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Conflict

2012-03-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

Conflict. Disagreement. Opposing viewpoints. I don’t much like any of them, especially when they involve me and those I’m in relationship with. Some people tell me they like controversy, spirited opposition, debate and argument. They say it energizes them, excites them, gets their juices flowing. All that conflict does for me is make my stomach churn.

So, at Meeting last Sunday, when our Worship-Sharing time focused on queries about resolving conflict, I did a lot of deep breathing. As we settled into silence, we were asked to consider these queries from North Pacific Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice:

When problems and conflicts arise, do we make timely endeavors to resolve them in a spirit of love and humility?

How do we use our diversity for the spiritual growth of our Meeting?

Are we prepared to let go of our individual desires and let the Holy Spirit lead us to unity?

In the silence, I sat with these questions.

Make timely endeavors to resolve conflict? I usually put it off as long as possible.

Use diversity for spiritual growth? I subscribe more to the “birds of a feather, flock together” approach.

Let go of my individual desires and be led by Spirit? Sure, once my fingers are pried away from their grip on my conviction that I’m right.

I know that many people throughout the world face the kind of conflict that threatens their lives. I’m blessed to live in a time and place that is not fraught with such violence, fortunate to rarely encounter hostility in my daily life. And yet, I don’t feel in unity with everyone, at all times. Whether it’s in my Quaker Meeting, at work, in my family, or among friends and community, sometimes tempers flare, opposing views swirl, or anger erupts. When that happens, there’s the familiar churn of my stomach. My heart races, my throat closes up, my head throbs. I’m afraid.

The conflicts most common in my life stir fears of discovering I’m wrong or have made a mistake. I succumb to old beliefs from childhood that there is a “right” way to act or believe, as if there is only one right answer. I fear disapproval and rejection. In introductory psychology, I learned that animals respond to fear in one of two ways – fight or flight. I don’t want to do either, yet engaging with the differences brings a pounding to my chest.

Quaker practice has taught me to listen, to lead with a question instead of defending my opinion. When I remember to ask, rather than answer, I open myself to the possibility that there is something for me to learn.

I wish that the path to resolving conflict wasn’t bordered with so much humility, patience, and letting go. What I know experimentally, though, is that it is in times of conflict, times when I listen deeply to the words and beyond the words, that I grow.

Afterthought #2

2012-02-29T07:50:00.000-08:00

Back in December, I wrote about my new 2012 calendar and its inspirations for a simpler life. Two months in, I continue to look to it for strength to not overfill the days. Recently, support came from another source— No Ordinary Time by Jan Phillips. Subtitled “A Book of Hours for a Prophetic Age,” Jan draws on the Middle Ages practice of staying spiritually mindful all throughout the day. Each chapter is devoted to a day of the week, and a reading for Wednesday spoke to me. It’s Jan’s “To Be List,” in the form of a poem.

In honor of having an extra day on the calendar this year, today I’m going to focus on my To Be List, rather than the To Do List.

To Be List

2-29-12

Patient

Open-hearted

Grounded

Joyful

Beloved

Welcoming

Compassionate

Observant

Grateful

What’s on your To Be List?

The Job of the Writer

2012-02-24T09:35:00.000-08:00

Ten years ago, I printed up business cards with the title Writer under my name thinking that if that’s what the card says, that’s what I am. Now, I don't have to read that card to know that writing is my job, but some days, at the end of a writing session, I’ll leave my desk with doubts about whether I’m called to this work. Well aware of the needs and problems crying for attention, questions about the value of putting words, my words, on paper ring in my ears.

I know that I’m not the only writer who frets. One of my writing program classmates got this response when she typed writer/copy editor into her online tax form: Please enter a valid occupation. One of the faculty, an award-winning children’s author, admitted, “To this day, whenever I write down writer as my profession, I imagine the person on the other side of this transaction changing it to unemployed.”

Recently, I received affirmation for my call to writing at the Seattle Repertory Theater’s premier of How to Write a New Book for the Bible, by Bill Cain. The play, originally written as a memoir, is based on Cain’s experiences caring for his dying mother. The main character is also named Bill; flashbacks portray Bill's and his brother’s childhood as well as his parents’ relationship and his father’s death. “These are exquisite human beings,” Cain says in the Rep’s magazine, Encore, “and I wanted to ritualize in some way the wonder of their lives as a way of celebrating them.”

Not that Cain’s parents didn't have their flaws or that his family was perfect. There are plenty of scenes of conflict between the parents, misunderstanding between the brothers, and feelings of inadequacy and failure. A classic struggle emerges when Bill’s widowed mother’s health begins to fail and she needs help to remain in her home. Just like Cain, the playwright, Bill is a Jesuit priest as well as a writer. Perceived by his mother and brother as not having a “real job,” Bill gets tapped to be the live-in caregiver.

Cain explains that his ministry as a priest is “to go into the world, find the presence of God there and celebrate it.” He thinks that’s a good description of what those working in theater do as well, bringing attention to what is “neglected and holy.”

In the second act, this moment of reflection by Bill took my breath away. “The jobs of writer and priest are closely related. In both, you point and say, Look. Look there. That person you haven’t noticed—he, she matters.”

The writers I most admire do this in their writing, pointing to the people, places, and issues that we don’t notice—and that matter. Bill Cain’s play pointed to the value of writing and left me with a useful query to guide me in my work:

Who or what that is neglected and holy am I to call attention to?

A Little Bit of Wisdom

2012-02-14T09:19:00.000-08:00

The last day of Spring Residency for my writing program (Northwest Institute of Literary Arts), guest faculty Kathleen Dean Moore talked with the Craft of Nonfiction class about writing essays. A philosophy professor at Oregon State University, Kathleen writes prose that questions and celebrates our cultural and spiritual connections to Earth in a style reminiscent of poet Mary Oliver.

Taking notes on my laptop as Kathleen spoke, my fingers barely kept up with the wisdom she shared. Here is one of her gems:

Every essay is connections and a little bit of wisdom tucked into experience.

I took in a quick breath and felt tears stinging my nose and filling my eyes as Kathleen spoke. That’s why I read essays, to find connection and that little bit of wisdom tucked into a story. Kathleen’s wisdom usually is surrounded by experiences in nature—such as watching an osprey taking time to notice a shadow in the water and then having the courage to dive. She says that’s the work of nature writers (I would argue all writers): “observe patiently, lovingly; keep watch for shadow; plummet toward it and engage it.”

That’s what I want my writing to be. Sometimes there’s only a very little bit of wisdom. Most of the time, I don’t know it’s there until I start to write. I’ve tried to be organized and systematic in my writing. Sometime I write out a rough outline, topics and themes sprouting out from an experience or an insight. That technique does help me to have an idea of where I’m going in my writing. But usually I don’t know which road I’m heading down until I wrap my fingers around a pen, or place them on the keyboard, and let them lead me across the page.

I have a similar experience in Meeting for Worship when I quiet my mind enough to open myself to that essence or wisdom beyond me. And just as in my writing, that opening and centering usually takes me to unexpected places.

Kathleen also challenged us to think about the kind of writing we should do.

“In a ‘world of wounds,’ it’s not enough to write about a marsh as it’s being bulldozed for a K-Mart parking lot,” she said. “We’ve run out of time; we have to move quickly and reach a wider audience through new venues such as newspapers, blogs, and radio essays.”

To know the kind of writing we should do, she urged us to answer three questions:

What are my gifts?

What breaks my heart?

What are the world’s deepest needs?

“Your calling is at the intersection of these,” she said.

Maybe I should follow the behavior of the osprey both when I settle into worship and to write—take whatever time is needed to listen patiently and lovingly, keeping watch for shadow. There’s plenty of that as I open myself to my own flaws, mistakes, and regrets. And observing more widely, I’m aware of the shadows of hurts, disappointments, and wrongs in my community, my country, and the world. I want the courage of the osprey to dive deeply into some of those shadows and to engage with them. But I often just skim the surface and pull back to my comfortable spot of gratitude for the blessings in my life.

I’m discovering more all the time the amount of courage needed to write the connections and tuck in a little bit of wisdom. I often stop myself because I know that I possess just a portion of knowledge of an issue or a situation. But my portion (or yours) might just be what is needed for greater wisdom to emerge. I want to be courageous enough to shine the light on my little bit of wisdom.

Afterthought #1

2012-01-31T11:12:00.000-08:00

A writing friend, Charlotte Morganti, blogs regularly at Morganti Writes. Most Fridays she posts an “Itty Bitty”— typically a quote or anecdote and a few words of her own reflection. They often inspire me as I head into the weekend.

Charlotte’s Itty Bitties remind me of a practice in some Quaker meetings of a time for “Afterthoughts.” After meeting for worship ends, silence continues for a few more minutes during which members are invited to share thoughts or reflect on the morning's worship. Those words often inspire me as I head into the week.

Today I’m adding a new category to my blog called “Afterthoughts.” I expect to use this hybrid drawn from my writing and Quaker communities for brief reflections on headlines, quotes, comments overheard, maybe even bumper stickers.

Here’s Afterthought #1.

Last Friday I attended a pediatric nursing update and heard a startling statistic from child psychologist Christopher McCurry. He claims that every day, each of us has to depend on about 2000 people we’ve never met. “Like the people who run the water treatment plant and make sure what comes out of my tap is drinkable,” he said. For me, I think of the engineers who designed the highways, the electricians who grounded the wiring in my house, the captains who pilot the ferries I commute on.

Sure, sometimes people make mistakes and my trust is shaken. And the headlines seize on those rare, but often devastating, times when someone we depend on intentionally causes harm by abusing power. But I take comfort in Dr. McCurry’s reminder of our interdependence and of how trustworthy those 2000 people I rely on are.

One more afterthought: For more information about Quaker worship as well as the Quaker practice of sharing afterthoughts, visit Quaker Information Center.

OPEN

2012-01-24T08:51:00.000-08:00

Five men holding cardboard signs huddled together, urging passersby to join them in protest against financial institutions. A month earlier, they had been among hundreds of others camped out in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. But on this biting cold post-Christmas day, they were the only ones who had ventured through the maze of metal fencing and past security guards to continue a vigil against corporate greed and social inequality. The sight of the barricade snaking around the park’s perimeter chilled me as much as the winter air.

Up until then, I only had read about the various Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and encampments around the country. The movement didn’t have much traction in my rural, island community. Although many here share the concerns of the Occupy participants, we’re insulated from much of the evidence of corporate influence—our bank is locally owned, there are no corporate headquarters or business chains here, and generosity predominates over greed. When Occupy Wall Street hit the news on September 17, 2011, I was immersed in my return to work as a school nurse and the first semester of my MFA in writing program. A couple of weeks later, when protesters closer to home organized Occupy Seattle, I gave the movement limited attention.

Throughout the fall, I periodically tuned in to Occupy actions around the U.S. and similar protests around the world. Although reportedly loosely organized, the Occupy movement put its purpose out in strong terms: “Occupy is fighting back against the corrosive power major banks and multinational corporations have over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest depression in generations.”

As much as I wanted to believe in the power of the people, I doubted that even thousands of rallies around the world could reverse the inequities caused by what is now characterized as “the 1%” – the wealthy few who control the banks, the mortgage industry, and the insurance industry. When I saw the fence hiding the entrance to Zuccotti Park that December day, I despaired anew for the powerlessness of the 99%.

This “open space” was a logical site for the first encampment of Occupy Wall Street because of its location in the financial district of lower Manhattan. In 1968, developers of One Liberty Plaza were permitted to add 500,000 square feet to their building in return for providing a public space. Ironically, the 33,000 square foot park was named Liberty Plaza Park. After renovations in 2006, it was renamed by its current owners, Brookfield Office Properties, after company chairman John Zuccotti.

On November 15, New York City’s mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered police to remove protesters from Zuccotti Park in the middle of the night, citing the city’s ban on overnight camping and concerns about health and safety. Over the next two weeks, shutdowns occurred at other Occupy sites around the country, including the one closer to home in Seattle’s Westlake Park. Fences ringed “open spaces.”

The barricades came down in Zuccotti Park on January 10, the day after lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the New York City Buildings Department citing zoning laws that require Brookfield Properties to provide unobstructed access to the park. VillageVoice.com reported that within an hour of the removal of the barriers, protesters had returned.

We Quakers claim to “speak truth to power.” Early Friends such as George Fox, William Penn, and John Woolman raised their voices in protest, often against impossible odds and in direct opposition to those in power. Noah Baker Merrill of Putney (Vt.) Meeting writes in the January 2012 issue of Friends Journal about the Occupy movement as a current-day example of witnessing to those in power.

“Occupy Together is just taking shape. It can’t and doesn’t promise to solve all of the pressing issues we face…It may help hold open space for something new that is about to be born and is already on its way…To get there we have to help one another to listen, to understand, and to respond.”

Although I’m far away from these scenes, my heart is with those who are keeping concerns about economic justice before us. Until now, my voice has been quiet about the issues brought forth by the Occupy movement. I’m not clear how I’m to speak for these concerns, but I’m “open” to adding my writing voice to the protest.

For more thoughts and reports from Friends about Occupy, visit Occupy Together - AFSC

Simplicity in Twelve Months

2011-12-19T09:08:00.001-08:00

Just went shopping for a 2012 calendar for my office. I thumbed through a stack of them in a bin at my local bookstore, searching for a size that would fit in a small space of wall over my desk and with images that would soothe or inspire me. About midway in the pile, I found “Simplicity—Inspirations for a Simpler Life.” This is the one, I thought as I looked at Deborah DeWit’s color photograph of a vacant floating dock mirrored in a placid lake in foggy morning light. Inside, more images of simple scenes mark each month—a wire basket filled with golden apples; weathered cedar chairs overlooking a bay; a faded red wooden door slightly ajar.

It’s not as though I need the photographs in this calendar to recognize the beauty of simplicity. Reminders are all around me if I only pause to take them in—the sunrise pinking the sky and the bay that reflects it; a dew-glittered spider’s web spun on the garden fence; an eagle crouched at the edge of a wetland; the curl of peeled bark on a bent elbow of a Madrona trunk.

But it’s the calendar’s empty squares for the days of the coming year that speak to me of simplicity. Flipping through the pages, I wonder if the juxtaposition of these tranquil scenes with the sharply defined boxes of the days will help me preserve the expansiveness that the beginning of a new year offers. How can I hold the conflicting states of being and doing?

This is not a new dilemma for me, nor is it uniquely mine alone. My Quaker faith lists simplicity among the values to be upheld along with peace, equality, and integrity. The first generation of Friends in the late 1600s stripped away anything that seemed to get in the way of living life from a holy center. In daily life, they detached from superfluities of dress, speech, and possessions that got in the way of loving and serving God. In worship, they did away with priests, believing that no intermediary is necessary to encounter the Divine.

Henry David Thoreau urged from Walden Pond in 1854, “…let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand…simplify, simplify, simplify.” And in the 21^st Century, essayist Scott Russell Sanders yearns, “to pare my life down to essentials. I vow to live more simply…by refusing all chores that do not arise from my central concerns.”

There’s always more paring down I could do—my bookshelves sag, I have enough earrings that I could wear a different set every day for two months, colorful scarves and shawls crowd a dresser drawer, and the closet doors bulge with the press of boxes of no longer used items. As a new year approaches, though, where I need pruning most is on activities not focused on my own central concerns—family, community, peace, writing.

There, I’ve distilled what calls to me down to four words.

My daily challenge is to not fill each inch of the calendar blocks with tasks, for even just those four concerns can place demands on every minute. They offer ample opportunities for me to feel inadequate, to judge whether I’m doing enough, and to conclude that I’m not. Living a simple life is less about time management and more about listening and responding daily to the promptings of the Spirit rather than ego’s siren call to achieve.

This is my spiritual task in the coming year: to preserve more of the white space on my calendar. How nice to discover that 2012 gives me an extra day to practice this discipline—my new calendar shows 29 days in February.

Meeting for Worship for Apple Pressing

2011-11-14T14:33:00.000-08:00

I appreciate Quakerism’s absence of rituals—an appreciation born from many years in the Lutheran Church, kneeling on command, singing hymns someone else chose, reciting a creed I didn’t understand, and daydreaming through mumbled invitations to communion. We unprogrammed Quakers, with our hour of silent worship broken occasionally, and briefly, by someone moved to speak, limit our rituals to handshakes at the end of meeting and announcements about upcoming committee meetings or protests or potlucks to raise funds for one good cause or another.

My Quaker Meeting (still a Preparative Meeting as we discern whether we’re ready to be a full Monthly Meeting) has a history of not accepting even the few standard forms that most Quaker meetings adhere to today. For example, rather than a Nominating Committee, we formed a Gifts and Talents Committee to identify which members are best suited (have gifts and talents) for the various roles that keep the Meeting going. Instead of a Worship and Ministry Committee, we have a small group of people who attend to our Meeting’s Spiritual Life. And for those who encounter the Divine in music, we’ve designated our worship hour on the last Sunday of the month as Singing Sunday.

