-filled, sprawling and gracious home on a Concord (MA) hillside overlooking the family’s farm. And while delighted to be in such a stunning setting with all four daughters, my mother and sister, one of my dearest friends and many, many friends of the guest of honor, like most Americans, I grieved the Aurora massacre. How blessed we are to be so carelessly and easefully seated together under a magnificent tree sipping summery drinks, I thought.
Inside that lovely home, framed, over the downstairs bathroom sink in a spot you couldn’t miss every time you washed your hands hung  a hand-written version of the above prayer by Fra  Giovanni. I recognized this prayer immediately: I’d come upon a version** of it last week as I’d sorted memorabilia from Friends Meeting at Cambridge memorials. Here’s how that version read:
The gloom of the world is but a shadow.
behind it, within our reach, is joy.
There is radiance and glory in the darkness,
could we but see. . . 
And I was comforted to think that all over the world, hung in places you can’t miss noticing, are similar acknowledgements of deep, deep pain and transcendent joy.
*For daughter Hope, who is due at the end of August.
**  From Polly Thayer Starr’s memorial program, October 29, 2006

July 20, 2012: “. . . and it’s One! Two!. . . “

Is is possible that a human heart will not stop beating but can endure, in a single day, the televised sunbathers of [not legible] and the faces of Tyre’s inhabitants going through their burned, destroyed, and disemboweled streets? Yes, our hearts are doing it, and nobody has yet died of anguish. (Jacobo Timmerman, in a 1982 New Yorker piece on the Lebanon/Israeli War)

For thirty years, since hastily copying out that quote, I’ve been inwardly calling such confusing, heart-challenging, observed from afar experiences my “Jacobo Timmerman moments.”  Had one last night at a Red Sox game.

Yesterday morning,  I’d listened to mothers and lawyers and others who regularly receive phone calls from Massachusetts inmates eloquently complain about the excessive costs and lousy-quality phone service they must endure. (This was at a hearing run by a state agency that’s supposed to oversee such things.) Talk about anguish! Person after person, most of them African American, made it painfully clear that phone calls are, literally, a life line. “My son needs to talk to me every day,” one mother explained. And then matter-of-factly explained his medical/mental health history which made a daily phone call to his mother so important. An incredibly expensive phone call, mind you. A phone call VERY likely to be cut off.  Reconnecting, which may happen several times during a conversation, costs an additional $3.00 fee each time. Which this poor, grieving mother has to pay.  “The Department of Correction will tell you it uses this money to pay for programs. I have no problem with programs for my clients,” one lawyer noted. “But to pay for them on the back of the most poor people of our state is unfair.” And, yes, several people referenced the Habitual Offenders bill, aka as the Three Strikes Bill, which was probably being voted upon and passed at that very same time, as a potential source for many MORE frustrated but forced-to-pay phone customers!

And, no, my heart did not stop beating.

But last night, singing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” at Fenway Park during the seventh inning stretch, I again wondered how is it any of us can endure these wild and lurching moments when we simultaneously contemplate the pain of “Threes strikes, you’re out”  while joyously singing those words with 37,000 other people? (it was, BTW, a joyous game.)

 

July 12, 2012: “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

At meeting for worship last Sunday, we heard  (maybe too much?) ministry re tribes/tribal identity.

So I was kinda forced to think about tribes. And here’s where I got:

Seems like one, very important organizing principle of a tribe is this: Everyone in that tribe knows the same stories. (Do the words “Bucky F-ing Dent!” mean anything to you? If so, you and I are in the same tribe.)

The day before all that ministry and pondering, David and I saw “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the first story-telling re climate-change movie I’ve seen, certainly the first non-documentary, non-urban-setting apocalyptic film I’ve ever seen.

I thought I recognized something else: the prequel to “The Shambhala Warrior Prophecy.” Here’s a video—with a way-too-earnest intro—of Joanna Macy telling that tale. (If you want to skip right to the Aesop’s Fable, the moral-of-the-story ending, here is it: The two weapons of the Shambhala warriors are compassion and insight.)

I invite you to see the movie, watch the video. So we can be in the same tribe.

 

June 28, 2012: Where Are You, Batia?

(And I hope you’re doing OK)

The other night after the SCA film (June 20th post), when people were doing the Just Standing Around Thing, I took my leave by saying: “Well, I gotta get home and read more about Iranian women.”

NOT an exit line worthy of Nora Ephron. (Yes. I was/am a huge fan and mourn her as if we’d been friends.)

Truth is, the “riveting” book I couldn’t wait to get home to, Wanted Women: Faith, Lies & the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Aafia Siddiqui, isn’t about Iranian women. (Pakistani and Somali, respectively) And I knew that when I said it.

So, I wondered, walking home, why such a stupid—and unnecessary—remark? Sure, I’m particularly drawn to films or memoirs or biographies of Muslim women—especially women from Iran. Still. . .

And then it came to me (Lots of things come to me while I’m walking): Because, years ago, when I was a counselor at an adult learning center, I’d worked with a young woman from Iran. Her name was Batia.

Ironically, Batia is Jewish; most of her stories centered around that fact. So, I reasoned, walking home, my fascination with Iranian women hasn’t been completely about learning about what it means to be a Muslim woman.  Something else has been going on.

And I think it’s this: Batia is not an abstraction. Once upon a time, we connected. She’s not a character in “A Separation.” She’s not words on a page. And although I have had no word from her in over ten years, Something very deep remains.

Shalom Aleikhem, Batia.

 

June 20, 2012: Narrative(s) from The Left

Last night I joined a smallish group of people to watch “Growthbusters: Hooked on Growth” (wish more people had come*; the film’s too dense yet excellent.) Afterward, Boston writer and activist  Jack Thorndike gave a brief talk. (Jack also attends Friends Meeting at Cambridge.) Still reeling from the film and struck by how much his body language reminded me of his daughter’s—I’ve been lucky enough to be her First Day School teacher a couple of years—I finally tuned in to what Jack was urging: that people from the Left, people of conscience, climate change activists, et al, share our narratives.

So here’s one:

A week ago, I again went to the Davis Square farmers’ market to collect signatures for the “Budget 4 All” (for Massachusetts) referendum. Only this time, it was POURING.

Loathe to get signature sheets wet—we signature collectors had been warned not to spill coffee or damage the sheets in any way—and not possessing enough hands to hold an umbrella, hold a clipboard and, being me, wildly gesture as I explained what this initiative’s all about, I was about to quit when a young woman holding a large box of tomato, basil, and other herb seedlings, walked up to me.

“Where’s your pen?” she asked after politely standing in the rain listening to my (hurried) spiel.

“You really want to do this?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

So like two contortionists just beginning to work on their act, she still clutching her box, we eventually managed to get her vital info on the dampened sheet.

“You’re amazing,” I told her. “I’m gonna blog about you.”

Done.

 

*This film, shown at Somerville’s Center for Arts at the Armory, was the last of the series co-sponsored by Somerville Climate Action and State Representative Denise Provost.