CLERKING … WITHOUT A PASTOR OR ADMINISTRATOR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

There is a tendency in many silent-worship Quaker meetings to turn the clerk into a de facto pastor. This is curious when we consider the widespread resistance in the same meetings to recognize ministers, elders, and overseers – historic roles a modern clerk becomes expected to fill, at least in part. This is something I had observed long before agreeing to serve as clerk of our meeting.

To be fair, one of the difficulties facing modern pastors is that congregations expect them to assume all three of the historic Quaker offices – to be ministers, elders, and overseers – while few individuals are gifted in more than one. Somebody who’s great in the pulpit may be lousy in hospital visits or in coping with children. Add to that expectations as administrator or chief executive officer, or even as a major fundraiser or organizational planner, and you can imagine the stresses and burnout that result. The fact that “programmed” Friends have both a pastor and a clerk should be a healthy reminder.

The message for quietist Friends like us is that the central job of the clerk is to moderate our business sessions. Yes, by extension, the clerk typically becomes a Public Friend empowered to speak on behalf of the congregation. At Dover, we usually expect our clerk to sit at the head of Meeting for Worship (and, as a consequence, to have nearly perfect attendance), although that has not always been the case. Other expectations may creep in, almost unseen – as the Most Visible Friend is sought out to solve Meeting problems left and right. No, this one will rarely solve the problem. Our strength is that we ALL have active roles in this faith community. Making the service and talents of each Friend more visible is a worthwhile accomplishment – and a sign of health, too. Please stand up and take a bow for the ways you contribute, even as I steer someone in your direction. Especially those of you serving as clerk of your committee-ministry.

~*~

Seasons 1 For more of my reflections, click here.

GIVING VOICE TO A UNIQUELY AMERICAN MUSIC

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

The demands of settling the New World left little time for the first waves of immigrants to attend to the fine arts. Unlike Europe, with its ongoing traditions, America had no courtly patrons or vested institutions. No Lorenzo de Medici or cathedrals, for instance. In fact, many of the Protestants looked askance at the vanity running through many of the arts or questioned the truthfulness of entertaining fictions. The Puritans banned theater, after all, as well as social dancing, at least until yielding where I live on New England contradance. The Quakers and Baptists went further, forbidding music from their worship services altogether.

Something had to bend and, over time, did. Slowly native voices took shape in literature, painting, and music, mostly. To us today, these “primitives” can be refreshing encounters.

In music, much of this impulse surfaced along vocal lines. (Little wonder, considering the rarity of instruments and teachers.) And out of this came a desire for choral music, a community activity of a social nature.

In the absence of trained musicians, though, some music masters, mostly self-taught, opened workshops known as “singing schools” and eventually created a unique notation style we know as “shape-note” scores. These pages have the staves, time signatures, sharps and flats like the scores generally used today, but rather than having the notes themselves be round, some are square or triangles – and each of those markings designates a fa, so, la, ti, do – an ancient foundation for singing.

When singers pick up a hymn from a shape-note book, they run through the music the first time by using the words fa, so, la, ti, do rather than the lyrics, which are introduced once the singers have their musical lines and harmonies in place. And away they go.

Boston tanner William Billings (1746-1800) is regarded as the first American choral composer, and increasingly as an original, even startling, voice. His four-part “fuguing tunes” of one voice after another embracing and embellishing a phrase create bright polyphonic tapestries on Biblical and patriotic texts. Henry Cowell, a major 20th century American composer, has argued that had we heeded Billings rather than later reformers, we would have had a unique serious American musical tradition much earlier than we did. Other observers have said that hearing Billings is like encountering the wonders of music for the first time. I’d agree. While Billings, himself a singing-school master and publisher, did not employ shape notes, much of his music has survived in that style.

In Virginia, the Mennonite Joseph Funk (1778-1862) created a seven-note system still in use among Mennonites and Brethren. Many of those hymns were published in both English and German. (I have several editions of these volumes.) The crossroads where he lived and is buried is now known as Singers Glen. It’s a lovely site.

