Serendipities

Today I participated in a poetry reading at Ohio University Eastern, where I teach.

I had been wondering what poem to read. My brother just died in December, and I had been finding solace in Wordsworth's  "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" which I had recently blogged about, but felt strongly I shouldn't read. 

Daffodils are the subject of  "I Wander Lonely as a Cloud." The daffodils dance joyfully in the breeze in that poem.

What then can I read, I wondered? I had chosen a stanza from a poem called "The Jazz of Pussycats," but needed more. Several hours before the reading a poem called "What is Death?" showed up in my mailbox, sent out by Friend Susannah Rose. 

Not only was the timing of the poem's arrival and its theme perfect, the poem was written by Henry Scott Holland, the same name as a mentor who encouraged me strongly on my Bonhoeffer book

OK, thought I. I will read the poem. 

Not only was the poem perfect for the occasion, but another person, Tom Flynn, read "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." Tom not only read it, but said almost exactly what I would have said about it. 

I tend to be suspicious of "connect the dots" serendipites, but yet I wonder. Is this all coincidence? The uncanny timing of the poem's arrival, the poem itself, the author, Tom reading Wordsworth? 

Perhaps I construct all this. And yet. I suppose the most important take away is that we never know who we will touch when we send a poem or a word out into the world. Susan Rose could not have suspected that I needed just that poem for a poetry reading just that day. As I worry about this post, I am trying to trust that maybe it too will speak. 

Past into Future?

I became part of a Quaker discernment group last year and have been trying, as far as possible, to be responsive to the promptings of the Spirit. This has been a struggle--I want to schedule the Spirit for when I "have time." But do any of "have time?" Is time ours to possess and slice and dice as we find convenient?

So I am stopping today to blog, though I have many other more important things to do. What if I had blogged here every time in the past year the Spirit prompted me? Would I have failed to get done what was so important to do? 

I have begun to notice the slippage lately between me and my college students, who are mostly teenagers. I become more acutely aware that their world is not my world. This came home to me forcefully a few years ago when I showed them an ad featuring Grace Kelly. None of them had heard of her. When we studied art forgery, they had no idea who Greta Garbo was. I felt it too this year, as my students, for a song analysis paper, shared groups I had never heard of before. They love Linkin Park. They don't know the classic Beatle songs. Some of them love Tupac, who at least I've heard of (and whose music I want to hear--but haven't yet.) Pink Floyd is not part of their context. 

It has occurred to me too that the world most of them, at this point, have grown up in--what they remember, these students born after 1996--is the post 9/11 world. Most of them don't even remember the day 9/11/01. What they've grown up with, what is "normal" to them is what I think of as a grim, gray world of wars, terrorism, shrunken job opportunities, impossibly high college tuitions. I find myself--heaven help me!--wanting to share how it "used to be."

As a member of an older Meeting, I encounter many older Quakers who tell stories about the past. I have been wondering why that impulse is so strong, in me and in them, and I think it is because, as we experience the slippage between how things are versus how they were, we want to preserve and pass on the memory we have of how things were, especially what has changed.  Yet the past is so fragile-- a piling up of ephemera, mood, feeling, texture--that I have more and more come to believe we have to listen carefully to that something behind--or more accurately, within-- all that content we pour out.

I don't worry about subjectivity at all--ie, whether we remember the past through rose-colored glasses--because that doesn't seem important: of course we are remembering subjectively. The subjectivity, in fact, seems to me the most important part of the content: why have we chosen these details? Why? What do they represent and how is that valuable?

I have been thinking about all this, because sometimes, perhaps when my students ask me, outraged, yearning for the answer, why, say, college costs so much, why they have to take out so many loans, my first response has been to describe how it didn't use to be that way--to explain "what it was like in my day--" and yet they don't respond to that. I have found that when I talk about what it was like in The Day--trying to convey a zeitgeist--younger people glaze over. So I have stopped. 

