June 24, 2009: Blame the rain?

[Background to today’s blog; much of this info is discussed in the last chapter of Way Opens. Scroll down to the * if you already know about FMC’s inner workings.]

A few years ago, 8 to 12 people doing what’s sometimes called prison ministry, formed a quasi-support group at Friends Meeting at Cambridge (FMC) and called this group, what else, Prison Ministry. These people were visiting prisoners in jail, writing letters to men and women behind bars, advocating for a more just criminal justice system, volunteering in agencies working with families impacted by violent crime, etc., etc. Uncomfortable with the word “ministry,” this group, which meets once a month, is now called Prison Fellowship (PF).

Over time, PF, while continuing to support its members’ individual efforts, took on a new role: sponsoring talks and lectures about the criminal justice system and sharing the stories of individuals directly affected by what some call “the very criminal justice system” for the entire Meeting’s edification. PF also proposed FMC offer a weekly meal-and-sharing opportunity for the formerly incarcerated which is now in its second year and has attracted eight to twelve regular attenders. My husband (who cooks amazing meals for these weekly, powerful, community-building gatherings) and I attend faithfully.

* About a year ago, in the Spirit-led, organic way that these things happen, three people from Prison Fellowship found themselves raising funds, mostly from the larger FMC community, to bail out a young man who’d been held in jail for three years. This oh-my-God-we-actually-DID-this! has led PF to wonder: Should we create a bail fund? A legal defense fund?  Both? Neither? (Twice, through PF members’ efforts, money has also been raised to pay for lawyers, too.)

Over the past few months, at our monthly potluck-plus-meetings, PF has gone around and around on this should-we/ shouldn’t we. Lots of good meals, little progress. Last month, someone suggested we do a kind of personal assessment, ask ourselves what’s keeping us back, what’s a concern, fear, ” a stop,” as they say.

So I did. And here’s what I discovered when I listened to that still, small voice: Given how many people could use bail and/or legal defense funds, including, God forbid, people I love, people I break bread with every Wednesday night, how do you decide who gets what? I am simply not up to such a challenge. It’s too much.

Usually an energetic and optimistic person, I prefaced my gloomy remarks (last night) with: “Maybe it’s the rain but. . . ” (We haven’t seen sunshine around here FOR A LONG TIME!)

But in the organic, Spirit-led way that these meetings go, another PF member suggested that the decision-making process re who gets what should be the responsibility of a wider group, including, she suggested, mothers whose children had either been the victims of the perpetrators of violence and people from the Wednesday night group!

Yes. Once again I’ve assumed primary responsibility for some endeavor. Once again I have decided it’s all up to me! Once again I have failed to appreciate the power of community.

Can’t blame the rain for THAT!

June 8, 2009: On Flannery O’Connor and Race

Having recently taken a workshop on unlikable characters (Takeaway: Don’t get hung up on some readers’ need for sympathetic characterswhen writing fiction.), I have both created a main character who steals from her generous landlady/employer and reread Flannery O’Connor. Talk about unlikable characters!

O’Connor was Southern—as is my sticky-fingered protagonist—and self-identified as a Catholic writer, two more reasons why this Quaker fiction writer decided to read her again.

But, oh my: Much as I had yearned to learn from O’Connor’s art, her treatment of her black characters appalled me. Hoping I’d find something more, dare I say enlightened, I read her letters, too. Which, sad to say, made her worse in my eyes. Example: In one letter, she tells a story and uses “colored people.” In another letter, to a different friend, she tells the same story but says “niggers.” So don’t tell me she was a product of her time and place. She knew better.

Tons of writers have written about O’Connor and race (Check out Links for an excellent but looong piece.) I want to add my two cents:

My personal theory re why this severely ill (lupus), Southern, white, female, Catholic writer living during the civil rights movement (1925-1964) was so drawn to the grotesque, so convinced that the South was “Christ-haunted” and so clueless that it was, in fact, slavery-haunted, is that she was absolutely all of those defining words AND Irish-American.

