Pain and the (Quaker?) world

I've been reading Quaker blogs recently about pain. Quaker Harlot James and Hystery pop to mind. I have been thinking about them probably too much. Then I came across this from Cary Tennis at www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2009/09/29/envy/ (I'm not at all suggesting that any Quaker person's pain is the result of pursuing status or material good (au contraire as I think the pain derives in part from awareness of the unconscious worldliness of meetings) but that the theme of pain struck me:


Look around you. Recognize that we stand at a crucial point in history. I submit to you that your discomfort with attainment of status and goods is a form of knowledge; it is a form of seeing; you are seeing what is in front of you and naturally it makes you nauseous. It should. Because in the background the planet is burning.

Your discomfort is a form of world knowledge. You are being called; you are being nudged by the world. What you feel is not envy but contempt, and what is behind the contempt is the nudging of the world; it wants something greater from you.

Is it so far-fetched to consider that all our discomfort with present conditions is in fact the world speaking to us, begging for our help?

Does planting trees feel good? Does feeding the hungry feel good? Why is that? If the world were giving us instructions, how would it do so? Is not pleasure the world's chief instrument of instruction and guidance? Is it not pleasure that the world has used to ensure procreation?

Why would it not speak to us by giving us pleasure when we do certain things and depriving us of pleasure when we do other things?

Then we ask, what feels good to do? Has your life of constant attainment and striving ceased to give you pleasure, as you see it mirrored in the striving of others? Could it be that it feels good to be of service because that is the world's wisdom, because that is what it wants of us? Yet observe how cynically we dismiss the good feelings we get from charity work or volunteering as a kind of false do-gooderism, as unworthy of us. We say that we are buying our way out of true commitment, buying our way out of guilt with this little bit of charity work, this donation, this volunteer time.

Maybe we are not buying anything. Maybe we are indeed joyfully paying -- paying as the fruit tree pays by bearing fruit, as the bird pays by singing, as the antelope pays by running.

Could it be that our feeling of worth when we do good things is genuine? Could it be that it is only with great reluctance that we steel ourselves against our better natures, in order to participate in useless, wasteful activities? Could it be that our willingness to sacrifice our need for meaningful lives is the one thing our masters most desire in us? Could that be why this quality is the thing they stress through stultifying educational programming, through empty television and media, through the utter meaninglessness of political drama, through advertising's attempts to transform us into conditioned consumers of armchairs and cold creams: that the whole system that has taken us to this point of unimaginable calamity -- the earth, our source of life, now threatened in some fundamental way -- needs to be reorganized and reoriented. And why? Because what we have arrived at is indeed an organized calamity -- not in any conspiratorial way but more in the way of the tragedy of the commons multiplied by a million, a logical clustering of individual decisions that collectively, by deracinating a million small commons, brings us to a collective tipping point?

Why is that such a strange or novel idea? Isn't it, to the contrary, more or less obvious?


I think it is obvious but hard to accept.

I know this has taken us a long way from your personal discomfort with your attitude toward your peers, but this is my suggestion: Treat your discomfort not as something to be cured or eradicated, but as a sign of your dissatisfaction with your own current life, and a sign that you are being called to a new and deeper relationship with the world.

What do you think of this?

Shouldn't all of us with commitments to religious communities feel at least a smidgeon of hope, a soupcon of joy, and a large serving of humility because we are at least one tiny step closer to solving the world's problems? Shouldn't we embrace our pain and the pain of being in our communities and become the change we want to see? Are we being called, through our pain, to a closer and deeper relationship with our spiritual homes? I keep coming back to reaching out. It is painful for me to reach out, painful because more often than not it's a good deed that doesn't go unpunished, because the person who reaches out embraces vulnerability and gives the other the power of rejection and dismissal ... and because I love my solitude ... but I've determined that it's not me or you or us having done something wrong or been something wrong that gets us treated badly but that people treat us as they've been treated and for a long time we've been treating each other badly, thus it will take a long time for the slapdowns to be finished ... but we still keep on ...

Monster or Miracle

"I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself." Montaigne

What more can we say?

Pumpkin (festivals) and Persimmons

I spent Thursday and Friday morning in the school kitchens baking pumpkin bread for Barnesville's annual pumpkin festival. The Olney Friends School senior class sells the bread as a fund raiser for the senior class trip.

Every year, the largest pumpkin is crowned King Pumpkin. This year's pumpkin came in at more than 1,500 pounds. This is close to the world record for the largest pumpkin ever, which is 1,528 pounds. However, the Barnesville pumpkin festival allows gourds into the competition. The largest gourd on record weighs more than 1,800 pounds.