A realization I have had, as alluded to above, is that it isn't so much facts and information I hope to communicate, as the feeling of a certain time, what it felt like to be alive in a certain moment. For while in a true sense things never change, they also do change all the time. One of the shocks of getting older is realizing that what had seemed completely normal and permanent, literally unchangeable,  is completely transient and impermanent. It's a cliche that those clothes and hair-dos--so normal-- become as old, out-dated and faded in the photos as the clothes in our grandmother's album. Police officers don't wear the same uniforms anymore. Children can no longer run free and unsupervised around the neighborhood. The technology changes. 

I remember going for the first time into the atmospheric St. Clairsville Library, a store front building on St. Clairsville's Main Street, tall and narrow, through a lobby, up an open, airy,  narrow, winding staircase to a second floor, and having my heart twist in my chest as I came across a set of wooden card catalogues. Card catalogues! This library had card catalogues! Tears almost sprang into my eyes. When had I last seen a card catalogue?

The catalogues were for the rare books collection. I have no particular partiality for card catalogues per se, but seeing them there broke (I won't change that typo)  back a flood of memories and emotions. I felt a huge desire to tell someone who wouldn't know what they were all about them: how very long they were, what it felt like to pull them out and go through them, how the book listings were typed on hard paper stock the size of notecards and how you brought you own notecards to jot down information, then went to the stacks to find the books. How you hoped the books you found lived up to expectations!

Yet none of that is important. It's boring really. Who cares? How different is it to look something up on the computer? Who would want to do it that old way? Thank God we have the Internet! What are you talking about with card catalogues!?

Of course, it's not the card catalogues that are important, but what they represent--a way of thinking and being and even moving through  the world that we don't have (much) anymore. It's spatial--how we relate to the world--and sensory--weight and smell, sight and touch. How we experience knowledge and information is different now. Is this important? I don't know. But something in me has an impulse to preserve the memory. 

So when I listen to older Quakers talk--and I love history--I try to--or need to try harder to--listen through and behind and within the stories, because the stories often aren't the most important thing. But they are the vehicle.

What I am struggling with is how to tell the stories--and to capture the texture of a time you need to tell a story--but how to tell them so that they are not tedious and irrelevant. How do we capture the details they convey a zeitgeist, a texture, a surround of what it was like in a past moment in a way that still matters? This seems important, in Quakerism, in our world, in our personal lives, because the only way to pass on the feeling of a time is through this compilation of story upon story. Yet so often I fear we do it in a way that loses the forest for the trees instead of conveying how the trees made up this particular, ephemeral forest. How can we do it better, as a Society, as Selves?

Through the Ocean of Light: On Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative, 2015

Every year, the members of Ohio Yearly Meeting descend on Barnesville like a flock of exotic--if plain--birds, a sudden migration of shin-length shirtwaist skirts, bonnets,  straw hats, whites shirts with black suspenders, beards. Even after seven years, the descent never ceases to startle me.

Last year, for the first time, I fully attended the Yearly Meeting sessions. Others years, Earlham School of Religion, vacations, and our first year here, the intense shock of arrival, kept me away. This year, balancing teaching and the other demands of life, I did what I could.

I sometimes wonder at my membership in this body. To say I am not a rural person, despite living in a rural area in a house surrounded by open fields, woods and lake, would be a complete understatement. When I first moved here, my brother used to to sing me the Green Acres theme song and wonder that I was living in "Petticoat Junction." Often then--and now--theses lyrics from the Green Acres song float through my mind: "Keep the country, just give me Park Avenue." Seven years into the rural experiment, I can definitely say I am not likely, barring a famine, to be gardening, baking, canning, sewing or in any other way performing rural femininity. The chances of my adopting plain dress also equal zero: I hate wearing skirts, and while the idea of simply stuffing my hair under a cap is appealing, I don't know that the look would go with makeup and hair color, quaffing a glass of swine or watching Orphan Black.

So, here I am, What could I possibly have in common with these people? I don't share a rural ethos, and I have not a drop of the ancestral blood of Smiths, Guindons, Rockwells, Tabers  or other old Quaker families.