My hero James Carroll wrote a wonderful piece in the Boston Globe today re Irish Catholics in light of the recent abuse scandal in Ireland. His point was that to the Irish Catholics, oppressed by the British and decimated by famine, “the Catholic Church had such a grip on the Irish psyche, if not soul. . . ”

No wonder her stories are so fiercely concerned with redemption! And Original Sin. No wonder she believed that “the Catholic writer, in so far as he [sic] has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that is, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.” No “cafeteria-style Catholicism” for our Flannery, no sirree. She puts ALL of it on her tray. Add all that painful Irish history/baggage to her Irish-American, day-to-day struggle to be Catholic in small-town, Bible Belt Georgia and, maybe, just maybe, you’ve got yourself someone so caught up in her own spiritual identity and survival, she was absolutely blind to the horror of racism.

Maybe.

June 2, 2009: Diversity as a Survival Tool

Last night I went to my first Transition Somerville meeting. Still a little unclear on the concept, I’m pretty sure this group is concerned with the peak oil crisis and climate change and living gently on this earth and, my personal fav, building community to  collectively create a brave new post-peak-oil world. (I’ve ordered the Transition Handbook so will be way more informed after I read it.)
It was the kind of meeting where people dared to say things like, “This is just my intuition but. . . ” and then saying something right-on/brilliant or “I read this thing in a novel which has nothing to do with climate change but I think one thing in this book might be a good idea for our ArtBeat table.” And it was. It was the kind of group that wondered if using either  Google or Yahoo to keep in touch wasn’t relying too heavily on computers and what if power failed—in other words, allowing the possibility of all hell breaking loose down the road informing the group’s decisions here and now.
I loved it.
Coming home, the much-repeated words of diversity and resiliency very much on my mind, I read of the Air France Airbus jetliner presumably lost in the Atlantic. Not sure why—maybe it was intuition—but Something moved me to read the NYT’s comments re this tragedy. Here’s the one made me sit up and take notice:
I always had concerns about Airbus design of their aircraft. They use fly by wire technology. They have 3 redundant computer systems to control the airplane including flight controls. It is nice on paper and very efficient, except a systemic failure like getting hit by lightning fries all the computers.

Boeing still uses a combination of mechanical and hydraulics. Take a little more weight and not as efficient… but much more reliable. It goes back to the tradition from WWII with the B-17 Bombers. It would take something like 25 direct hits on the average of 20 mm cannon from German fighters to bring one down. The Germans had to go to the MK-108 30 mm cannon and then it would need 4 direct hits on the average . . .

— Buba2000, USA

Ohmygod, I realized. Diversity isn’t just about justice and racial equality and, as Reverend Cardwell says, “Being equals at the table.” (BTW: the TS group acknowledged its lack of diversity and took a couple of “baby steps” to address that. And promises to do more.) Collectively creating a resilient web of support is how ALL of us will survive “direct hits.” Which are coming.

May 26, 2009: What gets lost

In today’s Boston Globe, there’s an article about Hobson City, Alabama, a “small town which once thrived as a rarity: a place where black people were in charge in the midst of the Jim Crow South.” Now dying, this historic community, incorporated in 1899 and governed by African Americans, once supported businesses, restaurants, a skating rink, and “a vibrant culture centered on the all-black vocational school.”

“Sometimes I think I wouldn’t have gone out and done all that marching if I realized how much we were going to lose,” Mayor Alberta McCory is quoted as saying. Her (complicated, bittersweet) comment re the civil rights movement and its aftermath—Hobson City’s all-black vocational school integrated in 1972—of course reminded me of Lynchburg’s all-black Dunbar High School and that city’s “vibrant” cultural center. After Lynchburg’s schools integrated, Dunbar was razed. And, sadly, something absolutely vital to Lynchburg’s African American community was irrevocably lost.

Because I knew about the Dunbar-demise story, I could instantly understand Mayor McCory’s comment. And, I realized, that immediate gestalt just might be pointing me in a new direction.

To connect the dots:

Dot 1) Because Lynda Woodruff insisted I learn “CONTEXT!” I discovered  the Dunbar-demise story.