So, it’s no surprise that at the end of October we had a “Meeting for Worship for Apple Pressing.” No one remembers for sure if this was the third or fourth or fifth such event, but we know how it began. One fall, one of our members, an arborist, reported he’d noticed apple trees around the island that weren’t being harvested. He offered to contact the owners (many of whom he knew because he’d pruned their trees) and to lend his wooden cider press if we wanted to glean apples and make juice to share. This year, eighteen of us worshipped together in this way again, putting the Quaker testimony of community into action—and possibly furthering the causes of peace, simplicity, and equality as well.

At the close of worship the week before the pressing, half a dozen of us had gathered in the orchard next to the home where we meet. Sun warmed the cool fall afternoon, and the scent of sweet, ripe apples wafted through the trees’ brittle, twisted branches. Although our arborist couldn’t identify the varieties we were harvesting, he was able to chase away the resident bull who pawed and snorted his displeasure that we’d invaded his cow-pile-littered turf.

The last Sunday of October, we worshipped in silence for 15 minutes, and then adjourned to the barn. Boxes bulged with the mystery apples from the neighbor’s orchard as well as Galas, Akanes, and Liberties from members’ trees. Under drizzly skies, we set up an assembly line of washing, disinfecting, cutting, pressing, and pouring.

Just like at quilting bees of earlier times, stories flowed while hands worked.

Memories of younger days, updates about children and grandchildren, words of support to a woman with an ailing husband, and reports of recent and future travels circulated among us, adding to the story of our little group of seekers. Fresh scones, apple bread, hot tea, and coffee sustained us, followed by sips of the spicy, caramel-colored nectar that poured from the apples under the weight of the press.

Two hours later, our efforts had yielded over twenty gallons of juice divided up among all those who helped, with some left for the couple who had let us glean from their trees as well as for the residents of our community’s assisted living home.

Meeting for Worship for Apple Pressing - it just might turn into a Quaker ritual.

What Do We Worship?

2011-10-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

My husband and I take a right at the driveway marked by a light blue sandwich board sign:

We enter the living room of the farmhouse where our Meeting gathers every Sunday for worship. I settle into a straight-backed chair softened with an ivory sheepskin, close my eyes, place my feet flat on the floor, rest my open palms in my lap, and breathe in and out deeply. The woodstove crackles and hisses, the electric tea kettle in the kitchen clicks off, friends shuffle in and find spots on the couch and chairs arranged in a circle. Meeting for Worship has begun.

Why, as a friend new to Quakerism recently asked, is it called Worship? She wasn’t asking how we worship, but rather, who/what it is that Quakers worship. I’ve wondered that, too, and didn’t have an immediate answer.

The sitting in silence of an unprogrammed Quaker Meeting for Worship bears little resemblance to the liturgy, hymn singing, and communion of the Lutheran worship services I grew up in. To prepare for confirmation when I was twelve, I learned the meaning of the Lutheran order of service. Many parts of that service were designed specifically to praise and honor God.

I’m no scholar on Quakerism, but in my own study of this faith tradition, I’ve not found an explanation of how the word worship came to be used to name our coming together in silence (perhaps others reading this blog know this history and can share it with me). I suspect that early Quakers were comfortable with use of the word that typically describes reverence and praise for a deity. But for my friend and me, and many others I know who attend Meeting for Worship, something else is going on during that hour of silence.

My North Pacific Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice describes Meeting for Worship as the heart of the life of the Religious Society of Friends, a time that “calls for us to offer ourselves, body, mind, and soul for the doing of God’s will.” William Taber suggests in Four Doors to Meeting for Worship that worship is a “…reality which has always been there from the beginning of time, waiting for us to join it… an invisible stream into which we can step at any time…communion with this invisible stream.” British Friend Ben Pink Dandelion shares a similar view in Celebrating the Quaker Way and finds worship a time “to concentrate on what is alongside us at all times…to a deeply felt but easily reached place of holy relationship.”

Those terms, communion and holy relationship, speak to me of my experience of worship, whether at the farmhouse on Sunday morning, in the rocking chair in my bedroom, or on a windswept bluff at Iceberg Point here on Lopez Island. Worship for me is a time of quieting my planning, thinking, and worrying. It’s an emptying and an opening to the Divine that I too often forget to tap into in my daily life. The outward quiet supports me to connect, or commune, with the Presence that I call God.

On Sunday mornings, as I notice soft inhalations and exhalations, hear chairs creak and feet rustle, I know that others are with me on this journey. At its best, the silence of worship deepens and we become aware that we have entered that invisible stream together, reminded that it’s always there, always ready to be stepped into. That is something to revere and praise.

Some resources on Quaker Worship:

Four Doors to Meeting for Worship, Pendle Hill Pamphlet 306, by William Taber, Pendle Hill Bookstore

Celebrating the Quaker Way by Ben Pink Dandelion, Friends General Conference Bookstore

“What If Quaker Worship Came with Instructions?” by Liz Oppenheimer,

The Good Raised Up

Naming the Un-Nameable

2011-09-27T13:07:00.000-07:00

I’ve been trying to name the un-nameable in my writing lately. I’m on draft seven of the prologue to my memoir, and critiques from classmates and my teacher called for more specifics about my spiritual journey. In a revision, I wrote about being in the mountains and having a “sense of a spiritual presence.”

My teacher replied that she tripped on that phrase. She went on, “Makes me wonder why you don't say ‘God.’ I wonder if it would work better to either say ‘God’ or somehow add a little phrase of explanation for why you don't. A tall order, I realize.”

So, this week, I’ve been writing my way through to the words that explain my experience of the Divine. Sometimes I call it Spirit. Sometimes I use the word Presence. Often I don’t capitalize. I write about an essence or of wisdom or a sense of being held and loved. But I still hesitate to write “God” to name what is at the center of my life. That three-letter word carries meanings that no longer fit for me.

I long ago outgrew the images of God I learned as a child. God as a man with flowing white hair and beard. God as judge. God as the all-knowing master puppeteer of every person’s actions, decisions, and journey. God controlling the wind, the rain, the mountains and seas. God with all the answers.

My experience of God has very little to do with answers. One of the things I treasure about Quakerism is the understanding that God’s way continues to unfold, that new light can shine onto changed understandings. I suspect God is as bewildered and distressed as I am at much of what happens in the world. The God I believe in doesn’t have answers to why young people get cancer, why earthquakes and hurricanes and wildfires and planes crashing into buildings kill thousands of people, why marriages fall apart, or why crops fail and people starve.

I also don’t think God makes any of those things happen any more than God helps someone pick the winning lottery numbers, get elected or get cured. But my lack of belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing God doesn’t stop me from praying for peace, for healing, for wisdom, for courage. To whom or what am I praying? I do believe there is something outside of me, beyond me, and within me, within all of us, always, that knows us and loves us unconditionally. This something is so much more than a person, a man, a human-like entity. It’s more felt than seen, although I find ample evidence of that presence in the faces of children and old people, in the sunrise pinking the sky, in hands extended in aid and friendship.

Perhaps it’s time for me to let go of my fears that readers will bring their own meanings to my words as I write of my spiritual journey. Don’t we all do that when we hear stories of others’ experiences? Aren’t those stories openings into our own? Perhaps my writing task is to show my journey toward that essence, that presence, that spirit, that I know as God. Readers will find the names that fit for them.

~ ~ ~ ~

Note: Enlivened by the Mystery (Friends Bulletin Company, 2009) includes an essay about my spiritual journey; a draft of the first chapter of my memoir is in the Summer issue of SHARK REEF Literary Magazine.

A Cost of War

2011-09-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

I heard a story recently about a woman, Jackie, who was an Army nurse in Iraq. She told her story to Brian Doyle, editor of Portland Magazine (Boots). Or rather, Brian caught Jackie’s story and then told it to his co-workers, his readers, probably his wife and kids, and to me and a bunch of other writing students in my MFA program. And now I want to tell you something that Jackie’s story taught me.

Jackie turned 27 this summer. Until recently, she was known as Lieutenant, and she was in Kirkuk. Now she lives near a beach and has a dog. I do, too—live near a beach and have a dog. But I’ve never been a Lieutenant, never been to Kirkuk, and I don’t know anyone else who has either. I’m so opposed to this war, to any war, that I avoid talking to anyone who is involved. That’s not hard to do in my small, rural community. We’re a peace-loving clan, I can count on one hand the number of young people who’ve joined the military during the 15 years I’ve lived here, and there are limited jobs here for someone looking for work after leaving the military.

Brian cried as he read Jackie’s story, and I cried as I listened. I’ve cried every time I’ve read it silently to myself or out loud to others. Her story is simple and eloquent about the costs of war for her—the emotional toll of being surrounded by fear, killing, and loss.

Like many Americans, I’ve spent time in these early days of September reflecting on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the aftermath during this past decade. As a nation, we’ve paid dearly for responding to violence with more violence, and there are big numbers to prove it. The Eisenhower Research Project based at Brown University assembled economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts, and a physician to quantify the domestic and international costs of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Their analysis (http://costsofwar.org/) yields staggering figures including an estimated $3.2 to 4 trillion spent, the deaths of more than 6,000 American soldiers and nearly 100,000 wounded, and at least 137,000 civilians killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. James Dao reported more stinging statistics about the current wars in the New York Times on Sept. 6 (They Signed Up to Fight): “More than two million sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. One in five returning with post-traumatic stress, major depression or traumatic brain injury. More than 1,000 missing a limb.”

I can’t comprehend numbers like this, but now I know that a woman named Jackie is one of the people included in them. So are identical twin brothers Ivan and Christian Bengsten, Bonnie Velez, Joel Almandinger, and others named in Dao’s story. I followed the link in Dao’s article for traumatic brain injury and read even more heartbreaking histories, like the one about Sergeant Shurvon Phillips and his long-term brain damage following exposure to neck-snapping, head-shaking mine explosions in Iraq’s Anbar Province in 2005.

There are at least three military bases within a couple hundred miles of where I live, and it’s a rare week that Navy jets don’t do training flights over the south end of my island. There probably are lots of Jackies not that far away. Her story led me to look beyond the numbers and beyond the anonymous people at the controls of the fighter planes practicing in the skies over my home. Her story also fortified my commitment to nonviolence and an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I know of no easy path to peace, though I’m clear that war is not the answer. Most of the time I feel that my letter writing to Congress and President Obama is futile, but I keep doing it (Friends Committee on National Legislation continues to be a place I can add my voice to influence U.S. foreign policy). Since hearing Jackie’s story, I’ve also committed to hold her in the Light, a Quaker practice some people think of as intercessory prayer or of joining with God’s constant love for a person. Compared to the costs to Jackie and thousands of others, it doesn’t seem like much. Yet even though I don’t understand it, I do believe that such holding is a powerful act, and I’ll keep doing it for Jackie.

Attentive Idling

2011-08-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

My compulsion to accomplish is fueled by a computer the size of the pack of cigarettes my mom used to slide into her purse. It serves as my calendar, my watch, my address book, and my to-do list. Its podcasts accompany me on my morning walks with my dog. One day recently, our workout stretched longer than usual, beyond the length of the hour-long program I typically listen to. With a quarter-mile to go before my loop returned me home, I pulled the buds out of my ears and stuffed my iPod into my pocket. It felt like a courageous act.

I don’t think I’m alone in my uneasiness with such moments of seeming non-productivity. There’s so much in 21^st Century American life that denies inherent value in strolling, ambling, proceeding without hurry or efficiency. Portable devices allow us to learn foreign languages, listen to books, and attend lectures, all while we work out, make dinner, pull weeds, or wash dishes.

Such current-day multi-tasking mania feeds my fears of sloth, conceived in my Midwest, Missouri Synod Lutheran upbringing. Yet, even after thirty years of sitting in silent Quaker meetings, I resisted those fifteen minutes of quiet at the end of my walk. I’ve covered that stretch of beach leading to my house thousands of times, but for an embarrassingly large number of them, I’ve failed to register the lick of the water, the whisper of the breeze through the sea grasses, the taunts of the eagles and crows, the palette of greens in the pines and blues in the bay, the pungent musk as my shoes slime across bundles of washed-up seaweed. If I’d scrolled to another episode on my playlist, had succumbed to the pull to achieve, I might have ignored them once again.

Poet Julie Larios would approve of my recent act of courage. She was guest faculty last week at my MFA in Creative Writing program and commanded us to be attentive idlers, to commit to time spent letting life into us. Good advice for my writing—and my spiritual journey.

Paddling Through Contemplation and Action

2011-07-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

Integration of two sides of the spiritual coin—the inward life and outward action —served as the focus for this year’s North Pacific Yearly Meeting (NPYM - http://npym.org/news.html), the annual gathering of Quakers in these parts. For four days in mid-July, a couple hundred of us from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana met with Friend-in-Residence Michael Birkel (an Earlham College professor, writer, and John Woolman scholar) and worshiped and shared around this theme. Michael presented evidence from the writings of both Woolman and Margaret Fell of the need for both contemplation and activism. Learning to balance these two in my own life continues to be central to my spiritual journey.

At the closing worship at Yearly Meeting, someone suggested that Spirit is a bird—with one wing contemplation and the other, action. “Contemplation without action,” she said, “and action without contemplation, keeps Spirit from flying.” I know the perils of trying to keep Spirit airborne with only one wing. For many years, I valued action over contemplation. Awakened to injustice in the world, specifically health care for the poor, I devoted myself to public health. I felt so compelled to fix the brokenness I witnessed that I neglected my own spiritual nurture. There was always more to do, and do, and do. Eventually, I could do no more.

I took a long break from caregiving and experimented with a more contemplative life. I discovered how parched my soul was and that I was being called to new work, more inward work, as a writer. Now I sometimes wonder if I’ve swung too far to the side of contemplation; I worry that my writing is not the kind of outward action that is needed in the world. While I yearn to have both contemplation and activism at work in equal measures in my daily life, I have yet to achieve the kind of steady balance I see in the eagles, herons, and gulls in flight near my home. Since returning from Yearly Meeting, I’ve been considering that paddling my kayak may be a more apt image for my efforts to integrate my inward, contemplative life with the pull toward outward action.

On my 49^th birthday, I bought a kit to build a wooden kayak. Over the next year, I assembled the dozens of pre-cut pieces of mahogany plywood to construct a 17 ½-foot, single person kayak. I spent hours mixing epoxy, gluing, nailing, and clamping the jigsaw puzzle together; layering fiberglass and varnish; then sanding and varnishing, sanding and varnishing, and several more rounds of sanding and varnishing until the boat’s deck glistened like honey. I sanded and primed the hull, too, then painted it a deep purple that I had created by mixing red and blue marine paint.

Late afternoon on the day I turned 50, I launched this vessel I’d built with my own hands (along with considerable help from a boat-builder friend, as well as the loan of a couple dozen of his C-clamps). Every time I take it out in the saltwater for a paddle, it nourishes and instructs me.

I’m a fair-weather kayaker, preferring the time for quiet and reflection that paddling on calm water offers. I didn’t install a rudder on my kayak—didn’t want the complexity of cables and foot pedals to turn a plastic blade on the boat’s stern. Instead, I use my paddle and the shift of my body to steer and balance. As I glide into the bay, the only sound is the lapping of the seawater against the hull and the dip and swish of my paddle. When the wind and currents are flat calm, my paddle’s rhythmic slice and pull through the water, first on the left, then on the right, repeating the alternating motion, keeps my boat balanced.

Even in that gentle sea, though, I have to vary my rhythm and pattern. Sometimes I paddle hard on one side to avoid tangles of kelp and seaweed. Unlike the eagle overhead lifting and lowering its wings simultaneously, at times I bend my torso to the other side, salty droplets sprinkling off one blade of my paddle as the other digs deep to turn my bow out of the path of a seal that pops up just beyond my bow. This seems more like the rhythm of my spiritual life—sometimes steering more toward action, at others, quite fully in contemplation.

For now, I’m following the pull to focus my outward action on my own community and writing for the wider world. However, I remain alert and open to the currents of other forms of action, praying that I’ll be able to lean into them, maneuvering with attention to both the inward and the outward life.

Telling Our Spiritual Stories

2011-07-13T11:24:00.000-07:00

It’s often through story-telling that I rustle through my confusion, my wonderings, my gratitude, my worries, my joys, and my faith. Stories, in specific places, where I remember the smell of the air or the scents in a room; the sound of traffic, or church bells, or the ocean; the texture of pavement or dirt or upholstery of the car’s seat; the touch of a warm hand on mine or a strong arm around my shoulders; the taste of tears coursing to my lips. Stories, peopled with family, friends, strangers, or no one but me and my cat.

Stories. They’re the best way I know to describe the indescribable Divine presence, and they’re often the way I encounter the Divine in others. So it’s no surprise that I’m drawn to a faith tradition, Quakerism, that calls us to speak from our own experience, to tell our own stories of encounters with Spirit.

In May, I joined with others from several Quaker meetings in the area to learn more about telling, and just as important, listening to, Spiritual Stories. Kathy Hyzy, editor of Western Friend, led a day-long workshop about this practice of both listening deeply and sharing from our deepest selves (http://westernfriend.org/community/spiritual-storytelling/). She began by suggesting that we all are storytellers—we’ve all told jokes, we’ve all shared memories of important events in our lives, we all have at least a handful of experiences that we tell over and over again. To prove her point, Kathy directed us to pair up with another person in our multi-age group to tell a “scar-y story.” The room hummed with tales of how each of us had acquired a particular scar. Yes, we all have stories to tell.

