OPEN

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

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

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?

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

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

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

 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.