Category Archives: God/Spirit/Light/Love

Speaking Through the Super-Storms (and the Droughts and the . . . )

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This is an entry about leadings. This is an entry about discernment. This is an entry about process—so this is an entry about bumbling around:

In the odd way these things happen, sometimes, the day after way opened* for another leading (my role vis a vis Opportunity Knocks, an exciting, greater-Boston re-entry initiative for ex-offenders became clear), I met with the incomparable Vanessa Rule of the Better Future Project, who’s working on another exciting initiative: Mothers Out Front.

As my sister would say, “I was torn.” Mobilizing mothers in Massachusetts to become a political force around climate change is a terrific idea. Yet who’s the most stretched-to-the-max group there is? Mothers.

What to do?

Well, the first thing I did was talk about this idea with a young mother—who also happens to be a daughter. “Sure, Mom,” she said. “Send me more information.” So I did. And to 4 other mothers, too.

Guess what? Only one mother responded. But then she had to beg off our scheduled lunch date. And still hasn’t gotten back to me to . . .

So, apparently, this is also an entry about Having It All and about the scarcity of time for most mothers and about how incredibly challenging it is to have “come a long way, baby.”

This morning, however, in the wonderfully odd way these things happen, sometimes, I woke up  thinking maybe I’d direct some of MY time towards developing a curriculum for parents and children that addresses climate change. Or as the wise Maggie Edmondson puts it: “Deicide.” A curriculum that acknowledges, as the wise Joanna Macy puts it: “We are our world knowing itself.”

BTW:  As a brand-new member of my Quaker meeting’s First Day School Committee, I’d decided to work on such a curriculum TWO YEARS AGO! But in the way that these things happen all the time, I never quite got around to it. Because although passionate, I was working solo, disconnected and overwhelmed. But now, I’m sensing, there’s energy around such an idea. Resources.

I’ll let Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier have the last word:

Breathe through the heats of our desire

Thy coolness and Thy balm;

Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;

Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,

O still, small voice of calm.

 

* “The old Quaker expression ‘Way Opens’ describes the serendipitous unfolding of God’s will for a person or community.” —Alex Levering Kern—

That Thing With Feathers

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Maybe because the snow’s melted enough to reveal tulip and daffodil shoots and in sunnier yards, actual crocuses. Maybe because of soft, vernal light. Maybe because Easter—as confusing and complicated as it is for me—is Sunday. Certainly being on the other side of a several, recent, challenging events helps. But I’m hopeful.

Why? Because of two articles in The Boston Globe, one on the statewide pushback re drug-sniffing dogs in Department of Correction visiting centers, the other, a scathing report re Massachusetts’ regressive get-tough-on-crime policies . Could these articles mark the moment when the proverbial paradigm shifts? Is something different emerging? I choose to believe so.

This morning, the online writing group I am blessed to discover I’ve “joined” has been oohing about the wonderful poem that follows (sorry about the mishmash fonts):

WHAT THE LIVING DO 
by Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

I live. I hope.

Winter Light, Random Light

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My friend David tells a story I’ll never forget:  One Sunday in early summer, he’d been struggling with a difficult decision during silent worship—at Friends Meeting at Cambridge.  Something came to him so he decided to test this something. “Give me a sign,” he prayed. And a beam of light shone directly on him! “So now I know that every June 21st, the sun shines directly onto the spot where I had been sitting that day,” David concludes. (And, BTW, the decision he’d made that morning turned out to be the right thing to do.)

Light happens.

 

 

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!

 

 

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!

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

May 23, 2012: I’m “Going Forth”!

On Mother’s Day, maybe 50 people and I got to spend the day with Joanna Macy, the Buddhist environmental activist—heck, she’s a prophet for our times.

And as they say, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

I was ready to go deeper. I was ready to cry. I was ready to acknowledge my despair, to even pour my heart out re the things that terrify me re climate change to a young man who happens to look a LOT like an ex-husband. (Now there’s a bit o’ fate, huh?!)

And I was ready, spiritually, to have faith that the “that of God” is all of us and in Mother Earth means something. So with gratitude, after honoring my fears and outrage and despair, armed with compassion and insight, I am ready to go forth.

Wanna come along?

 

 

April 27, 2012: Connecting Dots

What a week! Hearing Michelle Alexander speak Wednesday night, Bill McKibben last night. How often do you get to listen to two righteous, profound change agents back-to-back, huh?

But who can bear what these modern-day prophets preach?

* Our supposedly colorblind nation systematically incarcerates men and women of color by the millions; the scope of this 21st century Jim Crow is beyond comprehension—although if you happen to be Black and live in a community eviscerated by this mass round-up of (mostly) men and boys you’re living, breathing what Dr. Alexander preaches.