Kathy’s goal in this workshop was to share techniques of storytelling that help us tap into “the nuggets of experience that are spiritually important, times in which we felt close to God or encountered a sense of opening, Presence, or transcendence.” She instructed us in techniques of storytellers and writers to bring our personal stories to life—sensory detail of people and places, descriptions of characters, the use of dialogue, building tension to a climax, and reflection. Then, we all had the opportunity to practice telling and listening to stories. I came to know people—both long-time friends and new acquaintances—deeply.

For me, it’s often in the telling of a story, usually first through journaling or writing, that I come to understand the significance of an event or the understanding that arises from it. A walk with my cat has become one of those stories I tell over and over.

~ ~ ~ ~

For twenty years I worked as a nurse, primarily in public health. I felt led to serve the poor by being at their bedsides, visiting in their homes, and advocating for their care. I believed my compassion, as well as my skill, could help bring health and wholeness. I approached my work with a zeal born of a desire to save the world, believing that if I only worked hard enough, I could.

My drive took its toll. Early signs of disillusionment nudged me to move to a smaller town, take a job in a smaller organization, and get back to hands-on nursing care after several years as a public health bureaucrat. Within a couple of years, I was overwhelmed by my caseload’s never-ending stream of pregnant teens; I began to feel hopeless about the young women I cared for who were struggling with parenting complicated by poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, or domestic violence.

I tried to ease my burgeoning feelings of failure as well as the fatigue of witnessing so much suffering by moving into middle management. However, the impotence I felt in direct service was magnified in my new role caught between those with power and those in need. The clarity I had once had about my calling as a nurse was fading, and I knew it was time to re-evaluate. Fortunately, my family supported my need to retreat, and retreat we did, in 1994, to the tiny village of Stehekin, Washington.

Translated as “the way through,” Stehekin once was a passageway at the end of 55-mile-long Lake Chelan for Skagit and Salish Indians. Later, highways were blasted through parts of the North Cascades, but none ever made it to Stehekin. Today, most people get “uplake” by a commercial passenger-only ferry that makes one trip daily. Others arrive by float plane, the hearty by hiking a full day over National Park and Forest Service trails.

Telephone lines from the “downlake” world never made it to Stehekin, and there aren’t any cell towers, either. For the community’s 80 or so year-round residents, a single public telephone, for outgoing long distance calls only, haltingly relays voices via satellite when messages beyond Stehekin are urgent. Internet service has arrived recently, but just for those who install a satellite dish.

Despite my yearning for respite, there was one concern I carried with me to this remote, idyllic place. I feared I would forget. Forget the effects of abuse, disenfranchisement, and oppression. Forget injustice’s aftermath if I no longer looked in the eyes of people who lived with it daily. Forget the despair of limited opportunities as I experienced the privilege of choosing a different way of life.

There was no Quaker Meeting in Stehekin, so I went often to my favorite place of worship, a rock outcropping we named Boris’s Bluff. It was Boris, our tabby cat, who led me to a wooded sanctuary just a 15-minute walk from our house. To my surprise, he always trotted along with me on my treks there. Together we hiked through pine needles and scrambled over boulders that had rumbled down from mountain peaks over the centuries.

One day, sitting on a moss-covered rocky mound, I breathed in the pine scent of the surrounding woods and was warmed by the sun radiating off the stone. Encircled by mountain walls that gave the illusion there was nothing beyond, I was awed by an unexplainable feeling of connection with all people. Though I couldn’t see or hear others, I felt their closeness and no longer feared I would forget.

I hadn’t expected that the boundaries of water and rock that separated me from others could restore my awareness of my place in the circle of humanity. But there, in that valley nestled in the mountains, surrounded by old growth Ponderosa Pines and Douglas Firs reaching a hundred feet upward, I could see the effects of the cycles of melting snows, droughts, forest fires, and the rush of the Stehekin River. They taught me that the smallest touch, the briefest contact, the quietest diligence, can make a difference—can change the course of a river. It was there, in the solitude, that I had a palpable awareness I wasn’t alone. I embraced both my smallness and my greatness and felt released from the responsibility to do it all; I grasped it’s not up to me alone.

I don’t live in Stehekin anymore, but it lives in me. I didn’t go back to the old house, or the old job; instead, my family and I moved to a slightly less isolated community on Lopez Island in Puget Sound. Here, when I despair for the needs of the world and question how I’m to serve, the story of Boris’s Bluff strengthens me.

~ ~ ~ ~

We Quakers have many avenues to tell our spiritual stories and to listen to those of others. These stories sometimes come in the form of spoken ministry during Meeting for Worship. Others arise in response to queries during worship-sharing. Some are put into print in the form of personal essays and memoir. And now, technology provides additional venues to tell our personal stories of encounters with God. I often listen to podcasts of Northern Spirit Radio (http://northernspiritradio.org/) and read Quaker blogs. You can find links to some blogs in Western Friend at http://westernfriend.org/2011/02/quaker-bloggers-in-the-west/. I follow a number of them as well as these:

http://www.quakerquaker.org/

http://salonforthesoul.blogspot.com/

http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/.

I’m grateful for such generous spiritual story-telling.

Sacred Spaces

2011-06-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

“The corrosive eyes of time have not stared these ancient walls down…as if to say there are places in the world where beauty remains hidden and miraculously intact. This transcendent space where one leaves one world and enters another…”

~Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

I’ve been in such spaces where I’ve felt I had entered into another world. As a child, I created one of those places with my best friend, Sandy. She lived across the street from me in a boisterous Scotch Catholic houseful of six siblings. I was an only child, and a Lutheran. One of our favorite activities was to act out the Catholic mass on the steps of a Methodist Church on the street corner two doors from Sandy’s house. Following Sandy’s lead, I would bobby-pin a white doily to my head, move my left hand up, down, and across my chest in the shape of a cross, and kneel on the church’s cement steps. I can still remember the feel of the cold wrought iron railing I grasped as I knelt and how the concrete made little dents in my knees. I don’t know what drew me to this imaginative play, but I suspect it was a desire for something predictable and tangible as my child mind tried to make sense of the world. It was probably that same confusion that pulled me to attend real church services even when my parents didn’t.

Nearly twenty years later, I found a spiritual home among Friends, my faith and practice having shifted to Quakerism’s emphasis on inward experience without outward rites and ceremonies. I embraced the Quaker view that all of life is sacred, each day is of equal importance, and the Divine can be found in any place. I’ve encountered that essence that I call God many times and in many places where I’ve gathered with others in the silence, quieting ourselves and opening to it.

Rivers, mountains, forests, and oceans also are like sanctuaries for me. Sunrises and sunsets, thunderstorms and lightning, wildflowers bursting through cracks in rocks, kelp and seaweed swirling with the rhythm of the tides and currents, tree roots gripping the ground to resist wind and roaring floods—these are forces that also open my heart and quiet my mind to hear and feel God’s presence. The voice of wisdom and love that I listen for often is in the breeze that lifts tree branches and rustles the grass. A favorite rocky point I visit regularly, shaped by eons of wind, rain, and crashing waves that have moved boulders and gnarled pines, manifests the power and strength I lean on. For me, Presence is in the smell of decay and new growth, of wet mineral and dried grass.

After thirty years of Quaker worship as well as my experience of Spirit in nature, I hadn’t expected to be so drawn to a Catholic church in Mexico. My husband and I have visited San Miguel de Allende in Guanajuato, Mexico several times and have worshipped there with Quakers in the home of an expatriate. At every visit, though, I’ve also been drawn to La Parroquia, the parish church in the main square. Church after church was built on this same site beginning in the 16^th century. Around 1880, a self-taught mestizo architect, Don Zeferino Gutiérrez, was hired to build a new church façade. His inspiration came from postcard images of the great Gothic European cathedrals like Notre Dame. The result is a mass of pink columns, railings, windows, spires, and steeples.

It’s been a few years since I’ve been to La Parroquia, but I can easily recall its welcoming sacredness. It’s always cool inside the church’s concrete walls and quiet as the tile floor mutes footsteps. The scent of melting wax wafts from candles flickering around statues at stations of the cross, mixing with gladiolas and lilies on the altar, freshly laundered shirts and dresses, the gel on adolescent boys’ hair. The benches I've sat on have been worn to a honey glow by countless generations of toddlers, grandmothers, and young couples, much like those pausing in the church every time I’ve stopped in. The back of the pew in front of me had been smoothed and darkened by hands that have clutched it, just as I’ve done, compelled by some force to lower my body to my knees.

Thousands, maybe millions, of people have entered this same space with the intention to focus on divinity. I wonder how much incense and how many candles have burned here. How many words of adoration, thanksgiving, forgiveness, grief, and joy have been offered up over the church’s 500 years of confessions, funerals, weddings, baptisms, and prayers? How many hymns have been sung, rosaries prayed, chords played on the massive pipe organ in the far reaches of the ceiling? Surely their presence has changed the molecules in the stone columns and the spires, in the air.

Sarah Hoggatt described on her blog (http://walkingthesea.blogspot.com/2011_04_01_archive.html) a similar experience this spring in England at Jordans Friends Meeting.

Jordans Friends Meeting
Painting by Paul Garland

Built in 1688, the Meeting House is pictured in “The Presence in the Midst,” a well-known 1916 painting by James Doyle Penrose which portrays a meeting for worship of earlier years there with Jesus standing among Friends in the meeting. Here’s how Sarah wrote about sitting with other Young Adult Friends at Jordans in April 2011:

“Being one of the oldest meeting houses, just think of all the words those walls have heard. At the time we were there, there was a talk going on in another room about how a building is infused with what has gone on within it, that there is an unseen memory. What kind of memory does Jordans Friends Meeting have? To me, it felt sacred, hallowed, as if I was entering into a larger circle of living fellowship beyond what my hands could grasp.”

I’ve only scratched the surface of the study of Quantum Physics, but my limited understanding of its theories support my belief that certain spaces have been altered permanently as a result of years, decades, centuries of people going to them with an openness to the Divine. How else to explain the sacred connection I’ve felt (and Sarah did, too) with those who’ve gone to La Parroquia and Jordans Friends Meeting for solace or guidance; who’ve arrived in fear, in hope, in contrition. Isn’t that how we all meet Spirit, wherever we go? I’m content with the amount of understanding I have about how these changes happen; it’s a mystery I don’t have to solve, a question that doesn’t have to be answered. I can just experience it.

Perhaps I’ve come full circle back to my childhood yearning for “transcendent space where one leaves one world and enters another.” I’m grateful there are places that call to us in this way, that invite us to open ourselves to Divine love and grace and are changed by our seeking. Those transcendent spaces remind me I’m not alone; I’m connected with those who have preceded me, my journey mingled with theirs.

A Modest Genre

2011-06-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

Lake Chelan by David Ansley

Last week, I attended a workshop on The Personal Essay led by Ana Maria Spagna (http://www.anamariaspagna.blogspot.com/). One of the prompts she gave us resulted in the following essay.

A Modest Genre

This morning I watched the lake change from green waves, to black glass, and now to gray ripples. According to the dictionary on my laptop, a ripple is a small wave or series of waves on the surface of water. I looked the word up as I started to write on this last morning of a workshop on the personal essay. I’m two hundred miles from home, in a cabin at the end of a long lake in the mountains, out of reach of the phone, the Internet, and my well-worn dictionary and thesaurus that I turn to in search of different words to say the things that I want to say, to write the things that it seems so many writers already have written. I’ve spent the past four days with six other women, other women like me diving into the depths of memories, emotions, and dreams to bring those series of waves to the surface.

This morning I watched the lake change from green waves, to black glass, and now to gray ripples. In physics, my laptop dictionary tells me, ripples are small, periodic, usually undesirable variations in electrical voltage. Such ripples have surged through our little group in the cabin in the mountains, at the end of the lake, as we’ve approached, avoided, and re-approached losses, fears, regrets, mysteries, and discoveries. One woman said a teacher once told her all writing is about grief. Though we protested and recalled stories of joy and hope and redemption, we’ve all felt those undesirable variations in electrical voltage as grieving words coursed through our fingertips, as tears streamed down our cheeks.

This morning I watched the lake change from green waves, to black glass, and now to gray ripples. I’m relieved the boat that will start me on my journey home will be carried on these small waves, rather than the white caps that rollicked across the lake yesterday. In the coming days and months, there likely will be plenty more ripples of the undesirable jolt type as I study this form first described by that sixteenth-century Frenchman, Michel de Montaigne. He derived the name essai from a French verb that suggests experimenting, testing, and weighing out; so similar to my spiritual journey. Essayist Sara Levin claims, “The essay is a modest genre. It doesn’t mean to change the world. Instead it says – let me tell you what happened to me.” All these centuries since Montaigne, many of us still compose essays to make sense of life, or at least some wedge of it.

This morning I watched the lake change from green waves, to black glass, and now to gray ripples. My dictionary offers another definition of ripple—the particular feeling or effect that spreads through or to someone, as in her words set off a ripple of insight within her readers. This group of writers will leave today on this rippling lake, recommitted to experimenting, testing, and weighing out to make sense of slices of life, packing new tools to tell others what happened to us. Our words may not mean to change the world, but they will.

Writing as a Path to Spirit

2011-05-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

When Carol Sexton, Arts and Spirituality teacher at Pendle Hill, invited me to give a lecture at the Quaker conference and retreat center, I was thrilled and honored. This year’s “Way of the Artist” Speakers Series featured ten artists—painters, writers, musicians, photographers, storytellers, poets, actors—“who have followed a deep call to the creative life and discovered the power of the arts for prayer, spiritual practice, healing, teaching, building community, and creating social change.” On May 17, I spoke about “Writing as a Path to Spirit.” I’ve excerpted the lecture here; you can listen to the entire talk at http://www.pendlehill.org/images/lectures/20110517_Writing_as_a_Path_to_Spirit.mp3.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Writing as a Path

to Spirit

Words are powerful; they come back to us and draw us closer to Spirit. Think of a time you were touched by God through words on a page. Think of that time, and remember how God moved in you through those words.*

As a child, the excitement I felt every fall when it was time to buy new pencils, pens, and notebooks for school was an early clue that I might someday be drawn to creating with words. Still today, I can’t walk past an office supply store without stopping in to flip through blank journals and scribble on those little scratch pads beside the pens on display.

I developed an appreciation for people’s stories from my mom: first, as a fifth-grader, reading her weekly “Bellmont News” column, with its reports of who visited whom, that was published in a small town newspaper in Southern Illinois; later, sitting beside her in the studio of the local radio station while she discussed recent events and interviewed folks from our community; and finally, through her news stories and personal essays in the daily newspaper.

Years later, when I became a nurse, I again listened to stories. In hospital rooms, clinics, and homes I experienced an uncommon intimacy as patients shared their fears, hopes, grief, and pain. I knew my listening supported healing; it also fed my love of narrative.

Most of my nursing practice has been in public health. I felt called to that specialty’s priority of promoting health for all and for being a safety net for communities and people who typically are under-served. In the early 1990s, however, I discovered that concern about the bottom line was gaining greater influence over public health policy and practice. At the same time, I felt helpless and overwhelmed by my caseload’s never-ending stream of pregnant teens and young women ill-equipped to deal with parenting complicated by poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, or domestic violence. I admitted to myself that I no longer approached my work with the passion and compassion I once had. For me, that was a crisis.

Just as my disillusionment was rising, my family was feeling squeezed by Middle America’s compulsion to move faster, consume more, and question less. We embarked on a sojourn in the remote mountain community of Stehekin, Washington to re-evaluate priorities.

There, nestled in a valley surrounded by the craggy peaks of the North Cascades, with no phones nor television, and only 80 neighbors, I sought to reclaim the spiritual footing I’d lost. Two years later, I left Stehekin with more clarity about new directions in my work, a commitment to devote more time to writing, and ample material for personal essays. That journey is the focus of the memoir I’m working on.

Still preferring a remote community, we moved from Stehekin to a rural island in Puget Sound. I figured out how to do the parts of nursing I enjoyed most and developed a public health consultation practice. In October 2000, instead of attending the annual fall public health conference as I usually did, I enrolled in a week-long writing course led by Tom Mullen at Pendle Hill. During the workshop, we discussed how to fit writing into our lives. I realized a number of my consulting contracts would be completed by the end of the year, and I saw an opening to try a new schedule. Why not fit nursing work around writing, instead of the other way around? I announced to my fifteen workshop classmates that in January 2001 I would start a new job. Since then, the desire to promote health and healing that drew me to nursing in my twenties has found expression more in my writing.

What I hadn’t anticipated when I took this “job,” was just how much writing would feed me spiritually. Vinita Hampton Wright is someone whose thinking about art and spirituality speaks to me. She explains in The Soul Tells a Story—Engaging Creativity with Spirituality in the Writing Life:

“I have become a more spiritual person because I write. The creative process is a spiritual one and when we receive it as such, it deepens our gifts and edifies us in general. To write true stories, I must encounter truth. If I truly open my eyes and express in words what I have seen, then I will have participated in a spiritual act. I receive the vision from beyond myself, and I express it through who I am. This is God at work.”