And yet. As with Fanny Price in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, who suffered the pains of tyranny, ridicule and neglect, I also, beyond the former, encounter "something consolatory." This year, for example, compared to last, I felt more at home in my difference and more convinced the yearly meeting needs the difference I represent. I am very clear too that at this point my meeting role is a quiet one: to pray, to be present, to support. This is all to the good: the Quakers have a surfeit of chiefs.

Beyond the superficial differences, however--and in the end, who cares if our ethos is rural or urban?, -- I experienced the deeper kinship that unites us. Most of us are products of a transformed worldview, marked deeply by living in that "infinite ocean of light and love" that  flows over the world's ocean of darkness and death. In Ohio Yearly Meeting, we are not "of the world," at least not entirely.

One manifestation, for example, appeared during our discussion of a policy to screen for sex offenders and require criminal backgrounds checks for anyone working with children. Quakers are the only group I have ever known not to roll over and play dead, acquiesce in complete abjection, the moment the word "litigation" is used. We know there is something more important than whether we are sued. (Really? Can that be in US society? Can there be a group that doesn't immediately cave in as soon as the word lawsu ... starts to be articulated?)

Therefore,  although we decided to go ahead and screen for sex offenders and do criminal backgrounds checks on caretakers of youth, we made that decision based on love for our children, not fear of being sued. We did it because, as Quakers eloquently expressed it, predators look for easy prey, and our tendency to trust makes us vulnerable. We did this because we also know we can stand up for our principles against the threat of lawsuits if we need to do, because even were we to lose all our money and property, we would still exist. I felt deeply grateful to be part of a group that understands that its being roots in something deeper than the material and does not live in fear of losing its goods.

So I am in unity with this understanding of the universe that doesn't put its faith in chariots, in budgets, in programs, in worldly wealth. This gift  of perception is so great, and in such short supply, that it calls out to be nurtured and spread. I am glad, as older meetings perhaps fade, to see all the new growth witnessed to during the yearly meeting, small shoots of life growing up in England, Italy and Pennsylvania, new groupings arising.

On Quaker community: A dose of humility?

Micah Bales recently posted a blog on  the Quaker tendency to turn inward and focus on our own communities.

I agree that it can't stop there. The problem may be that we have confused the beginning with the end. We don't exist to be nurturing communities. But it helps to nurture people. People need love intrinsically. Love is the glue that holds the universe together.

That being said, Quakers need to keep examining the following:

Is the nurture we offer one another leading us back out to change the world?

Or does it cause us, especially the people in leadership, to have a false view of themselves?

Especially if we are leaders or insiders, how are we judging the people who want to enter our group? On the basis of how they fit in or, assuming they are not quite "right," on how "fixable" they are? Too often, Quakers are quick to TEACH but unwilling to learn. We are a tribe of chiefs. We want people to follow us. But what if we tried to learn from others? What would it take to actually listen and hear what another person said--not just use what they are saying as a a prelude to correcting them or as an echo chamber confirming what we already know? Or become completely defensive?

Who wants to be fixed?  Very few people: we crave love and acceptance. Yet often our unconscious thought towards others seems to be, "if only we could fix that person to be more like us, we could accept him." Thus we lose the opportunity to be transformed--and often the ability to transform other lives when people flee us.

Sometimes I have been literally jaw-droppingly astonished that people, often leaders, have sometimes become so insular, cosseted and protected, that, although  by the standards of the larger society they lack social skills, looks, etc (though often wonderful people!) they only want to be around the "beautiful people:" those highly socially adept and attractive. Sometimes I can only say to myself: Really? Really? Listen to yourself. Look in the mirror. Guess what? You (me) are not so great. Not as individuals. Not by ourselves.

On a like note,  coming from Lutheranism, I have never been able to get over the pride people often have in being Quaker. It's good to be proud of your tribe, but often this goes over the top, into what I will call the "we are the cat's pajamas--we are QUAKERS" mentality. Often, it seems, we expect people to be impressed, if not bowled over into speechless, rapt wonder,  if not to swoon and possibly have a near death experience, just because we are QUAKERS. In reality, the rest of the world doesn't care. How long do we have to wait for the masses NOT to come storming the gates, panting to be QUAKERS, before we get the memo?