Dot 2) Some days I’d emerge from my house, having just spent a few hours reading about Lynchburg history, and realize, “Oh! I live here!”

Dot 3) There are thousands of comparable Somerville stories I know nothing about.

Dot 4) Because I’m currently working on a novel, I have zero interest in researching such stories.

Dot 5) But have enormous interest in reading them; learning more.

Dot 6) A group of writers and activists here in Somerville are looking at community-based journalism, i.e. when interested readers pledge money in order for a journalist to research and write a particular article.

Dot 7) Maybe other writers, from Somerville’s immigrant community, perhaps, could be paid to research and to write such stories.

[I know. This is pretty vague. But, as I’ve learned from following a leading this far, this kinda/sorta stuff is EXACTLY how something eventually happens. Whatever that something is. Like “A Chorus Line” ‘s Michael Bennett said of that amazing Broadway production’s earliest, earliest iteration: “We have something here.”]

Meanwhile, while this sorts itself out, let us mourn Dunbar High School’s death and let us pray that Hobson City’s unique history isn’t lost.

May 19, 2009: Lynchburg’s Community Dialogue on Race and Racism

[OOPS! This SHOULD have been posted last week. So sorry]

Here’s a description of the Community Dialogue written by Leslie King, who coordinates this important project. The people who’d participated in the program—and, BTW, read Way Opens—are invited, nay URGED, to write comments.

The Community Dialogue on Race and Racism began in response to some  racially charged incidence in our community:Real and perceived gang activity in the City, the death of an African-American man, Clarence Beard while in the custody of White police officers, public reaction to low-income housing proposal (Pedcor) and conversations with community leaders/others.   As a result of these events, the City Manager and Mayor decided it was time to address the issues of race and racism in Lynchburg. With the assistance of two-community based groups, Lynchburg Community Council and the Neighborhood Executive Advisory Committee, the study circle model was chosen as the method for engaging the community in the conversation. Everyday Democracy(www.everyday-democracy.org) out of Hartford, CT have advised and provided the necessary resources in order begin the Community Dialogue on Race and Racism. We have engaged over a 1000 people in our work and intend to continue the discussion. As of today, we currently have 8 Action Groups actively working toward racial equity in the following areas: 1) Police 2) Education Youth & Family Support 3) Faith-Based 4) Citizen Advocacy/Strengthening Community 5) Diversity Events 6) Ward Forums 7) Workforce Development 8) Communications and Media. In an effort to shift the leadership of the Dialogue from a City lead initiative to a more community based one, we have made the transition from a Working Group to our current Advisory Board. The board realizes that it must continue learning about the issues and about our community, which are some of the reasons why your book was very helpful in beginning the discussion on white privilege and relevance of Lynchburg’s history to our work.

May 19, 2009: Drama on Longfellow Park

On Sunday morning, just as we were settling into worship, the Mormon church across Longfellow Park from Friends Meeting at Cambridge, maybe fifty yards away, caught fire. As I’d taken my usual seat that morning, I’d  heard an insistent alarm bleating but, like the 300 or so Mormons inside the (doomed) building, did not, could not imagine that the annoying alarm meant imminent danger. Assuming the alarm to be a drill, the Mormons apparently exited without fuss. Everyone made it out, thank God. (Meanwhile, of course, across the little park’s green, most Quakers were still centering. Except for the ones sitting near the windows facing the park. They knew something extraordinary was happening.) A few minutes later, a member of FMC entered the meetinghouse to report the fire and to suggest that people move their cars to assist firefighters’ access.

Some back-story which informed my subsequent discernment re whether to remain in worship or to go outside:

Pre-9/11, I was already in love with firefighters and would, whenever possible, witness them in action. (Even a peace-loving Quaker like me needs action figures!) So, I reminded myself on Sunday, I’d already seen plenty of fires.”Stay in your seat, Patricia. And pray for the people around the world swept up in similar disasters. The world needs your prayers.”