Wright's words describe well my experience writing Hands at Work. While not explicitly Quaker, this book grew from my understanding of the Quaker testimonies of simplicity and equality and from my belief in that of God in everyone and of the importance and value of everyone’s story. Listening to and writing the stories ministered to me in my own seeking to do Spirit-led and Spirit-filled work. I know it ministered to the people I interviewed—they told me how they appreciated being watched and listened to as they worked. And I know it has ministered to others who have read the stories and looked at the images and felt inspired, challenged, or affirmed in their own work.

Every time I sit down to write is an act of faith. I typically come to my writing with questions, rather than answers. Through the writing, I tap into a wisdom that is beyond me. Wright claims, “It’s easier to trust the creative process when you also trust that a greater force is somehow guiding that process.” She refers to the faith required to engage creativity with spirituality as “submitting to a divine process that is beyond you.”

Wright claims that in the creative process, the only control lies in the mastery of one’s craft. “Give up the illusion that you’re in charge,” she says. “The best you can do is develop your gifts with all the strength and mind and heart you have.” Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain, also urges building skill. “We have to learn to be good technicians of the craft,” he says. “We’re not just telling stories; we’re transforming people.”

As a writer who experiences this craft as a path to Spirit, it seems fitting that much of the language of the creative process is common to the spiritual life. Wright’s term—submit— is the same one used for the action of sending work out for publication. Release is the first presentation of a work to the public, such as a book release or a CD release. Many artists call celebrations of their work openings. And in order to not just tell stories, but transform people, we have to practice.

I welcome your thoughts about how writing or other creative work serves as a path to Spirit for you. I leave you with a few queries to consider now and in the days ahead.

How have creativity and spirituality been linked in your experience?

What characteristics of creativity do you recognize in your life?

What spiritual practices do you already know of, or use, that might apply well to creative work?

What is your next step in being faithful to creative work you’ve been called to and/or to support someone you know to be faithful to a call to creative work?

*With appreciation to Christine Hall of Whidbey Island Worship Group who shared this reflection when she introduced plans to start a School of the Spirit program in the West.

No Cause for Celebration - Yet

2011-05-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

I froze when I saw the bold, large headline on the New York Times website – “Osama bin Laden Dead.” I called out to my husband and read it out loud, disbelief in my voice. As I read through the story that bin Laden had been found in Pakistan and killed by US special forces, my stomach soured. I searched my heart for feelings of relief—relief that this man our nation has feared since long before Sept. 11, 2001could no longer wield influence. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I were a family member of someone killed in the attacks on Sept. 11, or if someone close to me had been killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Would bin Laden’s death provide them some kind of closure?

But I felt no relief, and certainly no joy. Instead, all that welled up was grief – for the nearly three thousand lives lost on Sept. 11, for the tens of thousands of lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the trillion dollars spent so far by the U.S. to end terrorism.

In the following days, as I read about celebrations around the U.S., I felt alone in my sadness. In the comfort of my rural, remote community, with no threats to my well-being, I re-examined my commitment to non-violence. Although my heartache was real, I judged my rejection of killing another human being, even one who had brought so much violence to thousands of people for decades, as naïve. Yet I couldn’t shake the darkness that I sensed as I read justification for bin Laden’s murder.

Since the news of bin Laden’s death, I’ve read, prayed, and talked with others to find clarity about my opposition to my government’s actions. One friend recommended the site of Sojourners Magazine and its “God’s Politics Blog.” There, Jim Wallis posted some helpful queries:

· How do we best respond to evil and those who perpetrate it?

· What have we learned in the last 10 years about what truly is the best answer to the violence of terrorism?

· How do we change the conditions that have allowed terrorists to pull others into their agenda?

(For the full essay, go to http://blog.sojo.net/2011/05/02/how-should-we-respond-to-the-death-of-osama-bin-laden/).

An e-mail from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) directed me to a discussion on their Facebook page about bin Laden’s killing. And an essay by Kathy Kelley of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (http://vcnv.org/) presented sobering facts about the people and the place our country has been fighting for ten years. She writes in“Beyond Retaliation” –

“They live in a country where 850 children die every day, a country which the UN has termed the worst country in the world into which a child can be born, where the average life expectancy is 42 years of age. The UN says that 7.4 million Afghans live with hunger and fear of starvation, while millions more rely on food help, and one in five children die before the age of five. Each week, the U.S. taxpayers spend two billion dollars to continue the war in Afghanistan.”

I also turned to the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) to help me discern my beliefs about the actions of my government. Once again, there I found grounded, Spirit-centered wisdom as well as tools for action that strengthen my commitment to nonviolence and support to speak my truth.

Jonathan Evans, FCNL Legislative Representative, Foreign Policy, questioned why he, too, felt no joy or relief at the news of bin Laden’s assassination. He spoke my mind on the FCNL blog:

“… I believe deeply that war is not, and never has been, the answer to terrorism. My Quaker faith leads me to the conclusion that nonviolence is the only way to promote peace and justice. Jesus taught us to love our enemies. He did not teach (or ask) us to kill them. That basic teaching is as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago. In short, we are called to witness to the spirit of love that takes away the occasion for war. We are called to seek that of God in every person, even when that person perpetrates evil in the world.”

Posted on another page of the FCNL website was an action alert (http://fcnl.org/action/alert/2011/lam0502/) for those who viewed bin Laden’s murder not as a success but “a failure of imagination and of political will that led to answering violence with more violence.” With a few clicks, I drafted messages to both of my senators and my representative, expressing my view that killing bin Laden and more violence are not the answers. With the help of FCNL, I listed alternatives to violence that I believe will promote peace:

· begin a significant withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan

· halt offensive operations against the Taliban

· engage Afghan parties and Afghanistan's neighbors in negotiating peace

· channel U.S. development aid for reconstruction through Afghan, multilateral, and other civilian humanitarian organizations.

Now, as the shock has faded, and I’ve felt buoyed by evidence of many others who mourn this act of violence, I’m starting to see the potential for changed approaches and opportunities. Jim Wallis suggests, “The death of Osama bin Laden could be a turning point in our ability to both resist evil and seek good, to turn away from the logic of both terrorism and war, and, as the Bible says, to find the things ‘that make for peace.’” Jonathan Evans also believes in the possibility of a turning point “…that takes us in the direction of realizing sooner rather than later two FCNL objectives: the removal of U.S. military bases and combat troops from Afghanistan; and diplomatic efforts to reach a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan. When accomplished, both will be worth celebrating.”

David R. Woolley, a Friend from Minneapolis, is already thinking of how to celebrate. According to his blog (http://quakeruniversalist.wordpress.com), he’s promoting an idea for how Friends might turn this year’s tenth anniversary of 9/11 into “…an opportunity for honest dialog, mutual forgiveness, and reconciliation.” Here’s what he envisions:

“9/11 this year is a Sunday. What if Quaker meetings were to pair up with mosques and hold joint worship services? What if Friends were to attend Friday prayers at a mosque, and Muslims were to attend worship at a Quaker meeting on Sunday? It would make for a weekend of interfaith worship, fellowship, and learning, from 9-9-11 to 9-11-11…If this idea could spread beyond Quaker meetings, with HUNDREDS of partnerships forming between Friends meetings, other Christian churches, synagogues, and mosques all over America, it would be too big a story for the mainstream media to ignore. Maybe it could begin to turn the tide.”

I pray, and believe, that healing comes through nonviolent work toward justice. I’m grateful for Jonathan, Kathy, Jim, David, and many others like them who are leading the way.

Time-Simply

2011-04-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

Winter’s rains have barely ended; spring blossoms are just nudging their way through the cold soil; and already it’s started—the predictable, annual speeding up of the clock. I can feel an energy in the air, like a child wildly cranking a jack-in-the-box, as if to make up for the past few months of shorter days. As much as I welcome the longer hours of sunlight and the warmth and golden glow of the sun, I’m resisting the accelerating tempo.

It’s not as though I hide away during the winter. I still go to my job as a school nurse, work every day at my writing desk, walk the dog, gather with friends, attend Meeting, carry out household chores, and fulfill my commitments to various organizations. But I do take the season’s cold and dark as permission to burrow under my comforter, sip my tea more slowly, and inhale more deeply. Then, every April, I notice a shift pushing me, like commuters elbowing themselves into a New York subway at rush hour, to squeeze more activity into my already-full life.

This year I’m considering how my springtime ritual of scheduling every minute of my day conflicts with the Quaker testimony of simplicity. Although my possessions could be whittled down, I’m not tempted to acquire more stuff nearly so much as to fill my days doing more and more. In Hunting for Hope, essayist Scott Russell Sanders summarizes well a growing yearning for me—

“…the richness of a gathered and deliberate life, letting one’s belongings and commitments be few in number and high in quality.”

Thomas Kelly understood the breadth of the simplicity testimony. His words from over seventy years ago in A Testament of Devotion sound as though they were written yesterday. “Quaker simplicity needs to be expressed not merely in dress and architecture and the height of tombstones… Too many of us have too many irons in the fire…pulled and hauled breathlessly along by an over-burdened program of good committees and good undertakings.”

I can hear myself panting as I glance at my calendar. For years I carried a spiral-bound date book that fit in my jacket pocket. Black ink scrawls of meetings, to do lists, and tasks filled each day’s square. Now, I track where I’m supposed to be and what I have to do on a sleek, hand-held computer I can synchronize with my laptop. As I scroll through the days this week, nearly every box is filled with strips of color for different facets of my life--bright green for work dominates the boxes, along with blue and turquoise for home, family, and Meeting obligations. Most days, very little white space remains. My computer screen glows with evidence I’ve not achieved that gathered and balanced life Sanders refers to.

Simplifying my life isn’t a new challenge for me, and it’s not that I haven’t made some progress. My schedule now reflects better than ever my priorities for regular meditation, periods of solitude, and writing. But I still struggle with Kelly’s guidance that “… a life becomes simplified when dominated by faithfulness to a few concerns.” His words echo those of Caroline Stephen, whose Quaker Strongholds appeared in 1890. She wrote, “In life, as in art, whatever does not help, hinders. All that is superfluous to the main object of life must be cleared away…a severe pruning away of redundance.”

This year, rather than unconsciously picking up my pace or pruning without thought, I’m looking deeper into the roots of my crowded calendar. I’ve developed several theories about why an empty date book raises anxiety, like groping through a dark, narrowing tunnel, rather than the sense of boundlessness of a jet stream streaking silently across the sky. Years of striving to please others by doing, and being efficient, have kept me rushing from one task to another like a hummingbird darting to and from the feeder. Deaths of family and friends sobered my childhood and young adulthood and left me keenly aware of the brevity of life and suspicious of the promise of tomorrow and next year. For much of my life, the precision and certainty of a full calendar has given me a sense of worth and an illusion of control. It’s protected me from the unknown and comforted me like a polar fleece blanket hugging my shoulders. Lately, though, clicking open my calendar has felt less like solace and more like my Midwest childhood memories of walking out of an air-conditioned building into the wall of humidity on an August day.

While I’ve gotten better at quieting myself enough to listen for those few concerns—those main objects of life— that God calls me to, one of my challenges to Spirit-led pruning is believing that the value of those callings isn’t measured by quantity or speed. This April, I’m seeking the simplicity of unfilled lines in my calendar. I want my breathlessness to come from walks on the beach when the sun unexpectedly breaks through the clouds. Rather than tearing through errands, I want a schedule that allows for trips to the village on my bicycle rather than in the car, unhurried chats with neighbors at the grocery store, and a visit with an elderly friend. Instead of feeling guilty for not responding to the many needs of the planet, my country, my community, my family and friends, I’m committing to the few with which I can be fully, joyfully present, trusting that my own worth isn’t dependent on a jam-packed agenda. Perhaps this April and the coming months will find me closer to time—simply.

Photo credit: http://newsworld11.blogspot.com/2010/10/when-do-we-turn-clocks-back-in-2010.html

Libya and the Peace Testimony

2011-03-31T11:38:00.000-07:00

Rarely have I doubted my commitment to the Peace Testimony of Friends. I’m clear that violence is not the answer to hurts within a family, misunderstandings between neighbors, discord in a community, or conflicts between nations. Many times in my life I’ve called for an end to U.S. military involvement throughout the world—most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And now there is Libya.

Over dinner with friends recently, I was asked what I thought, as a pacifist, about the US decision to intervene. I admitted that in the first days of the rebellion, I had been persuaded that a military approach might be the best option following reports of Gaddafi’s escalation of violence when the US froze his regime’s assets and imposed an arms embargo. Memories of past genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia raised questions for me about a peaceful way to eliminate Gadaffi’s brutal tactics and protect innocent people from his military. Maybe the threat of this tyrant was so great for thousands of people in Libya that compassion mandated deadly intervention. Each morning I went online, hoping for news that the plan had succeeded, that Gadaffi had surrendered. Although I knew it was wrong, I was coming to believe that air strikes could bring a fast, decisive solution to a decades-old abuse of power. I couldn’t see an alternative.

In his address to the nation on March 28, President Obama spelled out why the U.S. felt compelled to join in military attacks after those first few days of diplomatic efforts. “In the face of the world's condemnation, Gaddafi chose to escalate his attacks, launching a military campaign against the Libyan people,” Obama said. “Innocent people were targeted for killing. Hospitals and ambulances were attacked. Journalists were arrested, sexually assaulted, and killed. Supplies of food and fuel were choked off. The water for hundreds of thousands of people in Misratah was shut off. Cities and towns were shelled, mosques destroyed, and apartment buildings reduced to rubble. Military jets and helicopter gunships were unleashed upon people who had no means to defend themselves against assault from the air.”

Who doesn’t want to end such violence and cruelty? And as quickly as possible?

This morning as I centered into worship, I uncovered my desire for a fast solution, recognizing the folly of such thinking—we have only to look at our eight-year involvement in Iraq (and countless other places) to remember that military intervention does not yield a quick result. Nor is it this time. I realized I had accepted the common belief that anything other than military intervention is inaction. Seeking guidance for other ways to act, I went to the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) website. There I found the kind of grounded, Spirit-led response I believe we’re called to.

Reading their alternatives to violence, I regained my steadfast belief that war is not the answer. The tools they offer on their website spurred me to convey that conviction to my elected representative and to ask them to take these actions:

· Urge a ceasefire.

· Provide humanitarian aid.

· Continue an arms embargo based in international law.

· Follow up the already-enacted UN Security Council resolution that refers the Gaddafi government to the International Criminal Court to hold him accountable for actions he has taken against fellow citizens.

President Obama’s words and actions suggest to me that he also struggles with how to be an agent of peace in the world. While he has pushed for a military response, he continues to call for other ways to assist in the removal of Gaddafi. I see indications that he is aware of the illusion of quick solutions, military or otherwise. At the end of his speech, the President urged us to not be afraid to act. “We recognize that … a diplomatic, humanitarian approach will take time and intense international engagement to be successful. We believe, however, it offers the best chance of limiting the loss of life and restoring a path toward peace and stability.”

I pray that our leaders will recognize that non-violence is action. This is what I think the Peace Testimony calls us to in Libya.

For more about why “War is Not the Answer,” visit:

http://fcnl.org/issues/middle_east/fcnl_statement_war_is_not_the_answer_in_north_africa_and_the_middle_east/

Reconciling the Existence of Evil

2011-03-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

My Quaker meeting’s continuing discussion of Marge Abbott’s To Be Broken and Tender focused recently on the book’s second section – Encountering the Seed. There’s much to consider in this segment that reflects on “The Nature of God,” “The Light of Christ,” “That of God in Everyone,” and “Spiritual Maturity.” I continue to chew on one of the queries we considered: How do you explain or reconcile within yourself the existence of evil in the world? (p. 202)

I was surprised—and relieved—to learn that several people in my Meeting who spoke during our discussion share my lack of belief in Evil. Contrary to the teachings of my Lutheran upbringing, I believe we all come into this world not as sinners, but as whole, loving beings, equipped to do and be love. And then we are broken—most by living in an imperfect world, some by the harmful effects of people who aren’t capable of care and love, many by circumstances such as poverty and oppression that challenge the Light within. Such brokenness separates us from the Divine, from the knowledge and experience of the mystery of being loved fully and irrevocably. That separation can lead to immoral, malevolent actions—the very definition of evil. As horrible as those acts can be, I don’t believe they are the work of an evil force or of evil people.

I’ve been reluctant to share this view for fear of seeming naïve about some of life’s harsh realities or disrespectful of the suffering of so many around the world at the hands of people who commit atrocities. Yet, I’m not unaware of the evidence of cruelty, immorality, and harm. I’ve heard it in the stories of clients in my work in public health in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest—women and children abused by husbands and lovers, fathers and mothers; refugees and immigrants denied health care and education; families without adequate food and housing. I’ve seen it in my travels to Nicaragua meeting banana workers poisoned by pesticides; driving through the burning debris of the Managua dump to play with children who live there with their families; learning of the decades of corrupt governments that stole funds from international aid organizations in the aftermath of earthquakes and hurricanes; acknowledging my own country’s terrorist acts of military support. I’ve listened to the stories of women in Nicaragua and Mexico and have heard from Friends working in Burundi of the horrors of unemployment, poverty, HIV infection, and tribal violence. And this week, I’ve watched and listened in horror and grief as reports from Japan of the earthquake and tsunami and their aftermath have filled all the media outlets.