Much of this, I would argue, roots in having lost our Christ center [and rather than start a firestorm, I ask you to interpret that as you will] rooted in the values Jesus espoused. Liberal Friends have often become a politically progressive action group and conservative Friends sometimes act like a plain- dressing antiquarian society, more interested in projecting an old-fashioned ethos than looking outward and walking humbly with the Lord.

That beings said, Quakerism retains so much behavior, so much action, so many people, so much, dare I say, theology, that is loving, kind, and also Christlike, that we have a great gift to offer the world--if only we could get over ourselves.

"Heaven is for real:" but maybe not a little boy's vision of it

   This falls under the auspices of a Quaker post: Stillwater Friends Meeting, of which I am a member, hosted a showing of the movie "Heaven is for Real." I was interested in seeing the film both as part of the committee that sponsors "movie night" and because it was outside of my comfort zone. To my surprise, I found it fit Roland Barthes's notion of a "writerly text:" open-ended and ambiguous--far more than I would have expected. It really was not quite what I expected.

Little Colby sees heaven--maybe.

The plot goes as follows: a little boy named Colby, aged four, needs an emergency appendectomy, and at some point in is in danger of death. According to the movie, he never actually stops breathing, his heart never stops, his brain function never flatlines--he never actually dies, even for a moment.

Little Colby fortunately survives his operation, but it does cost a bundle. While under anesthesia, he has a vision, a dream or literal experience of heaven. 

After the operation, the boy tells his father, Todd, a pastor, bits and pieces of what the youngster understands as a visit to heaven: He sat in Jesus' lap, Jesus rode a rainbow colored horse, a choir of angels sang. The father, not naive, is intrigued but at first interprets the boy as describing a dream or vision based on fragments of stories he has heard about Jesus, the Bible and heaven.  When the little boy announces that Jesus has blue-green eyes, the father is convinced his son has imagined heaven: the parents have blue and green eyes and, of course, the parents think, the child is projecting mom and dad as Jesus. 

Dad, actor Greg Kinnear, comes to believe--or almost believe--his son has been to heaven. Anyway, it gets him thinking hard about belief. 

And yet. Some residue of the boy's story strikes the father as real. The story nags him, and he starts talking about it in the pulpit, to the alarm of the church's lay council. The father becomes so obsessed with the story that he starts having fights with his wife, Sonja, who will have none of it, and he goes to see a psychologist. This woman, clearly the classic castrating, dark haired, over-educated career woman and definitely not a "believer," pooh-poohs the pastor's thought that the heaven experience could be real.

Colby tells his Dad about heaven. 

Meanwhile, a local paper gets wind of the "boy who went to heaven" and sends out a reporter. The church council becomes even more alarmed after the story runs. Though previously a banker on the council had offered to take care of the pastor's high medical bills--more than $50,000 (apparently the church did not provide him with health insurance or anything near adequate health insurance, though this is never said, and the pastor refuses the offer of help), now the banker is part of the group that turns on the pastor and announces that he has only one more week in the pulpit. (His wife at one point wants to get a job to pay the bills, but the husband informs her that her job is to be a mother.)

So far the wife has been a doubter, just like the female psychologist and the woman on the church council leading the charge against the him. However, when the four year old tells  her he has seen his dead sister in heaven, the wife breaks down: she did lose a baby to a miscarriage, even though she never knew it was a girl. The child, she reasoned, could not possibly have heard about that, so his story must be true. 

Mom becomes a believer after Colby tells her about meeting the sister Mom lost in a miscarriage. Kelly Reilly, the mom, plays another devoted wife to much more twisted man in the current season of True Detective.

