Attentive Idling

 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

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

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

“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

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

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

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 post at Quaker Universalist Voice, 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.  Quaker Universalist Conversations