It’s through my own experience of encountering the inexplicable, steadfast love of God for me that I’m convinced of God’s love for everyone and view the wrongdoing as the result of our brokenness, our separation from the ever-present Spirit that loves all. As I weep over stories of greed, deception, abuse, prejudice, and violence, I envision the Divine Presence doing the same—crying for the pain and suffering brought on by souls that have been lost, people whose connection to the great force of Love has been severed.

I know we’re called to work for justice, but I wrestle with how humanity can right these injustices. I’m certain that demonizing those who commit despicable acts does not heal the deep wounds they suffer and cause. I have faith that, ultimately, God’s love restores us to wholeness. Marge Abbott’s powerful teaching reminds us that it is in our brokenness and tenderness that we receive such love.

To Be Broken and Tender: http://westernfriend.org/shop/books/

To Make Music in the Heart

2011-02-25T11:02:00.000-08:00

Snowy Seattle

✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴

In the past few weeks, I’ve gone from a silent retreat (see previous post) to a writing retreat, where I am now, at the Seattle apartment of vacationing friends. Thanks to their generosity, I have a change of venue from my rural, island home, to the city… to write about the two years my family and I lived in the remote mountain village of Stehekin, WA. I’ve schlepped journals with me here to freshen memories of that time seventeen years ago as I work on the rough draft of a book-length memoir.

Yesterday, I re-read pages I had written that snowy first winter in Stehekin. Snowfall outside the Seattle apartment transported me back to that time when inches and inches of snow slowed and focused my journey inward. Questions about the work God called me to accumulated on the pages as the snowdrifts grew outside.

Prior to our move to Stehekin, much of my identity had been tied to work as a public health nurse, caring for infants, children, and women with high-risk pregnancies. That work had fed me for many years, had brought me satisfaction and gratitude that I had been led to help others. After about twenty years, though, I was drained. Day after day, in the privacy of our mountain cabin, I peeled away layer upon layer of uncertainty about my work and my worth. I carried out assignments in Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, writing to the recognition that I was tired of taking care of others. My three pages of free-flow writing every morning became questions to God about what I was being led to and how I was to serve.

The solitude and beauty of the mountains, river, and forest awakened my creativity and revealed how depleted I was. I had become a shriveled sponge in desperate need of re-hydrating with art, music, walks, reading, cooking, writing, and being with friends and family. I had expected that a few weeks or months of attending to myself would saturate my dryness, but as the days grew shorter, the snow piled deeper, and the air chilled my skin on daily hikes, I recognized not only the intensity of my exhaustion but nudges to a new calling.

Early in December that year, a card sent by a long-time nursing friend buoyed me. The card’s message, Howard Thurman’s poem, “Christmas Begins,” spoke directly to me. Thurman’s words suggested that after the song of the angel, the star, the kings and the shepherds are gone, the work of Christmas begins:

“To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among peoples,

To make music in the heart.”

Could it be that God had led me to that time of healing, restoring, and renewing so that I could make music in my heart? It took me awhile, but I’m now clear that I am called to work that makes music in the heart, through listening and words and stories. My belief is that such music helps find the lost and heal the broken, and brings peace.

Late Wednesday night, as snow glistened in the streetlights and powdered the sidewalks of Seattle, I received an e-mail that I’ve been accepted into an MFA in creative writing program. There, I’ll continue to write my memoir and other stories that I hope will further Thurman’s notion of the work of Christmas.

~ ~ ~ ~

Blogging update – The January/February issue of Western Friend magazine focuses on the written ministry of Quaker bloggers in the West (http://westernfriend.org/2011/02/quaker-bloggers-in-the-west/). Almost all of the content of the issue is available online, but WF editor, Kathy Hyzy, printed excerpts from ten blogs (including a post from this one). For those new to blogging (and perhaps hesitant to explore this new media), the WF print version offers a gentle introduction. Enthusiastic bloggers will find the issue a great resource as well, with links to dozens more Western Quaker bloggers and to Quaker organizations all over.

Silent Retreat

2011-02-09T08:08:00.000-08:00

I once avoided silence; at times, even feared it. Now I relish the silence, seek it out, embrace it and the gifts it provides. I begin most days in solitary meditation and spend many of my hours in silence, writing or working in my art studio.

So why, then, do I travel for three hours at the end of January each year to retreat with other Quakers in silence? This weekend Silent Retreat sponsored by my Quarterly Meeting has become one of my rituals to bring in a new year. This year, thirty-two of us gathered at our usual spot, a rustic camp at the edge of a state park. After a potluck dinner and introductions on Friday evening, we entered into silence to pray, journal, walk, read, prepare meals, sleep, eat, and worship together.

This year’s retreat was a wet one. The air was warm, almost like spring, and the rain was unrelenting. The rhythm of its patter on the cabin’s metal roof directed me to relax, reflect, and forget the clock. One of the disciplines I follow at the silent retreat is to re-read my spiritual journal of the past year. I read with attention to themes; I log the titles of books and articles I referred to during the year; and I recall the events that I recorded in my journal pages.

On Saturday morning, I followed the rain’s instructions so well that I nearly missed lunch. Absorbed in reviewing my journal, I was only vaguely aware of the leavings and returnings of others to my dorm’s common room. A subtle scent of tomatoes and onions circled the soft couch as someone sat down next to me. Thinking it was noon, I shuffled to my bunk in the next room and checked my clock; its digital face read 1:17. I gathered my dishes and side-stepped mud puddles to the dining hall. The soup on the lunch menu was gone, but I feasted on cheese; bread; a crunchy, sweet, russet-skinned pear; and a wedge of peanut butter cookie.

Back in the cabin’s common room after my late lunch, a fire glowed in the tiny wood stove. Rain-slicked hooded jackets in red, green, purple, and fluorescent lemon hung over hooks, doors, and chairs. I had no desire to leave the dry warmth, content with my journal and books in the company of silent Friends. Being with others in silence, together without interacting verbally, close to others without the pressure of interacting, is a relief for me. There’s an intimacy in sharing space without sharing words. There are a number of regulars at this retreat that I see only here. I don’t know many details of their lives—the kind of work they do, whether they have children, what organizations they belong to, whether they garden or are marathon runners— yet I feel I know them, and am known by them, more deeply than many people I see daily or weekly.

The silence of the weekend carried me to different places; to a depth of being I rarely get to in a typical day. I listened—not to music or voices, but to the groaning pines, the whispering wind, the rumbling river. I listened to my breath, exhaling out the jangle of sounds that usually surround me and inhaling, inhaling deeply and sinking into my meditation. Resting one sense took me to an awareness I usually don’t get to with my daily times of worship. During this year’s journal review, words I’d read and written in the past spoke to me in new ways. Ideas I’d considered, but put aside, re-surfaced with new urgency and clarity. Now I was ready for them when I hadn’t been before. The silence cleared space for God’s presence to enfold and guide me.

Forty hours of not talking, not putting my thoughts into spoken words, not listening to others’ spoken words, brought me to the doorway, beyond the doorway, into sustained connection with Spirit. This year, that connection bestowed peace and renewal.

Broken and Tender

2011-01-27T08:49:00.000-08:00

My Quaker meeting on Lopez Island (WA) has just embarked on a study of To Be Broken and Tender by Margery Abbott. With leadership from our Spiritual Life Committee, over the next few months we’ll discuss the book’s content.  This month we explored the first four chapters and shared in response to these queries:

· What in the reading resonated with your experience?

· What did you find difficult to accept?

· What does your reading mean for you within our Quaker community?

Many people who attended expressed that the book is deepening their understanding of Quakerism as well as stimulating exploration of their own beliefs. That’s true for me as well. I find the book especially powerful in its combination of Quaker history, theology, and Marge’s personal narrative of her spiritual journey. Much in the book’s first four chapters echoes in my soul.

Like Marge, it took me many years of what she calls waiting and attending to have an awareness of being loved. Sure, I had felt loved by my parents, my husband, my children, and many friends. But there is a bigger, more steadfast love that I believe only Spirit is capable of that I didn’t fully embrace until mid-life. That awareness of being loved, always and unconditionally, changed me by silencing (or at least muffling) my fears of not being good enough, capable enough, or caring enough.

These fears are old and imbedded in some of the deepest and most hidden parts of my being. I’ve come to understand that they go back to toddlerhood losses—of my alcoholic father and grandfather—and of my childlike attempts to make sense of the dramatic changes these deaths brought to my mother and me. With the understandings of a two-year-old, I likely imagined I somehow caused my father’s death and tried to protect my mom from more grief. Years of striving to make her happy and not upset her or cause her to worry sharpened my sensitivity to any signs of her disapproval or disappointment. Over time, my desire to please her governed many of my actions; eventually, avoiding dissatisfaction of teachers, co-workers, employers and friends shaped my decisions as well.

Fortunately, those I was trying to please were responsible, caring people whose values I shared and aspired to. It took many years, many miles on my spiritual journey, to recognize that I wasn’t called to live their lives, hadn’t been given their gifts. Quaker practices of discernment and silent worship taught me to listen deeply for Spirit and to trust the wisdom within me when I open myself to God’s guidance. A spiritual friend and mentor shepherded me in examining my understandings of God’s love, and eventually I came to fully accept the knowledge that I am loved, came to know that unconditional love that is available to me, to everyone. This realization has freed me of much of the fear that dominated my decisions about the work I am meant to do.

Marge writes of her own feelings of despair about her calling concurrent with her father’s death. During this vulnerable time, she attended a Quaker Meeting far from home and describes her reaction to vocal ministry as, “…my life-long sense of worthlessness was consumed in all-encompassing love.”

I resonate with Marge’s story as I’ve had my own experiences of all-encompassing love. One was in the wilderness where I had retreated with my family out of despair over a loss of clarity about the work I felt called to. For two years we lived in a remote mountain community where I separated myself from those voices I had sought to satisfy and listened for what it is I’m meant to do. One morning during a walk deep into the quiet and solitude of the mountains, I felt God’s presence and unconditional love as I never had before. I felt known and loved just as I was, free of fear of losing that love.

Like Marge, I was surprised to be called to a ministry of words. She describes her experience as, “Slowly I came to see what it means to say that when words or actions arise out of the Spirit, they echo in other souls. That such words and actions open the heart and reduce fear. That words can have the power to heal and to encourage growth.”

I’m still learning to trust the healing power of my own words. Remembering I’m loved takes regular reminders. How often I slip back into worries about whether I’m doing enough, preoccupied with concern I’ll be judged or criticized or compared to others. I’m grateful Marge has heeded her call to ministering with words and for sharing her own story of “being broken open by God’s love.” Through her writing, I have a companion on my own journey, and my Meeting has a guide as we risk being broken and tender.

~ ~ ~ ~

Recently I learned that Friends in the Midwest are reading and studying To Be Broken and Tender and will be visited by its author in Feb. More information about this upcoming workshop is at Liz Oppenheimer’s blog: www.thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com. Check Liz’s January 7 post.

To Be Broken and Tender is available at: www.westernfriend.org; click on Books.

A Hope-filled Beginning

2011-01-04T07:51:00.000-08:00

Last summer I was introduced to writer Scott Russell Sanders and his essays. One of his collections, Hunting for Hope, has become a favorite; I refer to its dog-eared and underlined pages often as inspiration both for my morning worship and my writing.

These essays are a response to questions Scott received from his adult children and university students about how to remain hopeful in a world and at a time in which the future seems threatened. Although Scott is filled with concern for the environment, he doesn’t feel despair, so he started to pay close attention to where it is he finds hope. His search resulted in beautifully written personal essays about nature, community, and spirit that shine a light on reasons for hope even in these troubled times.

As I wrote the date 1-1-11 in my journal on New Year’s Day, I relished the feeling of hope that I typically experience each January. Even though 57 years of life have taught me the coming year will have both losses and gains, joys and sorrows, pain as well as healing, I can’t help but be hopeful.

Right now, my hunt for hope is fueled by the crisp, new calendar on the kitchen wall. Its little boxes are filling already with commitments, activities, travels, and reminders of tasks to do. Yet, many of those squares remain open, and in these early days of 2011, I’m embracing the unknown and savoring a sense of potential, knowing that I’m not alone on this journey.

Stepping into the Stream

2010-12-26T07:05:00.000-08:00

Finding the words to describe my spiritual experience always is challenging for me – and this from a writer! My scientific, analytical, linear mind seeks to name the mysterious presence within and outside of me that guides me and connects me to time, places, and people. I grew up calling that essence God and still do. But now, that’s just one of many words I use to talk about the spirit that is ever-present in my life. Bill Taber’s Four Doors to Meeting for Worship (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 306) is loaded with images and metaphors that speak to my understanding of God and the mystical experience of Quaker worship.

My Meeting ordered a stack of Taber’s pamphlets recently, and in early December, several of us got together to discuss it; that gathering was the initiation of a “Quaker Book Group.” All of us who met had read Four Doors to Meeting for Worship previously, and we all again found resonance with our own experiences of God and worship.

Taber suggests that worship offers an opportunity to “enter a reality which has always been there from the beginning of time, waiting for us to join it,” and he uses the image of an invisible stream we can step into at any time. Perhaps Taber’s imagery speaks to me because I live in the Pacific Northwest, and during this especially soggy rainy season, streams all around are making their presence known. Yet even in the driest days of summer, I know they’re still there, burbling softly toward rivers and the ocean.

Taber uses the metaphor of a door to discuss the stages of entering into the stream and going deeper and deeper into it to experience the fullness of Meeting for Worship. My encounters with Spirit typically involve passing through different stages as well, as I move inward, shedding my ego, where, as Taber describes it, the “…analytical mind is cushioned in a vaster mind with access to wider ways of knowing.” That’s what often happens for me when I write, and perhaps why my writing practice sometimes feels much like my spiritual practice.

For the past week, though, I’ve not stepped into the stream much, at least not in my usual ways. My husband and I traveled by train from Seattle to New York (likely the inspiration and focus for future writing) for the holidays with our children. I’ve not followed my typical routines of quiet centering, journaling, and writing to more consciously enter the stream. But I know the stream is there, and that I’ve dipped into “brief moments of communion” with it, reminiscing with my adult children about their childhood and shared experiences; seeing the city and the wider world through their eyes; snatching some few moments of solitude before the day’s flurry of activities begins.

As I write, I’m entering Taber’s “Door Inward,” the time of inward focus to prepare for Meeting for Worship. Today, instead of with my small Quaker group on Lopez, I look forward to stepping into the stream with others at Brooklyn Friends Meeting.

Further Convinced to Blog

2010-11-30T08:07:00.000-08:00

One of my desires with this blog is to chronicle my experience using this new (for me) venue for sharing my writing. As I explained in my first posts in May, I became convinced to blog last spring following presentations and discussions at a conference of Quakers Uniting in Publications (QUIP). There, Friends from around the world and across generations shared their own experiences of, and concerns about, using blogs to minister through writing. What compelled me most in these conversations was the realization that blogs provide opportunities for dialogue about spiritual journeys and Quaker faith and practice. Last week, I experienced blogging as an extended time of worship-sharing.

The day after I wrote reflections about forgiveness, I discovered a comment had been posted on my blog. Cathy, a Midwest Friend I had met at the QUIP conference, wrote of that same day having experienced the grace of forgiveness. Her comment led me to her blog, Salon for the Soul, where she related her interaction with a friend that resulted in healing old wounds between them (http://salonforthesoul.blogspot.com/2010/11/fresh-act-of-forgiveness.html).

Following my exchange with Cathy, I e-mailed Ron to let him know that the worship-sharing about forgiveness he had facilitated the previous week continues. Today, I’ll encourage others in our Meeting to join this extended sharing.

Worship-sharing through blogs? Maybe I’m being convinced of that, too.

Forgiveness

2010-11-24T14:48:00.000-08:00

The first Sunday of each month, my Quaker meeting for worship takes the form of worship-sharing. This month’s theme was forgiveness.

Out of the silence of open worship, the convenor, Ron, read from Practicing Peace by Catherine Whitmire:

“Forgiveness is a condition in which the sin of the past is not altered, nor its inevitable consequences change. Rather in forgiveness a fresh act is added to those of the past which restores the broken relationship and opens the way for the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven to meet and communicate deeply with each other in the present and the future. Thus, forgiveness heals the past, though the scars remain and the consequences go on.” ~ Douglas Steere

Ron went on to read some queries for us to reflect upon, focusing on our own personal experiences of forgiving and forgiveness. I sank into the silence and reached into memories of forgiving and being forgiven.