The new King Pumpkin is huge ... and flat.

While I was helping to bake pumpkin bread, I learned some other interesting facts:

Persimmons don't ripen until after the first frost. Interesting.

Don, the Olney farm manager, said he is having the Jonathan and Empire apples (hope I have those names right) made into apple butter. First you boil the apples down into apple sauce, then you boil them down even further, adding a lot of sugar (apple butter is apparently half sugar) until you have a nice smooth paste. The key is never to stop stirring with the paddle.

Jessica, our gardener, came in with a plastic bucket filled with giant kale leaves. They were as big as palm leaves and a vivid green. I couldn't over how huge they were. My baking partner, Richard, told me it was a good season for kale.

About half a dozen wild turkeys have been shredding Richard's kale and other vegetables. It's hard to shoot them, Don said.

It's been raining buckets today, but Roger and I still went to the book sale that the Barnesville Historical Society holds on Pumpkin festival weekend. Do we need MORE books? Not really. But at 10¢ for paperbacks and 20¢ for hardbacks, it's hard for us bibliophiles to resist.

With the rain pouring down, we've yet to stroll the fair proper, so no fried snickers bars to sooth our tastebuds ... so far.

What's a Persimmon?

This time last year, after I had been living the bucolic rural life for about, say, six weeks, somebody asked me: "Are you going to put up your persimmons?"

Huh?

"Put up" my "persimmons?"

He must have seen the blank look on my face because he said, laconic, "You know, you've got that persimmon tree in your yard by the barn. Little tree. Looks like it's got a lot of fruit this year."

Oh--and he was asking me if I were going to can the persimmons.

OK. Like, oh yeah. Now where do I come from? S-u-b-u-r-b-s. Like right. Like I'm going to put up persimmons.

Now I know people in the suburbs "put things up." But what on earth is a persimmon?

I don't think I'd ever seen one. In fact, I thought they were some exotic fruit that grew in, say, England. You know, like gooseberries. The kind of thing Benjamin Bunny might eat in Beatrix Potter. Of course, I'm the person who some years ago took mulberries to my Quaker meeting because I didn't know what they were and my daughter had eaten some from a bush in our yard. As they say, you never stop learning ..

I went outside later and looked for the persimmon tree and sure enough, there it was, a little tree by a bigger tree by the red barn. And yes, little golden fruits that looked like yellow cherry tomatoes dangled amid its leaves. Persimmons. My body of knowledge had just once again increased.

I ate one just to make sure. I've been much bolder about eating flora since I wrote an article on poisonous plants in which I learned that it's exceedingly rare to die of plant poisoning the U.S. in this day and age. (Unless, of course, you're that young man in "Into the Wild" ...)

The golden fruit was sweet and soft inside. Good. I gathered some and ate some more, figuring, macrobiotic, anti-oxidant, what could I lose. I never did put them up. I think other people might have gathered them. Or the birds.

In any case, this year I went out and looked at my persimmon tree, and lo and behold, fruit was forming. It's wonderful--Edenic really--to have the earth produce such bounty without any effort on my part. I tried a persimmon. Not ripe yet. But soon enough.

Faith and Micah's wedding

A few weeks ago, I went to Faith and Micah's Quaker wedding at Stillwater Meeting House.

I barely know Micah and Faith. I met Micah in August at Ohio Yearly Meeting, which is largely held on the Olney Friends School campus. The plain dressing Quakers in their bonnets and long, flowing dresses captured my attention far more than the "civilians" in ordinary clothes.

Red-haired Micah was a civilian. I shared a table with him and some others at dinner one night in the Olney dining hall. I was in particularly bad mood and off my "center." Maybe that's why he and I bonded over a discussion of the demonic. Really. We connected.

In September, my Quaker friend Jaya from Toronto came to town with her friend Quaker Rebecca to stay at our house so they could go to Micah and Faith's wedding. It was Quakers everywhere. This actually worked out well because Sophie had just moved to college and Will and Nick to the Olney Friends School dorm across the lake, leaving empty bedrooms. I hung blue curtains, spread a light blue blanket on the bed, and put a blue bowl on the dresser of one bedroom, creating the "blue" room! Just like the magazines say! Simply rearrange what you've got!

Anyway. Jaya invited me to a meeting for worship with Micah and Faith at the Georgian Pillars, our one and only Barnesville B&B. Given that we have no hotels or motels in "Pixieville" for miles and miles, it's actually the only place to stay. I jumped on the chance to have a meeting for worship there.