My dear friend Wendy Sanford gave a terrific forum that morning re her faithfulness to Spirit and about her daily spiritual practices in order to “sink down to that seed which God sows.” She used the word obedient several times. So I asked, as she reminded us to ask: What am I asked to do? And, again, it seemed as though remaining in my seat was what I was being asked to do. (Meanwhile, twenty-foot flames are now shooting out of the church’s roof!)

But then I was reminded of one of my greatest fears: That I become so inwardly focused I lose sight of what’s happening right under my nose. Or fifty yards away. So I “prayed with my feet” and left meeting. Left while someone was giving a message. (Which for non-Quakes, is SIMPLY NOT DONE!)

It was a drizzly, chilly morning; some Mormons were shivering, some were crying; all of us, Mormons and Quakers, stood shoulder-to-shoulder watching the firefighters struggle against that stubborn, consuming blaze. (It was the worst fire I’d ever witnessed.) Suited, high-heeled CLS-ers and fleece-n-sneakers folks, side by side. Dumbstruck. Horrified. Someone passed around cups of juice to the crowd, Mormon children were invited inside to play in our nursery, etc. When it became painfully clear that the church was doomed, invitations to use our facilities were extended.

This past Sunday was a read-a-query-aloud morning at FMC, i.e. a series of questions on a particular topic that are read at the beginning of meeting so we can collectively contemplate this topic. Ironically, here’s what was read this past Sunday, just as that fire alarm went off: Do you welcome inquirers and visitors to your meeting?. . .

Two days after that tragedy and one day after receiving a phone call from a former writing student and a Mormon who asked me to thank my “church” for its kindnesses, here’s where I’ve gotten:

1) That particular church, the first Mormon church in NE, had been started in the fifties by Mormons attending Harvard, a creation story which closely parallels FMC’s inception. Learning this reminded me that when you talk to people, face to face, you will discover common ground. (Sidewalk conversations about Quakers being persecuted in Puritan Boston and Mormons knowing all about persecution came up, too.)

2) How easy, how absolutely automatic it is to put aside whatever reservations or disagreements I might have with a particular sect or political party in the face of disaster!

3) I like to think that I am a seeker and open to Spirit and that it’s that Mormon certainty I find so appalling. But when I regard the (somewhat astonished) person who just wrote #s 1 and 2, when it comes to my brothers and sisters at 4 Longfellow Park, haven’t I, too, been a wee bit shut down, rigid, judgmental?

You betcha.

PS: The fire has been deemed “accidental” and not, as some in the crowd wondered, arson.

May 4, 2009: Yesterday’s Panel Discussion, Jamaicaway Books

This morning, when I saw a woman wearing a surgical mask walk past my house, I added another reason to the list of why yesterday’s panel discussion was so special. Reason # 5: People braved swine flu/”enclosed places” to come to the (extraordinary) Jamaicaway Books to talk about race.

Here were the first four reasons:

1. Roslyn, the co-owner of Jamaicaway Books, is a very special woman. She’s created an attractive and inviting bookstore which, because of her commitment to JP, is also community center.

2. Roslyn had invited Clara Silverstein, author of White Girl, to be the other panelist. And as anyone who’s read her book knows, Clara is awesome!

3. Although competing with the Walk for Hunger, May Fair in Harvard Square, Open Studios in Somerville, a very special reading by some very special poets, etc., etc., a nice-sized crowd attended. Thank you!

4. People, including Roslyn, were open, honest, forthcoming, insightful and, gratifyingly, stayed WAY past the time the discussion was supposed to end.

I want to do this more.

May 3, 2009: Progress report

Way Opens: Year I has just ended and, on the whole, I’d give it a B+/A-: good readings, good response, good connections (connecting/reconnecting with two E. C. Glass classmates has been an unexpected bonus!). The highlight? That’s easy: The trip to Lynchburg in October. Low point? Not a low point, exactly, but I have to say the review in the April , 2009 Friends Journal was a little BESIDE THE POINT! (If you agree, tell them!) Ongoing concern? Another easy one: Too few comments on this blog.

Year II began auspiciously: a meeting at Cambridge Friends School re that school’s 7th and 8th grade Social Studies classes and possible ways Way Opens might be woven into CFS’s lively, right-on curricula. AAARRIIGGHHT! I am excited to work in “my” Quaker school and, down the road, excited to be working in other Quaker schools.