That day, and since, I’ve returned to a conflict I’ve had for years with another community member (I’ve changed some details to maintain anonymity). Larry and I worked together on a project for several years, with tension and conflict occurring often between us. My stomach churned before and during nearly every interaction, anticipating Larry’s typical tactics of monopolizing discussions, laying guilt and blame, and making unrealistic demands on me and others involved in the project. I tried every technique I’d ever learned to cope with and affect Larry’s behavior, and nothing worked. Finally, I resigned from the project and have kept my distance from Larry ever since. Do I need to take another step and forgive Larry? Forgive myself?

The concept of forgiveness suggests to me there is a wrong-doer and a wronged person. Except in cases of random, anonymous violence or crimes, I believe those roles rarely are so clearly demarcated. I’m fortunate to never have suffered such cruelty, so I don’t have personal experience with forgiveness in situations in which there’s a clear victim and a clear offender. What’s been more common for me is situations like the one with Larry, or with a family member or friend, when I’ve been emotionally hurt and have hurt another. In those situations, I believe all parties carry some responsibility for the conflict; all have made mistakes. I know that shared responsibility is true for the clashes I had with Larry.

Healing of these uneasy or broken relationships is what I seek, and I’m not sure the act of forgiveness is the route for such repair. Forgiveness implies someone has superiority, a power to grant something to another person. I believe I can only forgive myself, can only ask for God’s grace to forgive me, and can ask for that same grace for someone whose words or actions have hurt me or others around me.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with Douglas Steere’s suggestion to add a “fresh act to those of the past.” I don’t envision that “fresh act” would involve hashing things out with Larry, which is my usual approach to interpersonal conflict. Instead, I’ve been opening my mind and my heart to Larry and his wounds that contributed to his hurtful actions. I’m seeking compassion for myself, as well, for the ways my behavior factored into the clashes between us.

I don’t think it’s for me to forgive—I think that happens beyond the human realm. What I CAN do is create an environment—or contribute to its creation—that is filled with love and compassion for all those involved and that can make space for the departure or the healing of the pain and the presence of new growth. I’m open to the possibility that such motion on my part will heal the past between Larry and me and that God’s grace will forgive both of us.

Ferry Boat Meditation

2010-11-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

“Shaw Island. We’re now arriving on Shaw Island.”

The announcement startles me. I’d been so absorbed in my writing meditation on the ferry that I hadn’t detected the boat slowing down. I wasn’t really aware the vessel had been moving. I looked up from the glowing white of my laptop screen to notice the jagged, black treetops on the shore outlined by the rising sun.

This is how I start my day twice a week. On those mornings, my pre-dawn meditation silence is broken by the voice of a ferry crew member announcing our progress on the route to the neighboring island where I work part-time as the school nurse. Between the time I wait in the Lopez Island ferry line to board until I off-load at the run’s second stop on Orcas Island, I steal 45 minutes to quiet, center, pray, and write.

Here I write fast, ignoring typos and grammar, just trying to get the words down as they flow out of my solitary worship time. Often, like today, an idea comes to me that eventually ends up as a blog entry, and I get the beginning kernels on the page.

It’s not much time, but it’s a start. No phone, no Internet connection, no piles of bills and correspondence to distract me. Just me, in the quiet of my little maroon Subaru, the boat’s humming engine muffling other sounds.

I could get out of the car; walk upstairs to the warmth of the passenger cabin and the quiet murmurings of other ferry commuters. I’ve done that on some particularly cold mornings when my car hasn’t retained the heater’s blast during my 10-minute drive from home to the Lopez landing. But today, and most days, I decide instead to stay in my private confessional/meditation space and write my way closer to Spirit.

“Orcas Island. We’re now arriving on Orcas Island. Drivers and passengers please return to your vehicles. Orcas Island.”

I slide my cursor up to the “Save” icon, then direct my laptop to “Shut Down.” An orange-vested crew member signals for me to drive off the deck and up the ramp of the ferry landing. I breathe in and out, deeply, a few times, and give thanks for these few minutes of solitude.

To Be a Good Storyteller

2010-11-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

“Good storytellers heal the world. The stories that save us are the stories that give us what some Buddhists call a ‘bigger container.’ They open us up to new understanding and growth. Bigger container stories expand our circles of caring and ‘complexify’ the universe rather than simplify it. They encourage us to risk more for the world’s sake rather than making us cynical, cautious, and jaded…”

~ Mary Pipher – Writing to Change the World

I made an abrupt decision to apply to nursing school. It was the day forty years ago that I discovered a classmate had been accepted to a nearby hospital school of nursing. Like me, Patti hadn’t taken chemistry, a course I had assumed was a prerequisite to get into the program. Our high school’s chemistry teacher had such a reputation for being unfairly harsh with female students (a claim that baffled me since she was… a she!) that I had avoided any classes she taught. Instead, I took other challenging college prep courses, thinking I would be an English major and eventually, a teacher.

But the day I heard that Patti was going to nursing school, I knew without reservation that was the work I wanted to do as well. At the time, I wouldn’t have used the term “calling,” but I did have a sense that something beyond me had opened a door and lit a path that I felt compelled to follow. Ten years later, when I began attending Quaker meeting and learned about leadings, I had a way to talk about a variety of experiences in my life where I had felt clear guidance from the presence I call God. Abandoning teaching for nursing was one of those times.

For years I worked as a nurse with passion and gratitude that I had been called to serve in a way that fed me spiritually and also provided a livelihood. Unexpectedly, twenty years later, the zeal and satisfaction started to fade. What I had assumed was a lifelong leading no longer seemed to fit. I began to question the work I was doing as well as my understanding of calling. Was it possible Spirit was asking me to do something different?

Gregg Levoy writes in Callings—Finding and Following an Authentic Life, “…few people actually receive big calls, in visions of flaming chariots and burning bushes. Most of the calls we receive and ignore are the proverbial still, small voices…the daily calls to pay attention to our intuitions, to be authentic…”

I sensed that still, small voice on a deserted mountain highway one summer when I was feeling most distressed about my work as a public health nurse. Like the discovery twenty years earlier that I could go to nursing school even without high school chemistry credits, some barriers to a dream I had had for awhile seemed to be disappearing. As I drove back home after a family vacation in a remote mountain village, a clear plan to spend a full year there unfolded with each mile. This was a fantasy my husband and I had revisited and talked ourselves out of over ten years of vacations there; now a move seemed possible, desirable, and necessary. Responding to that voice required much more discernment and planning, but ultimately we did take what I’ve termed a family sabbatical, initially for one year, and then extended to a second.

The story of my journey during those two years is the subject of a memoir I’m writing. I know of no better way for me to understand what that time was all about for me than to write it. My hope is that this, and other writing I do, results in some of those “bigger container stories” Mary Pipher talks about in Writing to Change the World.

I know I have much to learn to be one of those good storytellers. To do this work well requires study, practice, and learning the craft of writing. Certainly I’ve been doing that over the past ten years by writing regularly, attending workshops and taking courses, and having my work critiqued. Last summer I took another step to refine my skills by attending a five-day residency that is part of a graduate program in writing.

Attending that residency was one of many actions I’ve been taking recently to discern if I’m to commit to the full graduate program. While I’ve become clear that such a program, and this one in particular, would be of great benefit to me and my work, I requested a clearness committee to help me identify how and what to cut from my already-full life in order to give and get the most from this program. We met for the first time last week.

My committee and I followed the guidelines Levoy offers for how a Quaker clearness committee works:

“Members first observe a period of silence…a sincere attempt to shift the center of gravity from the personal toward the transpersonal, toward bringing to an individual dilemma something of the divine.”

Then, we proceeded to the practice that is most effective, yet radical, in the clearness process—the members ask questions only. This allows for what Friend Jan Hoffman describes in Levoy’s book as a process, “…to engage the focus person in a way that makes hearing his or her own inner guidance more possible…”

As I listened for my own inner guidance, I heard lingering questions about whether I’m called to writing and called to further study. My concerns about saying no to other activities and fully committing to the program are intertwined with old beliefs I carry about the value of art in a hurting world and about the “right way” to respond to injustice and suffering. I spent much of my two years in the mountains wrestling with attitudes in conflict with my growing certainty that Spirit wants us to engage in work that brings us joy; this nudge to move deeper into the life of a writer is giving me more opportunities to test this understanding.

The morning after meeting with my clearness committee, during a long walk with my dog, Buddy, an insight came to me. If I felt called to advanced schooling in nursing, I suspect I wouldn’t be concerned about letting go of other activities so that I could devote my time and energy to my studies. But I’m clear that’s NOT what I’m called to. It’s time for me to give myself permission to focus on what I do feel called to—and to do so joyfully.

Calls Not Answered

2010-10-22T14:42:00.000-07:00

Feet shuffling. Whispered “Good mornings.” Bodies shifting in chairs. These are the sounds of gathering for worship in friends’ living rooms on Sunday mornings. Recently it was at Gene and Judy’s house where I closed my eyes and breathed in and out slowly and deeply to let those sounds float around me as I grounded myself in the presence of the Spirit.

Then a mechanical voice spoke, “Calls will not be answered.” I peeked through half-opened eyes to see Judy walking away from the telephone; my answering machine gives the same message, in the same voice, when I turn it off before meeting.

Calls will not be answered. How often I’ve thought that when I’ve felt pulled in directions I don’t want to go. I picture myself like a little girl stamping her foot, arms folded tight over her chest, her face in a pout. Calls will not be answered. God, don’t even ask. Sometimes I’m more polite. PLEASE God, don’t even ask.

Apparently this resistance is part of my Quaker heritage. Marge Abbott writes in her book, To Be Broken and Tender, that 19^th Century Quaker Rachel Hicks reportedly first responded to a call to travel in the ministry with the words, “This is a service I cannot perform.”

So often I sit in meeting for worship or in my daily time of silence listening for wisdom to guide me in my actions. Concerns ranging from global climate change and war, to my vocation, family concerns or crises in friends’ lives weave through my meditation. I’m aware of so many needs, so many issues requiring loving attention and care. Often on my way to settling and centering, judgment that whatever I’m doing isn’t enough burbles up. Although I know I can’t respond to everything, that not every issue or concern or danger is mine to act on, I put great pressure on myself to hear, and then answer, the “right” call. I’ve made progress; I used to believe that I really could do it all. Now I understand that God expects me to use my free will and to discern which calls are for me and which I’m to leave unanswered.

The answering machine’s voice seems to be speaking directly to me as I continue to test my leading to strengthen my ministry of writing by enrolling in an MFA program. The demands of this course of study will require time and energy that I currently use in other ways. I’m struggling with the awareness that answering this call would mean, for awhile at least, letting others go unanswered. Too often I’ve forgotten that saying “yes” to something requires that I say “no” to others. I’ve requested a clearness committee to help me identify what I need to say “no” to if I’m going to be faithful to the call to return to school.

Gregg Levoy uses a slightly different telephone analogy in Callings—Finding and Following an Authentic Life. “We need time when we’re not engaged in what the Taoists refer to as ‘the ten thousand things.’ When we give off nothing but busy signals, calls simply don’t go through. There’s no room for them. Make some room. Get off the line once in a while.” I hope to come to a sense of peace about focusing on just a few things instead of trying to do thousands.

Updates - Several weeks ago I wrote about my friend, Greg, who was diagnosed with brain cancer. He’s tolerating treatment well and is living with gusto. I know I’m not alone in my heightened awareness of the many lessons illness teaches about living and dying.

Blogging continues to be a good spiritual and writing discipline for me. Although I haven’t maintained my commitment to post weekly, this public forum provides just enough of a deadline to nudge me to write regularly, and that’s good for my spirit and the craft.

Two Places at Once

2010-10-09T22:51:00.000-07:00

Despite my belief in the wisdom of being fully present to each moment, I often yearn to be in at least two, if not three, places at the same time. I started drafting this blog post waiting to board a plane in Washington, DC, headed to Seattle. I had made a quick trip there to visit my son in combination with exhibiting at the New England Independent Booksellers Association trade show in Providence, Rhode Island. Too hard to be that close to my son, newly moved to Arlington, VA, without seeing him. Tempting to make a quick trip, too, to see his twin sister, who runs a café in Brooklyn, but I resisted.

As the 737 sliced through a thick mat of gray clouds, I wanted to be both at my son’s cozy apartment just outside the nation’s capital and back home in my quiet, island community. And, while fantasizing the impossible, I also longed to be sipping a cappuccino at my daughter’s café.

The kids haven’t lived at home for over ten years, and I’m clear that they’re both just where they should be at this stage of their lives. I’m equally certain that I’m in the place just right for me. But those sureties don’t keep me from desiring to share more of the landscape and rhythm of our daily lives.

Now, several days later and fully engaged in my life of writing, book promotion, school nursing, Quaker responsibilities, and household care, my heart still aches that I don’t share more of that life with my children and they with me. I expected that they wouldn’t remain close to their childhood home, as much as they love it. But I didn’t expect to miss them as I do so many years after their departure from this home. Yet, here it is, a great longing that wells up, often when I least expect it, and always when I see other friends whose adult children live nearby.

This seems to be another one of those opportunities life and Spirit give me to let go of my illusions of control. You’d think I’d have gotten it by now. Didn’t it sink in when I learned that I was pregnant with twins instead of the one baby my husband and I had expected? Or when they grew big enough and strong enough that I could no longer physically remove them from a dangerous or undesirable situation. And then again, when they chose friends, clothes, and activities without my input.

Those earlier parenting lessons seem minor now and not fully preparatory for my role at this time. Now that they’re grown, I long to see my children happily partnered, fulfilled with their work, spiritually nourished (and if it’s not too much to ask, if not a short commute away, at least in the same time zone as me). I know those are desires I can’t command.

So, I ground myself in this place where I’m called to be and savor the times we have together, relish the e-mails and phone conversations we share, and give thanks for our strong connections over many miles. I pray for patience, and acceptance, and faith that their journeys and mine will be Spirit-filled and Spirit-led.

Spiritual Hearing Aids

2010-09-27T17:11:00.000-07:00

My small, rural Quaker meeting on Lopez Island gathers for worship each Sunday in members’ homes. Frequently someone reminds people to speak loudly and clearly; even in the country, voices can be muffled by the crunch of car tires on gravel, a ferry foghorn, dogs barking, or a refrigerator humming. Mostly, the request for increased volume is needed because voices tend to soften and drop when people share from deep, inward places and personal experiences. And also because many of us are well past middle age, our hearing diminished by floods of loud music or machinery, or just aging senses.

During a recent Meeting for Worship, one member admitted he’s having increasing difficulty hearing and has begun to wonder if he needs hearing aids. As he’s thought of the possibility of slipping something into his ears to help him hear more clearly, he’s yearned for a similar simple correction to better hear that voice that guides him. “If only there were spiritual hearing aids,” he said.

I chuckled with others as my friend spoke, yet his lighthearted comment touched a deep truth for me. I’m always in search of devices to help me hear the wisdom of that divine essence I call God. Too often that voice is drowned out by others – echoes of fear, worry, anger, doubt, confusion, resistance, grief. Why is it those voices come to me first and loudest?

I’ve learned to distinguish between the judging, critical tone that took up residence in my head long ago and the kind of wise guidance that comes from a stance of love. Even so, often I have to strain to taken in that loving Presence rather than the old challenges about my worth, trustworthiness, and self-knowledge. I, too, yearn for an effortless way to turn up the volume on the Wisdom that I want at the center of my life.

Maybe tuning in to Spirit never will be as simple as planting a little plastic gadget in my ear. But there are some techniques that help me cut out some of the competing static. Most of them require that I slow down—plant my feet firmly on the ground; inhale and exhale deeply; light a candle; journal. Others connect me to a sense of awe and mystery—sunset; the sound of sea water tumbling rocks along the shoreline; an infant’s toothless grin and joyful gurgle; newborn lambs bouncing through green pasture. Still others remind me I’m not alone—reading words that inspire and cause me to ponder; sitting with others in the full silence of Quaker worship; feeling, smelling, tasting, hearing, and seeing the natural world that surrounds us all. When that Voice I know I can trust seems distant or muffled, I need to remember, and turn to, the sources of help for my spiritual hearing.

Writer in a Bullet-Proof Vest

2010-09-17T17:28:00.000-07:00

Last year, I stumbled on “Castle,” a television program about New York City detectives. Rick Castle is a mystery writer who models his novels’ main character after the show’s Detective Kate Beckett. Castle pulled some strings with a friend in the mayor’s office to follow Beckett and her fellow detectives on their crime solving in order to get material for his books. Before going out on a case, Beckett slides a gun into a holster slung low on her waist and snaps up a black, bullet-proof vest; bold, white letters march across the back – POLICE. Castle looks at his police-issue bullet-proof vest, too. The letters on his spell out WRITER.

As much as she hates to admit it, Beckett depends on Castle’s creative mind to anticipate moves the criminals she’s tracking might make. She accepts Castle’s presence but, with his lack of police training, she fears for his safety; they usually encounter murderers or armed robbers when they’re on a case. She insists on the bullet-proof vest.

I want one of those vests to wear when I sit at my writing desk.