* Because of carbon emissions, our planet is heating up at an alarming rate, causing unprecedented draughts and floods, hurricanes and alarming weather patterns (shorts in March in New England?)  If we don’t do something NOW we’re doomed.

Yikes.

Here’s what I do: I connect the dots. I see the horrors passionately elucidated by Alexander and McKibben and Chomsky and all those who speak out/have spoken out re “this filthy rotten system” as—are you ready?—symptoms. Symptoms of brokenness.

Somehow this construct lets me feel great compassion rather than despair. And allows me to be humble; always a good thing. Because what can I do? Am I going to heal this planet? Am I going to recreate human nature? Will I eliminate greed, fear of Other, how easy it is for my species to rationalize, deny, distract and distance ourselves from what’s really going on?

Nope.

What I can do is ask Spirit: What am I called to do to heal this broken planet?

What I can do is spend time with others who ask the same thing. Sometimes, like last night, when BMcK said, “When we have ‘a solar spill,’ we call it a sunny day!’ we roar together.

What I can do is “show up,” witness. (It’s truly terrifying how affective a White woman sitting in a courtroom earnestly taking notes can be.)

What I can do is practice mindfulness.

And to praise and be grateful.

 

April 19, 2012: A Grateful Guest

A week ago today, I was snorkeling in the aquamarine waters of “The Mayan Riviera” (the ridiculous name given to the resort area south of Cancun, Mexico.). After some initial discomfort—suntan lotion and salt water in my eyes; ouch!—I settled into The Zone, i.e. the mystical place I can access only when flippering underwater. Maybe I lose all sense of time and self because our species has such affinity to the sea. Or maybe I feel so other-worldly because I am, thanks to snorkel gear, allowed to visit this quiet, stunning, glorious, undulating other world. A world, as we all know, that actually comprises three-quarters of Mother Earth.

So much of the one-quarter world I generally inhabit—and my unearned, automatic significance in it—I take for granted. I take nothing for granted when I snorkel. “Did you see those barracuda?” my step-son asked me when we were ashore. No, I hadn’t; I didn’t care, either. I saw patterned sand and a rainbow of fish and coral and waves from their underside and everything I saw, every single thing was wonder-full.

I am a guest, a grateful guest underwater and every breath is a prayer of thanksgiving.

 

April 2, 2012: “There is a spirit which I feel. . . “

. . . that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong.” James Nayler

Last week, the week “Bully” was released, there were moments when I believed bullies had taken over (I was also post-Brooklyn grandchildren-visit pooped and fighting a cold.). Daily headlines reinforced my gloom; I won’t list all the current and personal events that made me feel: “Yup. ‘Might Makes Right.’ wins.”

Two memories repeatedly popped up, one illustrating, the other reinforcing my depression:

Kim Harvie, the amazing minister of the Arlington Street Church (Unitarian-Universalist), had described an ecumenical service she and other Boston clergy had organized to commemorate 9-11’s tenth anniversary to me. It had been outdoors, she explained, to show that we’d survived, that we were not afraid.

But we are afraid, I mentally argued last week. And so much of what has happened in this country, from tank-like SUVs to the proliferation of security cameras to perpetuating our deeply broken, deeply unjust criminal justice system is exactly about how terrified we are. “They” won.

The other memory is something I heard years ago,  back in the day when I taught in homeless shelters in Somerville and Medford (for obvious reasons I’m not going to identify who said it). “Mr. Roger’s gay,” this person declared.”So I won’t let my son watch his show.”

See? I lamented last week. Even someone who’s experienced poverty, homelessness, victimized by the indifference and cruelty of “the system” believes that a gentle and kind man must be gay. (And, yes, I acknowledge that remembering this over and over is as much about my mental state as anything else!)

But something wonderful happened the moment I arrived at Cambridge Meeting yesterday; Palm Sunday. Being with that quirky faith community uplifted me. How sustaining to worship with others who read the same headlines I’d read last week—much of my heartbreak centers around Trayvon Martin, of course; that the Far Right succeeded in getting healthcare reform adjudicated by the Supreme Court worries me, too—but there they were. Showing up. Planning our Good Friday peace witness on Boston Common.

Because it was Palm Sunday my thoughts during worship centered on the early Quaker, James Nayler, and his ill-conceived donkey ride through the streets of Bristol, England in 1656, his devoted supporters waving palms and generally making a horrible situation much, much worse! (LOTS to say about that ride but actually not to the point of this posting.)  And then, in the quiet, a fireplace fire cheerfully crackling in FMC’s new glass-fronted fireplace, Nayler’s words on his death bed came to me. And I was again sustained and comforted to be with people who acknowledge both the creepy news and Good News. Who believe that war is not the answer. Who believe that we’re being called to heal a broken world.

Somehow.