The brick Georgian Pillars looks Georgian on the outside in that it's brick, but inside it's a Victorian or early twentieth century house with high ceilings, art glass, stained glass, fireplaces and an amazing mammoth staircase that says "I am made of real, solid cherrywood and I am here to stay. Don't mess with me." So, with that staircase looming in the hallway, I sat in silent worship stared at by stuffed teddy bears and a large knickkack on the coffee table of a tuxedoed bear at a grand piano.

Even though they didn't know me, Micah and Faith couldn't have been warmer about encouraging me to attend their wedding. After the meeting for worship, we drifted into the Georgian Arms sunny dining room and Faith showed us the hand-calligraphed certificate of marriage that all the witnesses to the wedding would sign the next day, as no priest or minister validates a Quaker wedding. Quakers traditionally frame their certificates of marriage and hang them in their houses.

I was surprised at how calm Faith was the day before her wedding. Wasn't she supposed to be going crazy with last minute crises? Shouldn't she be, like, having a nervous breakdown? Well, one of the joys of a Quaker ceremony is its simplicity: Nothing could be a starker contrast to the bridezilla wedding industry.

Micah and Faith's wedding was true to form, truly beautiful in its austerity. No string of bouquet clutching satin clad bridesmaids preceded Faith to the front of the meeting house. It was simply her, in a simple strapless white dress, and Micah, saying their vows each to the other and exchanging rings. Afterwards, people rose as the spirit moved them and shared stories about the couple or about either Micah or Faith. At the end, we all signed the marriage certificate and poured out to the porch for cake and punch.

Some Quakers commented on how few, if any, Quaker weddings they had attended. It's sad there are so few young Quakers marrying in the Quaker tradition, but that could change. I do think the world would be less harried--and impoverished-- if more couples adopted the simplicity of the Quaker wedding. This is a place where less is more. Where simplicity is beautiful.

Amish and Quakers

Are these Amish for real or do they roll up their stage set at the end of the day and plop down in front of their flat screen TVs? I asked this question to my friend Jane as we drove from the Amish vegetable stand. Jane laughed and said she knew what I meant. Especially in a world where so much is based on illusion and deception-- the culture of the faux 1950s diner, the faux "handmade" crafts from a factory in China, the idyllic Main Street lined with all-American houses that only mulit-millionaires can afford--it can be almost mind boggling to accept that the Amish really and truly live as they do.

Yet it's true. They may have all the pathologies of the rest of us, but they do live simply. All around in Barnesville, the Amish occupy farms recognizable by simple white frame houses, laundry drying on the line, black metal buggies parked alongside barns. No cars, no electricity.

It's cool to have them here and in the world because money can't manufacture them and because they are a visible reminder that we don't have to live the way we live, with our toxic levels of consumption, violence, stress and waste. There is an alternative lifestyle that is not imaginary, impossible or utopic but which is happening now, all around us. It's flawed, we know that, but it's here.

On the same trip, Jane and I visited our friend "Sarah," an Amish woman who sells us bread--organic homebaked bread for $1.50 a loaf!--milk, butter and eggs. Her house, with its glossy white walls and simple dark curtains, her woodburning stove and long table with the plain white plastic cloth, is filled with the activities of her life--canning, drying apples, sewing, quilting. Although we can never call to tell her we're coming, she always has time for us. Other Amish might not be so welcoming, but she is.

I almost want to cry with gratitude when I see all her happy-seeming chickens wandering around the house grazing because it means I can buy eggs that have not been produced by grossly overcrowded birds whose beaks are torn off at birth to prevent them pecking each other to death from the stress of their living conditions.

Her son, middle-school aged, showed us a "fiction" book he reads, a book of gentle poems about God illustrated with color pictures that must have been drawn in the 1940s and 1950s. He seemed pleased to have it. How many 12 year old boys from our culture would show off such a book? Another time, we came on a holy day in which the family was resting, and the father was coloring in pictures of birds with crayons. What adult male in our culture would do that? I am astonished that such lives are possible.

We so quickly give up the gentle pleasures of childhood--coloring pictures, enjoying simple prayers. Why do these activities seem so silly to us? Aren't we supposed to come to the Kingdom of Heaven as little children?

I made a comment to Jane as we drove up Sarah's rutty dirt driveway towards the road and home that the Amish seem gentler and more at peace than we do and why-don't-we-raise-our-children-their-way? She reminded me that incidents of child abuse among the Amish are about equal to the larger culture. How do we measure child abuse, I wonder? What do these statistics reveal and obscure?