Why lie? My ultimate goal is for the Obama daughters to read Way Opens! (Maybe their awesome parents will invite me to the White House for a little one-on-one chat. I’ll even volunteer to weed their garden.)

April 20, 2009: Now, listen my children. . . “

Today is Patriot’s Day which, to Boston Marathon or Red Sox fans, must seem like a silly name for this holiday. But, as I write this, a Paul Revere impersonator, in colonial garb and astride an actual horse, gallops towards Lexington and Concord having already stopped here in Somerville. (I don’t know if he’s yelling “The British are coming!” since we know, now, that PR never actually yelled that. But when my kids were little, PR impersonators sure did.)

So on this Patriot’s Day which, in a way, celebrates how the well-connected Paul Revere so effectively broadcast news in 1775, I am once again musing on how information is disseminated. Two other events this morning underline my ongoing fascination: 1) I stepped onto my porch this morning: no Boston Globe. “Ohmygod,” I thought. “It’s finally happened. The Globe’s gone belly up, too.” (But it was production problems so, no, the paper’s demise isn’t today, anyway.) 2) Daughters Hope and Christina have posed a video onto Utube so we’re avidly watching the count rate increase hourly. Not exactly viral as yet but gettin’ there. (Forgot to link the site but like a prayer cat gets you there.) Very exciting.

Like a prayer: My prayer is that this site can tell stories of racial injustice and my own cluelessness effectively.

Amen

April 7, 2009: “Count on me”

When step-son Jeremy and his wife, Vita, invited David and me to travel with them and their toddler daughter Sasha this fall, maybe to Spain, maybe to Croatia, maybe to Turkey, we were flattered to be asked. Since I’ve been to what used to be Yugoslavia and spent several months in Spain, I’d volunteered that, given my druthers, Turkey would be my first choice (You know, life-lists, and all that.) It was only when Vita e-mailed that, yes, let’s do Turkey together that it occurred to me: What will Garen, my Armenian brother-in-law, and my sister, Deborah, also well-connected to Armenia, think? Will they be pissed that we’ll be traveling to a country that ethnically cleansed 1.5 million Armenians between 1915-1918? And now denies that genocide?

So I called my sister; we talked. Former assistant director of the Peace Corps in Armenia and still very active with Armenia-based organizations, with a wide circle of Armenian friends, my sister is far more in tune with the ongoing tensions re Turkey’s denial than most Americans. (Indeed, she’s been enormously  supportive re a play I’ve written re the genocide and denial.) But my sister, mother of a terrific son (who BTW, once attended an Armenian school), is also deeply connected to the whole idea of family. So while not thrilled about our plans (“It’s your life.”), she completely understood how excited we were to be accompanying “Baby Sasha”—no matter where.

“It’s [the genocide] going to come up,” she predicted. Which made me realize that, like the “Count on me” campaign here in Somerville a few years back, when white people in this community actually discussed what to say and what to do when someone made a racist remark, our little travel group (excluding year-old Sasha) needs to practice our remarks ahead of time. How to be honest, how to acknowledge a tragic event without putting notoriously gracious and hospitable Turks on the defensive, how to encourage talk, listen to stories? Not easy. But definitely required.

And, of course, not every Turk is a genocide denier. If we enter Turkey EXPECTING the worst from its citizens, that would be grossly unfair. So I am excited to see the wonders of this historic country and equally excited to learn from its people.

March 25, 2009: “Night Tree Necktie Party”

We’re back after a wonderful CA trip a little jet-lagged, a little weary—but robustly certain we’re blessed by an amazing family. Yesterday, a little jet-lagged, a little weary, I was walking to Union Square when I noticed a poster announcing an upcoming show at a neighborhood club; Night Tree Necktie Party is the name of the band to be performing.

My first (jet-lagged, weary) reaction: Well, that’s no more  shocking or attention-grabbing than the Dead Kennedys, I guess.