In the climatic scene of the film, the pastor, in his final sermon, gives an impassioned sermon in which he states that God is love and that what we believe is important. Heaven means different things to different people, he says. It may not be Jesus on a rainbow horse to everyone, but if we truly believed in sone sort of heaven, wouldn't it change how we lived, make us more loving and secure? Isn't the point to really act as if heaven is real? What he doesn't say is that his son's vision of heaven is literally real--the title of the book and movie are not My Son's Vision of Heaven is Real, but Heaven is for Real. What the pastor really wants people to think about is NOT the 4 year old's story of riding a rainbow horse with Jesus, but what it might mean if the concept of heaven--explicitly open ended as "whatever that means to you"--is real. Could it inspire us to behave less cruelly to one another in the here and now and instead (this is my interpretation) to build a better world.

In other words, this is Barthes's open-ended, ambiguous "writerly" narrative being mis-interpreted as a closed "readerly" narrative locating a literal heaven in a little boy's experience, devoid of ambiguity. 

The parishioners, led by the wife, are so moved that they come on stage in a group hug. Later, the pastor watches a show about a girl in Asia who paints her vision of heaven, and when his son sees her painting of Jesus on TV, amazingly a blue-green eyed man, he confirms it is the same Jesus he saw.

This is what Jesus looks like to little Colby during his trip to heaven.

The movie closes with the wife announcing she is pregnant.  We never see the pastor write the best-selling book, but clearly the wheels are turning--and he does have a huge debt load hanging over him. We might question him exploiting the naive statements of a four-year to make money, but we can also understand him needing to get bills paid--and it's not his fault he lives in a country that allows grossly inflated medical costs to be normal. Of course, it could be that Todd actually literally believed his son's story, but the tenor of the story suggests he does not. To give him his due, he seems to have sincerely wanted to get people thinking about their faith lives.

The movie is set in Nebraska, and the pastor lives in a big white frame house, apparently built very recently (not a 19th-century farmhouse) surrounding by open fields, reminiscent of Field of Dreams. The cast is almost all white, but I caught at least a glimpse of a black parishioner, and a black parishioner calls 9/11 at some point. The black-skinned person who calls 9/11 presents as extremely culturally white--very short hair, clean, crisp conservative clothes, an ultra-clean-cut look that does not threaten white sensibilities in any way. The real blacks, I would say, are a Latino couple with a baby to whom the pastor's wife gives a beautiful baby dress. When the Latino woman (who looks safely legal and as if she probably heads to a night job working at the Holiday Inn) exclaims it's too nice a gift to accept, the pastor's wife assures her: "Not for YOUR baby." This is apparently meant to exhibit lack of racial prejudice, but it comes across as very condescending: even a brown baby deserves a pretty dress! I am going with the idea that the movie makers meant well. 

This movie interested me in particular because I am fascinated by the way people misread texts. I don't know how many times even top scholars in a field don't see what is right in front of them. I am even surprised at myself: as I go back to familiar texts I can come away with completely different takes at different times. (This is why I always tell my students to head back to primary sources.)  I am thus more and more in accord with Nietzsche's thought that people read or see what they have already decided is there, not what is really in front of them. 

 So I am interested that people seem to misread this movie as primarily about a boy's literal trip to heaven rather than as exploration of the power of belief. Why is the boy's story so important? Why are we all so prone to misread?

Back to the Zombies!

    I completely missed this comment about the Zombies post from March, as I so seldom get comments anymore that I stopped looking. In any case, I was delighted to hear from Hystery, who I have missed. Since the original blog post is so old, I decided simply to make this into its own post. Hystery is responding to a blog (that I try to push back against) saying the Zombie craze is really about younger people's dread of aging Boomers. I am in agreement with Hystery and wonder if others feel this same vague dread of Exploitation, Apathy and Despair? I also see that our story is not yet written, and am haunted by Germans who committed suicide during World War II because they became too hopeless, and yet a new, better time was coming soon.  I too am an adjunct these days, love the work, but am not crazy about the conditions ... :) I also wonder if the intergenerational family will become the new norm--or the new old norm, as it once was the norm. 