I know it can be easy ... blah, blah ... to idealize the Amish, who, as humans like the rest of us, have the same failings. But as I said to Jane, the Amish don't start wars. They almost never kill people. That's a start. They show us, in the words of Dorothy Day, that we can build a world in which it is easier for people to be good.

As for Quakers, while I don't think we're called to be as removed from the world as the Amish, we share so much in common with the Amish-- the peace and simplicity testimonies for starters--that it's hard not to feel a kinship. Is there a way we can learn from them without either romanticizing their flawed lives or seeing them as nothing more than an outmoded, oppressive patriarchy? Where's the gray area?

Quakers and Humility

But that humility came under attack in the ensuing decades. Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call “expressive individualism.” Instead of being humble before God and history, moral salvation could be found through intimate contact with oneself and by exposing the beauty, the power and the divinity within.
David Brooks, "High Five Nation," The New York Times 9/15/09

"There is a general way of treating people that are not seen as being part of the meeting that is condescending and standoff-ish. Young people are seen as being something novel but not to be trusted or counted on...and that is our own doing for not making more of a presence in meetings. However, I have been coming to this meeting for 3 years --fairly infrequently mind you...but enough that I should at least look familiar. I don't expect to be remembered or even to have someone remember that the familiarity is from meeting. But it would still be nice to be treated in a welcoming manner and maybe as if I had a brain. I realize that these are very unkind charges to be making."
Quaker Harlot James at quakingharlot.blogspot.com/2009/09/ive-got-sticky-everywhere.html

When I first came to Quakers, I experienced the insider/outsider divide James discusses in the quote above, and would have fled, had I not had a strong sense of calling. I was astonished at how self-congratulatory some Quakers were about the simple fact of being Quaker. Pride.

I remember once a question coming up at my meeting about "some people" being uncomfortable with calling meeting for worship, well, meeting for worship. The problem was the implication in the word worship that we were adoring a higher being or in some way were coming as supplicants. How about "meeting for meditation?" At this point I said I came to meeting to worship to worship, not meditate, and if we changed the wording, I was out of there. I thought, more angry at God than my fellow man and woman, that I have put up with a lot to be faithful to the call to be a Quaker, but if we're not at least attempting to worship, I, like Jonah, was going to head for being swallowed by the whale. In any case, that rather bizarre--but not too surprising--idea of meeting for meditation was dropped, but not the underlying assumption that the so-called "God within" makes ME the center of the universe. Pride.

I fear that pride goeth a fall and that for all our sense that Quakerism has been on the right side of history, such hubris as infects it will cause a huge blunder. I wouldn't be surprised if a century from now Quakers won't look back at this period of their history with embarrassment or shame.

Clearly, if we have the truth, are smarter than everyone, and are "better" than all those "evangelicals," our condescending mindset will be apparent--and alienating-- to newcomers. Like Martin Kelly, I too see the age demographics and I too worry, though I trust in God to refill the ranks when we become meek and broken spirited and yes, humble. Do such words offend? Surely, the quality of humility is not strained in the Quakers. Therefore, Harlot James teaches us. Posts like James's, written with such humility and so from the heart, can prod us to do better.

But truly to do better--and this ultimately is the point of this too-long post--we need to transform. I remember early on in Quakerism reading an editor's letter in a Friends' publication. The editor spoke of two Baptists turning up at her meeting, looking for a place to stay for the night. She didn't want to host Baptists (at this point, the red flags started to fly up in my mind--replace Baptists with blacks, gays, Muslims, Jews and see how that sounds)-- but, sigh, since the meeting had committed to hospitality, she had no choice. Anyway, she was pleased to report that the Baptists caused no trouble, stayed for Meeting for Worship the next morning, even spoke !! and she thought they "had learned something from us."

OK. I wanted to tear my hair out. What did the Baptists SAY at Meeting for Worship? Is it even slightly possible that God sent those great unwashees to us to teach US something? Why is the prevailing attitude so often what WE have to teach others? What makes us so holy? Why are we so unwilling to expect that others will teach us? Until we have the change of heart--the humility-- to wish and to hunger to learn from newcomers, visitors, strangers, and yes, perceived "enemies," I believe we will continue to shrink. We need to be transformed--that's why we are Quakers--and we do that through humility. We should be filled with gratitude when newcomers or infrequent attenders attend our shrinking, fading, boring meetings in shabby (sorry, I meant "simple" and if you don't "get" that, we will judge you) settings. We are not doing THEM a favor by allowing them into our exalted meetings. They are doing us the favor. God has sent them to teach us something, if we have ears to hear.

Am I being too harsh? I thought about "nicing" this up and decided not to pull my punches. Do you find Quakers too prideful? Can we improve on the humility front? How?