Almost immediately I wondered: maybe it’s 2 bands. Night Tree Necktie Party doesn’t exactly roll off your tongue, does it?

But then, despite being jet-lagged and weary, I remembered a story—a story about lynching—included in several of the earlier drafts of Way Opens which didn’t make the final cut. And here it is:

Since Lynchburg’s name is so inescapably intertwined with the word lynch, in the earliest days of my leading, I’d done quite a bit of research about “necktie parties.” Such research stirred up a vague, vague memory of a black-and-white photograph of a lynching I’d seen as a child—probably in Life Magazine. Naively, I’d assumed such a photo to be one of a kind and therefore easy to locate so I’d asked a research librarian at the Somerville Public Library for help. She steered me to the Without Sanctuary exhibit  which, at the time, was online. (Maybe it still is.)

Determined to find my photograph, I briskly went through the site’s slide show: “Nope.” “Nope.” Finally, thank God, the horror  of what I’d been briskly rejecting hit me. My God, I realized. There are hundreds of such photographs! They show us, again and again, a black man—there were a few black women, too—dangling from a tree, a train trestle, etc., while a crowd of white people—hundreds of them in locales all over this country—watch, laugh, eat. Some of those photographs had been made into postcards. My God, I realized. Lynchings were far, far more prevalent than I’d ever imagined. Chastened, I forced myself to look at those pictures again, this time very slowly, lingering over every scene as I’d done as a child. And praying.

So, yeah, I get why an up-and-coming band gives itself an edgy name. But as my Buddhist/Catholic friend Dolores says, “There’s so much hatred and evil in the world. Why add to it?”

 

 

 

March 12, 2009:”Go tell it. . . “

Three times last week I heard tragic, dire stories from Palestine. Last Sunday, Gay Harter* showed slides of her trip to Palestine last fall and shared her concern for the troubled country’s remaining Christians. A few days later, photographer Skip Schiel, a f/Friend, presented his slide show which included photos from ravaged, desperate Gaza and painful first-hand accounts from the Palestinians Skip has met on his numerous trips. This past Sunday, at First Church in Jamaica Plain, Reverend Terry Burke, to illustrate his Lenten rededication to social justice, told the story of Rachel Corrie, killed by an Israeli bulldozer (made in USA) while protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes (Skip had also recounted Rachel Corrie’s death).

A huge fan of both Gay and Skip, I’d attended their respective shows because I knew they would tell me news from “over the hill,” i.e. information and stories not reported, not told. They did not disappoint. And I’d heard Terry Burke’s wonderful sermon because I’d been asked to give a talk re Way Opens that morning at First Church.

During my talk, I quoted from a Derrick Z. Jackson Boston Globe column from the day before: “This week, the Pew Center on the States released a report that found that states spent $47 billion on prisons last year, with spending rising faster than for education. The spending continues to rise, even as crime rates have fallen by 25 percent over the last 20 years. . . Huge percentages of the 1.5 million people in prison, particularly African-Americans (one in 11 African-Americans are under some form of correction), are there for nonviolent drug offenses that call out not for barbed wire, but for treatment, education, and job opportunities.”

Like their counterparts in other churches I have visited, these JP U-Us are concerned and well-informed and compassionate people. When I brought up CORI reform, for example, they knew what I was talking about. Still, I got the feeling, especially when I read that column, that I, too, was bringing news from “over the hill.”

When I’d heard Gay and Skip’s impassioned presentations, my first reaction both times was “I, too, need, to go to Palestine so I, too, can come back and tell what I saw. That’s the only way our country’s policy will ever change.” But, after Sunday, I’m rededicating myself to reminding people how many African-Americans are “under some form of correction” (one in ELEVEN? C’mon!). And—this is brand-new, folks—to explore ways to better connect with other people of faith working on, as some call it,  “the very criminal justice system.”

* Gay Harter is a loyal member of Side-by-Side, a safe and loving sharing circle for the formerly incarcerated  held every Monday night in Boston’s JP. After people from my Quaker meeting’s Prison Fellowship group visited this circle, we decided to start a similar group in Cambridge. No wonder I’m a big fan!