Popular advice to writers goes something like, “Writing is easy. Just sit down and open a vein.” That sounds dramatic, but putting my beliefs and experiences into words on paper can seem as risky as when Castle slinks around an abandoned warehouse. When I sit down to write, I’m not exposing myself to criminals’ weapons, but I am opening myself to feelings that can rip at my heart with the near-force of a bullet or knife blade. When I’m present to the source of my writing, I encounter beliefs, memories, truths, grief, and joy that can leave me gasping for breath, choking on tears, or sweaty-palmed.

I know there’s no gun aimed at my chest when I write, no actual possibility of physical harm. Yet my heart can race and my mouth can dry as if I were being pursued by some danger. What is it I fear? When I’m writing my truth, when I’m writing with a desire to minister, I have to go to those deep, tender places within. To the places where I reveal my weaknesses and flaws. Where I expose my faithlessness, my desire to be in control, my fears that others will reject me if I share my true self or that they’ll disagree with what I hold most dear.

In To Be Broken and Tender, Marge Abbott writes of how she sees “God at work in the hearts of individuals so that they are tender to the pain of the world and the selfish power of the ego is broken apart.” The process of writing opens me and makes me tender to my own pain and the pain of others. My heart may be broken open as I seek to find the words. My ego may be broken as God works in me.

As Abbott writes, “Bringing the painful into the Light does take courage and can open many wounds.” When I write, I often access feelings and knowledge I didn’t know I had or that I’d ignored. I awaken memories of hurting, fear, or sadness that I’ve buried so deep in my unconscious, the pain can feel like a stab to the heart or a punch in the gut. That’s the depth I want to get to in my writing, to those places where the memory and the knowing are alive, touchable. But I ache as I open my heart, and my tender spots need protection, the shielding of a bullet-proof vest.

I could keep my beliefs and awarenesses private. I could, and have, kept them locked deep inside to avoid long-standing self-judgment that I’m not good enough or that I’m not following God’s will. Yet, I’m already known fully by God. And I know that God loves me unconditionally. Isn’t that knowledge my bullet-proof vest?

When I write from my center, I’m surrounded by the light and love and strength of that essence I call God. I’m carried by the spirit that wants me to use and develop my gifts as a writer, that loves me no matter what I put on the page, that yearns for me to minister to myself and others through writing.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The sky outside my window this morning is gray. Fog cuts off the tops of the trees and hangs over the bay like a false ceiling hiding a higher one. Somewhere—above that layer of fog—the sun, the light, is shining.

And I’m venturing into the day with the bullet-proof vest of God’s love within me and around me, protecting those tender and broken places waiting to be opened.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

To Be Broken and Tender—A Quaker Theology for Today by Margery Post Abbott, Western Friends/Friends Bulletin Corporation, 2010, www.WesternFriend.org

Held in the Light

2010-09-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

Candles burn bright and long in my small community these days, even when summer asserts itself for a few more sunny hours. Many of us have turned to these flickering flames to symbolize what Quakers call “holding one another in the light.” The one we’re holding is a beloved man, husband, father, brother, teacher, mentor, friend, neighbor, storyteller, juggler, pilot, sailor, hiker whose world was turned upside down two weeks ago when a doctor told him he has a brain tumor. Now, Greg has a giant half-parentheses incision spanning the right side of his head, and he and his family and a wide circle of friends have been awaiting results of the pathology report.

Two days before Greg’s surgery, our Quaker meeting gathered around him and his wife, Nancy, for worship with an intention to “hold them in the light.” Marcelle Martin writes in the Pendle Hill pamphlet, Holding One Another in the Light, that this is the term Friends use for intercessory prayer—prayer for another person—and that it comes in many forms. “It may involve lifting up specific requests on behalf of someone else, or simply joining with God’s constant love for that person. It can be done when we are alone or with others,” she explains.

On that Sunday, about forty of us gathered. Our clerk lit five candles (one for Greg, his wife, and their three daughters). Out of the silence of worship we expressed our love for Greg and his family; our appreciation for his surgeon and other caregivers; and our hopes for healing, courage, strength, and Greg’s vision that what the doctor would find was a glob of blue jello and marshmallows. Two days later, another group of us met at Greg’s home at the hour he went into surgery at a hospital 100 miles away. Again, we lit candles and spoke aloud our requests that Greg be well cared for and that his tumor be released.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been holding, praying, pleading, and questioning almost constantly. I’ve lit and re-lit candles on my desk and the kitchen table, in the living room, and in the meditation corner in my bedroom. This candle lighting is such a tangible act for something I don’t understand.

Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, I prayed to the God of the Bible stories I read in Sunday school. God was an all-knowing, all-powerful man who, I believed, listened to my every word and might just do or give as I asked. As I matured and my faith at times wavered, but mostly deepened, my mental picture of God became less human-like. Now I experience God as a presence, mystery, an essence of love and wisdom far beyond my human comprehension and constructs.

So when I hold Greg and his family in the light; when I pray for healing, strength, and courage for him; to whom or what am I praying? I no longer believe there is a Great Listening Ear hearing my cries for peace, justice, and restoration of the earth. I don’t picture a white-bearded man nodding thoughtfully or shaking his head in response to my requests (though that doesn’t stop me from chanting silently in my airplane seat during take-off and landing, “Please, please, please keep us safe”). And yet I believe in miracles. And I believe there is a mystical power that receives and responds to my outpourings of love, fear, rage, and hope. A presence that hears my desire to serve and be light in the world. A force that guides my actions when I open myself to its cues and signals.

Earlier this week, Greg wrote on his Caring Bridge website of his anger about this threat to the hopes and dreams he had for the future. He’s mad and asking why this is happening at a time he was looking forward to retirement from a teaching career, just as he was anticipating alternative work, new adventures, and telling the stories he’s collected over 61 years to future grandchildren. That anger and those questions are understandable, seem healthy and right. And I suspect God, that great lover of life and joy and peace, is asking them, too.

Yesterday, Greg got a phone call from his doctor that the cancer cells he cut out of my friend’s brain are stage 4 glioblastoma. Greg has a difficult road ahead living with this tenacious cancer. I don’t know who or what has heard my prayers for a tumor that responds well to radiation or chemotherapy. It’s tempting to believe my prayers were ignored. But as heavy as my heart is today, I know that Greg, and his family, and all of us are being held by an ever-present love and power. And I continue to light candles.

Blogging journey update – One of the finest uses of blogs is Caring Bridge (www.caringbridge.org), a site to help people “stay connected with loved ones during a significant health challenge.” Or as we Quakers say, it’s a way to hold someone in the light – electronically!

Comments on my last post led to a bit of dialogue and connection to other Quaker bloggers finding their way with this spiritual discipline; I don’t think these exchanges would have happened without this technology.

On the Way to Blog, Life Happened

2010-08-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

Three months ago, when I began this blog, I committed to posting once a week. Now it’s been over three weeks since my last entry, and I’m writing today primarily out of honoring what I had said I would do (thank you to one of my followers for gently holding me accountable to this intention) rather than from a clear sense of having anything to share, of ministering.

Since August 11, I’ve spent little time in worship. That day, I journaled:

“August – the month every year when, if possible, life here speeds up. More gatherings, more guests, more food from the garden to process, more sunshine pulling me outdoors, more, more, more.

And this morning, fog drapes its shroud over everything except what’s just a few feet in front of me. I hear the ferry’s foghorn out in the bay, reminding me it, and the world, are out there. For now, my focus is trained on what is at hand.”

What was at hand was saying farewell to my son as he relocated to Washington, DC; preparation for being away from home for five days for an intensive writing workshop followed by a short return home for a friend’s 60^th birthday party; and re-packing my suitcase for five days in New York visiting my daughter. Now I’m back home, hosting long-time friends here for a few days, then one last get-away before the school schedule resumes for my husband and me (his as a sign language interpreter at a high school and mine as a school nurse).

These have been rich times, filled with stimulating lectures and conversations about writing; celebrating with friends; sharing in my adult children’s lives. In all of that richness, I spent little time in my usual disciplines of prayer, quiet, and journaling. My openness to the Spirit has come in short spurts, often in the midst of getting ready for days so unlike my usual routine I felt as though I was putting my shoes on the wrong feet.

I yearn for my spiritual practice to be more constant through life’s ebbs and flows. I’m aware that I too readily let my disciplines slide when I’m busy, and those likely are the times I need them most.

I have much to ponder right now.

The writing workshop was a beginning exploration of whether I’m being led to enroll in a graduate program in writing. In the coming months I’ll be discerning (hopefully with the help of a clearness committee) if that’s the way to strengthen my ministry of writing.

While I was visiting my daughter, the husband of the friend whose birthday I celebrated two weeks ago was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and he’ll have surgery next week. He’s a beloved teacher and leader in my small community, and his unexpected health crisis, like the August morning fog, has draped us all in sadness. As I re-read those words, I’m struck by the constant challenge in life both to plan for the future and to live in the present.

I don’t know if sharing my journey through this blog or other writing I do ministers to anyone else. I do know writing is one way I open myself to the Spirit. My pledge to blog regularly nudges me to slow down in these busy and emotional times and ground myself in God’s presence.

Doing My Little Part

2010-08-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

On the first day of the Iraq War, singer-songwriter Linda Allen penned the lyrics and music for “I Believe that Peace Will Come.” At least that’s the story Tom Rawson told as he led us in singing the song at North Pacific Yearly Meeting’s Annual Session in mid-July. It was a fitting choice for the gathering’s theme “Practicing Hope: Living and Witnessing Our Testimonies,” and the timing was perfect as it preceded the address by our Friend-in-Residence, Bridget Moix.

Bridget, the director of the Peaceful Prevention of Deadly Conflict Program at Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), titled her talk, “An Ocean of Darkness, An Ocean of Lightness, y un Barquito Grande.” It was Bridget’s two-year-old son, Pablo, who provided that image of a “big little boat,” and it became a metaphor for Bridget’s inspiring message. She kept coming back to the idea that when we put our faith into action (no matter how big or little), it brings about hope, which leads to more positive action and more hope.

We know from George Fox’s journals the grief he experienced, the “ocean of darkness,” as he confronted the pain and suffering in the world, in his time. There’s no doubt that remaining hopeful in these times is a challenge as well. “There are days I turn on my computer at my desk and cry,” Bridget said. “An ocean of darkness is literally rising around us.” Some of the many examples she cited especially struck me:

· War is becoming a common state of affairs.

· 70% of the Afghan population is under 30 years of age, and they can’t remember a time of peace.

· We’re funding war at the expense of our country and the planet.

· As always, the poor and marginalized are hit the worst.

I often weep, too, for these and other signs of suffering around the world and in my own community.

Fox wrote of experiencing God’s infinite love as the “ocean of light” overcoming the darkness, and Bridget related evidence of this light she’s seen in her work at FCNL:

· Now, there are conversations about the prevention of war.

· $50 million have been earmarked in the federal budget for efforts to prevent war.

· The new Civilian Response Corps already has 1000 members working around the world to support overseas reconstruction and stabilization operations.

Examples like this keep me going day after day when I feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems in our world and of my limited capacity to change them. When the knowledge of the pain in the world sears me, my unrealistic yearning to “fix it all” immobilizes me. I focus on all the things I’m not doing to bring about peace, reverse climate change, end injustice. Chastising myself for not doing more requires energy—energy that could be used sharing my gifts and following the calling I have.

“Practicing hope is a big job,” Bridget said. “But we’re not alone, and we only need to do our little part. That’s the power of community, to uplift and multiply each other’s gifts.” That was the part of Bridget’s message that I most needed to hear, and that I believe many of us Friends need to take to heart. I know very few Friends who talk of their work for peace and justice as a joy or as in just the right proportion to what they feel they can give and do joyfully. Rather, what I typically hear from others and feel for myself is a sense of being over-stretched, over-committed, frazzled by long “to do” lists.

Bridget’s message gave me much to think about related to what my little part is. Her words cast light once again on my belief that whatever I do, it’s never enough, isn’t good enough. Perhaps some people need and respond well to challenges to do more, are motivated by admonitions to work harder. But the message I need to hear is to slow down; remain open; don’t plan and fill every moment with doing; beware of outrunning the Light I’ve been given.

Doing my little part seems so inadequate in the face of so much suffering and destruction. Yet I think that’s what being faithful, and hopeful, is all about—putting my energy into facing the suffering of the world squarely, listening carefully to what I’m called to do, and then being faithful to that call.

For Linda Allen, it’s writing songs. For me, writing stories is my little part. And if I’m faithful to using my gifts to write, to tell some of the stories needing to be told, I must trust that my faithfulness will result in action that will bring about hope and promote more action, and more hope. Maybe even peace.

I’ve sat with drafts of this posting for two weeks, writing through my questions and understanding about what it means to do my part. Now as I read it one more time, doubts remain about whether I’m on the right track. Is my little part really enough? Is Spirit calling me to do just those things I can do joyfully? What about all those hundreds of needs and problems I’m aware of that I’m not doing anything about?

I hope that those who read this entry will share their experiences and will embark on a dialogue about putting faith into action.

To learn more about two people doing their "little part" through music, visit:

http://www.lindasongs.com/pages/home.htm

http://www.tomrawson.com/folksinger.html

And to learn more about the powerful work of FCNL:

http://www.fcnl.org/index.htm

Conversion Experience

2010-07-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

Walking is part of my meditation practice and my regular form of exercise. Usually I’m accompanied by my dog, Buddy (yellow lab/German shepherd). Sometimes I’m in prayer while I walk; often I’m wrestling with worries, fears, disappointment, or confusion. Many times, when I’d much rather sit in my favorite rocker and not expose myself to the rain or wind or both, I reward myself for getting out for a brisk walk by listening to my iPod. I keep a good supply of programs loaded on my tiny nano – selections from “Speaking of Faith” with Krista Tippett; Bill Moyers’ “Journal;” Barnes and Noble’s “Meet the Authors;” and “Weekends with Bob Edwards.”

Last week it was an interview from “Song of the Soul,” one of the programs produced by Mark Judkins Helpsmeet of Northern Spirit Radio, that got me out of the rocker and up the steep hill on a trail near my house. A year ago, Mark interviewed Alivia Biko, one of my friends from the Pacific Northwest Quaker Women’s Theology Conference (see previous post), so I downloaded their conversation (www.northernspiritradio.org).

Alivia is a gifted singer/songwriter and minister at Freedom Friends Church in Salem, OR. I’ve been moved by her clear, spirit-filled voice and lyrics many times at the Women’s Conference. Over the years we’ve had brief conversations, enough for me to feel I’d like to get to know her better. That happened as I listened to her share with Mark her life story and spiritual journey. She honestly and eloquently spoke of her childhood marred by abuse, her mother’s death by suicide, her own struggles with depression and chronic illness, and her spiritual path.

The part of Alivia’s journey that especially spoke to me was her “conversion experience.” Although she had attended a variety of churches in young adulthood, it was while she was hospitalized and visited by a chaplain that she had a new awareness of the love of God. She described it to Mark as one of those “mountaintop moments” that has sustained her through other low times. Mark labeled it a “conversion experience” and contrasted it to the typical description of such times being an awareness of our sinfulness and willingness to “give ourselves over to God.”

“Unfortunately,” Alivia said, “ever since I was born, I had been told I wasn’t good enough and there was something wrong with me. My conversion came through the recognition that in God’s eyes I’m good enough.”

As I listened to Alivia’s story and her song “The Art of Life” that followed, my pace slowed; tears filled my eyes. She had spoken to my condition, to my experience of taking God into my life. I, too, grew up with messages from my family and from the church that I wasn’t good enough, that I couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing. Being loved, both by God and my family, seemed to me as a young child to be conditional, only available as long as I followed all the rules; behaved the way my mom, the church, and my friends told me I must. I lived in fear of doing the wrong thing, of angering God, of disappointing my family, and thus losing their love. For years I worked very hard, striving to finally be good enough to deserve their love.

Thankfully, I, too, had a wise friend, a Quaker woman, who convinced me that I’m beloved, that God loves me just as I am and yearns for me to be fully myself. She taught me about God’s ever-present, unfailing love for me—for everyone. I had understood well my shortcomings, my fallibility, my ability to sin. But I hadn’t taken in that God’s love is steadfast, even when I’m at my most human-like worst. When I’m being critical of and demanding of perfection from myself and everyone around me. When, out of feelings of inadequacy, I respond critically to differing opinions. When I talk, instead of listen; defend, instead of open.

Until I heard Alivia name her awareness of God’s unwavering love as a conversion, I had questioned the validity of my own discovery of God as an unconditionally-loving parent. I hadn’t fully accepted that my taking in of God’s unswerving love for me was my own conversion experience, that that was the change that was central to my spiritual journey.

Alivia went on to explain that after her own discovery of God’s love for her, she still had much work to do to recover from earlier wounds. I know that for her, and for me, this healing work continues. Alivia’s naming of her experience, though, provided some healthy tissue for my own deep wounds, and I’m thankful to her for telling her story.

~ ~ ~ ~

Blogging update – I checked Google Analytics and am delighted to see some numbers adding up about people visiting my blog. However, I don’t know much about what that means i.e. who these visitors are, how they got to the blog, whether they come back after a first visit. And of course, I don’t know what they think about what I’ve written unless they comment. I appreciate the comments people have written and am content to see how/if more dialogue occurs. I know I have limited time to read and comment on blogs, and I suspect the same is true for many others. For now, I’m still enjoying the discipline of putting into words some of my questions and reflections that arise from adding blogging to my spiritual practice.