     From Hystery:

It is an interesting idea, though I hardly think it is consciously held by most of us Gen-Xers, that you Boomers are like Zombies. I think you are right that this attitude, conscious or not, is born of a divide and conquer propaganda that tells us there is not enough for all and that we must fight each other for the scraps.

I do live with my mother and father and 98 year old grandmother as well as with my husband and children. It is what it is- usually good. Sometimes quite difficult. And I work as an adjunct (dreadfully exploited if I'm being honest) and share an office with my Baby Boomer father. We're both history faculty. He holds the only full time history job at the college and when he retires (which will be soon) they will likely decide to replace his full time position with more adjunct faculty without insurance, without a union, without job security. Until then, he does his best to protect us with all the pull and power his years, experience, and union membership afford him.

But there is a strong sense that there is some shuffling undead monster tracking us- feeding off brains and drawing us into a living death. I think it is not our parents but Exploitation and Apathy and Despair that mindlessly lurches toward us. We are not, perhaps, a generation well-known for our capacity for hope. But we shall see. Our story is not yet fully written.

Patience not passivity

I recently read a children's book from 1946 called The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. I am interested in children's literature, among other reasons, because of its influence on adults. In any case, in this story, a 13-year-old named Maria goes with her governess, Miss Heliotrope, to live with her uncle on his estate in the West Country. Early on, the village parson and several wise animals,  a dog (who turns out to be a lion--several years before Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and a cat, advise Maria to be patient and curb her troubling "feminine curiosity." This involves sitting and waiting quietly to be asked, for instance, to tour the estate's kitchens and other areas. Maria obeys, virtue is rewarded and Maria's curiosity satisfied--without annoying anyone in the process.

The book, which relies on the page-turning curiosity of its mostly female readers, and on Maria having the pluck to follow where her questions lead, soon drops the theme of cultivating passivity. However, I continued to ponder it, and the way passivity is often confused with patience.

Patience is not one of the fruits of the spirit contemporary Quakers emphasize. Our "p" is primarily for peace--more precisely peace-making, and we celebrate active virtues: cultivating simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality in how we live. Sitting patiently and waiting for other people to initiate change has not been part of our tradition.

It's important, however, I think, not to confuse patience with passivity. It seems to me Biblical patience has little to do with sitting quietly. The  patience of Job had everything to do with enduring suffering, not basking in beatific stillness as he laid on the dung heap, covered in sores.  Job actively cursed God, and God told the people criticizing Job for doing that that Job was right, that nobody deserved the kind of suffering he'd endured.

Early Quakers like  Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, who were imprisoned in Malta by the Inquisition for preaching up the Quaker word in a Catholic region, also don't fit a model of serene and saintly acceptance that we tend to associate with patience. They endured imprisonment--but they also fought back against it. Evans and Cheevers mounted a hunger strike in prison, complained vocally and resentfully about their abusive treatment and argued vigorously to refute both the theology and the threats of priests--but had the patience to resist trading freedom for, say, kissing the crucifix or recanting their Quaker testimony.

Malta cell of Evans and Cheevers

They had Biblical patience, a willingness to endure the consequences of following leadings, leadings that brought them into clashes with worldly authorities. Their patience was a fruit of activity, not passivity, and it was active in itself.

One of the earlier, lost meanings of being a "plain" people that the Quakers adopted as a label was "plaint" or complaint. The early Quakers were not simply plain because they had leveled their religion from the "airy" heights of the Anglicans or because they lived simply, but because they were people of the plaint--people with complaints--people who had suffered. They were patient but they weren't complaisant. Their patience in suffering was active and vocal, an incessant cry against the way they were treated. Their patience was accompanied by calls, again and again, for social justice.

This kind of patience,  a robust and even defiant willingness to endure the suffering brought on by following leadings, is a supernatural fruit of the spirit. The flesh shrinks from imprisonment, torture and want, the soul from the shame and censure that defying authority elicits in other people. This patience emerges not through passivity but through active immersion in the life of prayer and attention to spirit. Why does it well up during some periods and not others? Why do we seem to have so little of it today?