No Assumptions

2010-06-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

This year’s Pacific Northwest Quaker Women’s Theology Conference, the eighth such gathering of women from various branches of Quakerism, carried me several steps further on the path of letting go of the assumptions that distance me from the rich diversity within the Society of Friends. The epistle from the conference (follows this post) expresses well the collective experience of the sixty women who worshipped, discussed, sang, and prayed with a focus on the theme, “Walk With Me: Mentors, Elders, and Friends.” Through my writing, I’m exploring what the conference meant for me.

My introduction to Quakerism nearly thirty years ago was through the unprogrammed tradition. Like so many other convinced Friends, quite soon after attending my first meeting for worship, I had a sense of having found my spiritual home. And, just like many Quakers I’ve met, I was a refugee from a church (Missouri Synod Lutheran for me) that I felt couldn’t tolerate my questions and beliefs about God and faith. For me, the Religious Society of Friends was a place that not only tolerated, but also encouraged my seeking to understand my own spiritual path. A community that didn’t claim to have all the answers and that didn’t require that I adhere to a prescribed set of beliefs “spoke to my condition.” When I discovered there were evangelical Friends with churches and ministers and missionaries, I was surprised. For years I assumed that branch of Quakerism didn’t have anything to do with me or my faith journey.

Slowly, I began to open myself to the possibility that, despite differing forms of worship and beliefs, there was much common ground among these varieties of Friends. Not long after my son participated in the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage in 1998, I started to hear about a group of women from Friends churches and meetings in Portland, OR who were getting together regularly to bridge the differences among them (their history is told eloquently in Pendle Hill Pamphlet #323, “An Experiment in Faith – Quaker Women Transcending Differences,” by Margery Post Abbott). When I learned they had expanded the conversation among women throughout the Pacific Northwest through a Quaker Women’s Theology Conference, I was intrigued, but intimidated. What did I know about theology? I was still brimming with questions about God, Jesus, Spirit, faith, and what I was called to do in life. I assumed that the women who went to this conference had all of the answers and that those from the evangelical branch would try to impose their beliefs on me. But I remained intrigued and grew in openness to the experience as I watched trusted women F/friends venture into this experiment.

Finally, in 2004, I mustered the courage to attend the conference and felt welcomed into a community of faithful, seeking women. I served on the planning committee for the 2006 conference; missed the conference in 2008 due to schedule conflicts; and returned for this year’s gathering June 16-20 (http://pnwquakerwomen.org/wordpress/). At each conference I’ve found a safe haven to explore my own beliefs and to learn from others as they explore theirs. I’ve been especially drawn to the conference’s use of narrative theology, that is, personal stories of faith expressed in reflection papers that participants share with each other, as a way to integrate our experiences and our understanding. Much of my own narrative theology revolves around finding the vocabulary to describe my faith experience; it’s through wrestling with words that I become more clear about what I believe. The conference is a place I can see how some of this faith vocabulary—God, Jesus, calling, ministry, mystery, Spirit—feels on my tongue and reverberates in my ears. The conference is a place I let go of my assumptions of what those words mean to others and where I trust people let go of assumptions of what those words mean to me.

This year, in particular, it didn’t matter to me which tradition the women I met are from, and I didn’t feel a need to name my affiliation when I met someone new. What did matter, and what nourished me, were the many opportunities we had to share the variety of ways in which we experience the presence of God in our lives.

Epistle - Pacific Northwest Quaker Women's Theology Conference

To our Quaker family,

Surrounded by the waters and wildlife of Hood Canal and the snowy peaks of the Olympic Mountains, sixty women gathered in Seabeck, Washington from June 16-20, 2010 for the eighth Pacific Northwest Quaker Women’s Theology Conference. Begun fifteen years ago to promote dialogue and build relationships among different Quaker traditions, this conference continues to be deeply Spirit led and enriches the lives of women who attend.

Though we represent different backgrounds and branches of Quakerism, the lines between these seemed very thin and blurred. No one avoided talking about her home meeting or church, but our membership didn’t have as much weight as our personal experiences shared in love. Even as we attempted to be open and accepting, at times we mis-stepped and unintentionally hurt each other. Many of us felt broken open and left this conference changed.

Through reflection papers we wrote, plenary sessions, home groups, and discussion, we each connected personally with the theme, “Walk With Me: Mentors, Elders, and Friends.” Each plenary brought us back again and again to the awareness of the need for support and mentorship in our lives. We identified places in which we are being accompanied and are accompanying others and places where we feel the absence of that loving presence. Many of us made commitments to seek those relationships in our meetings, churches and beyond.

Despite colds, more serious illnesses and concerns for the health of loved ones, we drew strength, support, and encouragement from one another. Many think of the Women’s Conference as a reunion and newcomers found they were welcomed into the family with open arms.

In keeping with the testimony of community, we opened ourselves to another group, Interplay, also staying at the conference center. We described the kind of work that we each came to do, invited them to join us in worship, and likewise were invited to experience their ministry and we shared grace together before meals.

We celebrated the gifts of many through plenaries, workshops, singing and readings by several published authors. During one plenary session, several young adults shared personal experiences of their ministries in relation to the theme of the conference. We were thrilled to hear stories of women being supported and held sacredly in their ministry. However, we were deeply saddened to learn that some are not empowered or recognized in their ministries. We were thus reminded of the reality of sexism in the Society of Friends. Encircling the young adult women, we joined together in heartfelt prayer and were moved by its healing and supportive power. This experience deepened our worship and fellowship together. We challenged ourselves to be aware of internalized sexism, as well as the sexism in our churches and meetings, and to work toward true equality.

During business meeting on Saturday, we reaffirmed the work of this body of women and our leading to continue meeting together as an intra-faith group. We look forward to the next opportunity to join in fellowship.

~ ~ ~ ~

Blogging experiment update – One woman led a workshop at the conference about blogging, and of course I signed up. I learned a few more “tech-y” things like how to find out how many people visit my blog, and another woman helped me set it up through Google Analytics. I got there by “googling” Google Analytics, and my friend prompted me about how to set it up for my blog; I don’t know how well I would have done on my own, but I think it’s fairly self-explanatory. Now I can monitor how many people visit my blog whether they comment or not. I’m not sure what that will tell me, but I’m curious.

Saying Yes to Writing

2010-06-13T15:27:00.000-07:00

For the past week, I’ve been immersed in my writing life and am just beginning to re-enter and re-integrate it with the rest of my life. I attended an advanced memoir workshop, and it was a time-out-of-time. For five days I retreated to a house at the end of Lake Chelan with writing teacher Ana Maria Spagna (see previous post about her new book, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus) and six other women (thank you, Tee for the photo). We read, discussed, and analyzed writing craft in poetry, fiction, essay, and screen-writing followed by prompts by Ana Maria using some of the techniques in those genres in our memoir writing:

Write a sonnet (14 lines in iambic pentameter)

Write a paragraph about God, sex, or death. Then use line breaks to turn it into a poem. Next, make your paragraph into a scene.

Take a scene and write it just in dialogue.

Now I’m back home, commuting to another island for my part-time job as a school nurse, clerking the Epistle Committee for my Yearly Meeting (our task is to write a letter to Quakers around the world summarizing our annual gathering coming up in July in Montana), and preparing for my presentation at next week’s Pacific Northwest Quaker Women’s Theology Conference (http://pnwquakerwomen.org/wordpress/).

It’s that last task, my upcoming presentation (Saying Yes to Writing as a Path to Spirit), that is grounding me most about how writing fits into my life and how it leads me to Spirit.

For most of my adult life, writing has been a vehicle for me to understand what I believe, feel, question, and know. But when I felt called to nursing, the writing I did was technical and health care-related. Over the next twenty years, I journaled and wrote sporadically for self-discovery until, in the early 1990s, I acknowledged my passion for nursing was fading. I took two years away from nursing (way far away with my family to a remote mountain village in Washington’s North Cascades) to discern if I was being led to different work. I also attended more to my creativity through writing, music, and art.

A few years later, at a Writing as Ministry workshop at Pendle Hill Quaker Conference Center, I said yes to writing as a spiritual path and as the work I’m called to do. At the workshop, led by Tom Mullen, participants did writing exercises, read each other’s work, and received critique from Tom. Something shifted for me at that workshop, in the way I’ve often experienced Spirit moving in me, a seemingly sudden clarity and knowing deep in my bones about a next step. Ever since then I’ve thought of my writing as my work. That means I’ve treated it with the same respect as a paying job, reserving time for it Monday through Friday on my calendar.

For four years I devoted that writing time to a collection of stories about people who work with their hands and in 2009 published my first book, Hands at Work (www.handsworking.com). That project arose from an exhibit of black-and-white photographs of people’s hands by photographer Summer Moon Scriver. The images of the hands of a baker, a knitter, a spinner, and a gardener spoke to me of a passion for work that I had once had and lost and that I know is missing for many other people. I wanted to give voice to those stories of satisfaction with work.

The interviewing, writing, and editing brought me much joy. The people profiled expressed their gratitude for being listened to and for having their work honored. I hoped the stories and images would speak to others as well, though I recognized that was out of my hands. It’s a thrill every time people tell me the book has moved or inspired them.

Now I’m at work on my own story, a memoir of my journey to discern where Spirit leads me. Most of the time I’m clear that I’m called to write this particular story both as a way to Spirit and as a ministry to others, though I still struggle with outward expression of my interior search. The workshop last week offered some new tools to write my way toward Spirit. This experiment in blogging provides another avenue to “publishing” my truth and opens the possibility of dialogue (ministry?) with readers.

Small, Courageous Acts

2010-05-24T10:17:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, my husband and I hosted our long-time friend, Ana Maria Spagna, and her partner, Laurie, as part of Ana Maria’s tour promoting her new book, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus – A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey. I’ve read the book once just for the pleasure of learning the story of Ana Maria’s path to understanding her father’s involvement in the Tallahassee Bus Boycott. I’m reading it a second time to learn from this skillful writer how to tell a multi-layered story like Test Ride. Ana Maria uses literary techniques to, as she says, “braid” the stories of her father, who died when she was eleven; her own discovery of her father’s past that had not been discussed in her family; and her mother’s experience with cancer (find out more at www.anamariaspagna.com).

One of the joys of hearing an author read and talk about her own work is to be able to learn more about her process and what she discovered about herself through her research and writing. I was fortunate to get two of those opportunities during Ana Maia’s visit – both at her public reading and earlier in the day when I interviewed her for our local low power FM radio station.

I heard about how she starts her writing day first reading someone else’s writing that inspires her. Then she re-reads what she wrote the day before. “Sometimes I think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever written,” Ana Maria said. “At those times, I allow myself to just close that file without hitting the delete button, and move on to something else I’m working on. That’s the benefit of working on more than one project at a time.” Then she writes for a few hours, or revises if that’s the stage she’s at on a piece. “I’m pretty unproductive at writing after two or three in the afternoon,” she says, “so I shift to preparing for a writing workshop or the on-line teaching I do for a writing program.” Ah yes, the reality for most writers of having a “day job” (or two or three).

Ana Maria also talked about the two years of research she did about the civil rights movement and especially about the Tallahassee bus boycott and her father’s role in it. Here’s a synopsis of what she learned about the latter.

“One Saturday morning in Tallahassee, Florida in January 1957, three black men and three white—my father, Joe Spagna, among them—gathered outside Speed’s, a small corner grocery, to wait for a city bus. Their plan was simple enough, to ride the bus together, but it was dangerous as hell.”

Through her research, Ana Maria got answers to many of her questions about what happened after that bus ride, questions she had wanted to ask her father but couldn’t because he had died when she was eleven years old. She also learned a part of U.S. history in much more depth and much more personally than she’d ever understood. As Ana Maria shared about that learning, she ministered to me.

“I had grown up with such a limited view of what happened during the civil rights movement,” she said. “I’m embarrassed to admit I had accepted that condensed version I’d been taught in school – the stories of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the four young black children who had integrated an all-white school. What I learned is there were hundreds and hundreds of people who did courageous acts, large and small, to try to bring about justice.”

Hundreds and hundreds of people doing small, courageous acts to bring about justice. I’m just as guilty as Ana Maria of looking at only the well known, headline-making actions of people working for peace and justice—and holding myself to that standard. While it’s true that change usually requires that some people take action that gets lots of attention and demands huge sacrifice, sometimes even loss of life, I’m grateful for the reminder from Ana Maria’s story about the importance of the small things many of us do every day. I’m open (most of the time) to the possibility that someday I’ll be called to act in a big way, and I pray I’ll have the courage to follow such a leading. There really are so many examples, though, so many stories, of the small, courageous actions within our families, our communities, and our own hearts that contribute to peace and justice. Ana Maria learned about many of them that never made it into any history books or newspaper headlines. I’m grateful she had the courage to share some of them through her writing. They support me to put my energy into remaining faithful to the opportunities the Spirit provides me and trusting that those small actions, combined with others, will make a difference.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

An update on my experiment with blogging. I spent more time than I would have liked this morning figuring out how to include the image of the cover of Test Ride in this post, but that’s part of the learning of a new skill. I’m discovering some unexpected ways this medium connects me to other people. For example, a couple of the people who have commented on my posts have included information about their own or others’ blogs. When those links appear in their posts or profiles, it’s easy for me to click on them and encounter some people and ideas I hadn’t known about before.

Having set a goal to post every week is supporting me to focus my journaling and meditation time and going deeper into some of the ideas that surface. I’m also getting practice at disciplining myself to use this tool for that deepening rather than as a way to avoid it by getting diverted to other sites.

I'm not a birthright blogger

2010-05-17T08:49:00.000-07:00

I’m not a birthright blogger. Unlike some of my younger Quaker friends who were born in the electronic social media age, I’ve come to this mode of sharing ideas after years of devotion to pen and paper and face-to-face conversation. It’s those younger friends, though, who have convinced me that I need to be on board with blogging (and other electronic media) in order to nurture and connect with the next generation of Quakers. That was the message I heard over and over again from young Friends (and a few older ones) at the QUIP (Quakers Uniting in Publications) conference.

I’ve concluded that entering the blogosphere really isn’t all that revolutionary. I got my first hint of that at the opening plenary at the QUIP conference when Tom Hamm, a professor of history at Earlham College, spoke about “The Significance and Influence of Quaker Writing Throughout Our History.” He claims that the history of Quakerism IS the history of writing and publishing by Friends. For 350 years, Quakers have been publishing in some form or another to proclaim our beliefs to the world; to engage in controversy; to engage with each other; and to entertain. Throughout the conference, bloggers, journalists, editors, poets, and fiction and non-fiction writers talked about Quaker writing in the future. I came away energized by the potential for new avenues for wider and more diverse dialogue.

I also came away with concerns.

Do I want to spend more of my already-full life in front of the computer screen engaging in this virtual, but distant, way with others?

I treasure my quiet, centered daily meditation time in my comfortable rocker by the window, journaling with a wooden pen made by a dear friend in the blank book I bound by hand. Will my electronic journaling feed me in the same way?

What about those for whom words and images that can be transmitted electronically aren’t their media of expression?

This blog is one way I’m testing my evolving beliefs about the future of Quaker publishing and my own ministry of writing. I intend to post something once a week, writing a little more polished than what I journal during my daily meditation but a little more raw than writing I might submit for print publication. I’ll be sharing my journey with this new publishing mechanism as well as my personal faith journey. That last part is scary. What if nobody reads my blog? What if somebody does?

~~~~~~

In a less personal vein, I also plan to write about the process of blogging. So far, I’ve been surprised at how easy it is to learn the mechanics. I began by going to blogspot.com. I already had a yahoo e-mail account, so I was able to log in with that address and password (if you don’t have one, it’s easy and free to set up). Then I watched the tutorial and followed the step-by-step instructions to create a blog. I played around a bit with layout design sampling the templates the site provides.

I composed today’s entry in Word on my desktop computer. Now I’ll sign in to my blog, click on the NEW POST bar, and cut and paste this text into the window that pops up. I can still edit once I paste this in, I can preview it, and it won’t appear on my blog site until I click on the orange PUBLISH button. Pretty simple.

I’m also going to start contacting friends I think might be interested in this blog to let them know about my latest project. If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you got an e-mail from me inviting you to join me on this journey. I look forward to reading comments and seeing what it’s like to dialogue in this way.

I've been convinced to blog!

2010-05-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

I was at the QUIP (Quakers Uniting in Publications) Writers' Conference and Meeting in April and had some great discussions with Quakers (young and old alike) about the future of writing. One panel discussion about entering the blogosphere convinced me that blogging will be/is just another medium to share our writing - like old Quaker journals of the past, contemporary Quaker publications, books, etc. So, I'm venturing into this world and will share my journey.

Today, I'm having my hand held by my writing group members on our annual retreat. I needed their moral support to take this first step. I'm eager to see how this looks and will enter more soon. I look forward to sharing the joys and challenges of this new medium and hearing others' reactions.