Best known today is the Sacred Harp, taking its name from a 1844 tunebook once New England choral singing took root in the American South. It’s a loud, lively, even raucous style of four-part a cappella activity – with many of the hymns composed by Billings, in fact.

Historical purists can argue whether shape-note music should be performed in the Sacred Harp style or in the more lyrical piety of the Mennonites and Brethren, which I favor. What I do know is the joy we feel as a choir when we take up pieces from this stream, as well as how difficult and challenging they can be. For the record, we use standard notation, rather than the shape-note scores. No need to further confuse us.

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THIS OLD HOUSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I used to like the Public Broadcasting System series, back before I bought an old house. Now it’s too painful. Look at all this old wiring, the plumbing problems, the rot and warping, the fact the bulkhead needs replacing. The flaking paint, again. (Bulkhead? Didn’t even know what that was beforehand.)

What else do you want to know about New England?

 ~*~

Home Maintenance 1

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A RATHER CHECKERED CAREER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For someone who has engaged in a writing life his whole adulthood, I’ve had a rather checkered career as a reader. After a precocious outburst in the classics – Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in second- or third- or fourth-grade (not as class assignments, of course – who knows what we were reading there), I found myself largely oblivious to fiction. My attention turned to history and biography (the Landmark series, especially) and then science and politics. Non-fiction, with a sense of content. Fiction came later, in high school, curiously through political fiction – Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, 1984, rather than any of the traditional British canon. Throw a little Shakespeare in, and I was off – into journalism. (Let me mention that Huck Finn was much harder reading in my junior year of high school than it had been when I was younger; as a novice reader, I wasn’t tripped up by the strange spellings of dialect.)

In college, for whatever reason, I developed a passion for Samuel Johnson. Not for his moralizing as much as the sarcasm, I’d say, as well as a fascination with the baroque richness of his style. Maybe it was just the force of personality projecting from the writing. And then came Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Jack Kerouac … the widening stream.

Surprisingly, a major turning point occurred in the span when I had the fewest opportunities to read – my years living in the ashram, a monastic community in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. Out of the practice of meditation and reflection, however, I began to approach literature in a new way. The quietude opened poetry to me, both as a reader and a writer. The experience also introduced me to mythology, with the Hindu stories being more fantastic and meaningful than anything I had encountered in the Greek and Roman stream. Later, I was able to leap from this into the stories of the Bible as well, returning me to my previously unknown roots.

Others have written of being a promiscuous reader. I wouldn’t say I’m addicted to reading that way – at least, not any more. One of the ashram exercises, in fact, was a “reading fast,” meaning written words, rather than food. It’s all a matter of focus. That is, when I’m eating, I want to choose to concentrate on my food rather than a text. When I’m traveling, I want to see where I’m going. (Airport terminals, on the other hand, or stretches before takeoff, are another matter — they are among those place of limbo.) Later, when the newspaper first comes off the press, I found I could no longer focus on the stories – not after a shift of heavy editing. If anything, my head was so full of disjointed stimulation I needed to slow down to savor what I’d already encountered. For that matter, I prefer walking to jogging, with its restoration of a natural pace. I rush too many places and deliver on too many deadlines as it is. When I enter someone’s home for the first time, I must take care to pay attention to them more than the spines on their bookshelves. Now what were you saying?

I read, then, with greater focus these days. More selectively. I can no longer have classical music playing in the background. (It used to provide a barrier for noise from my family or neighbors.) Now, I immerse myself in what is before me. The text, then, as in scripture.

~*~

Out of all of this, my own work emerges. As a writer, I strive to create a linear progression. That is, the parts must advance is some sort of logic. Curiously, in my own work, I am often inspired by a Hegelian model – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – as drawn from cinema theory. On a wider scale, my earlier interests surface in new ways, resulting in something more akin to a matrix or spiral or collage than a straight line. I have been called a Mixmaster, with good reason. On top of it all, in my many moves about the continent, I’ve found myself exploring the soul of each place – something wine aficionados consider, in a smaller range, when they discuss terroir.

LOOK, WE KNOW WHAT WE MEAN BY A ‘NEW ENGLANDER’ STYLE HOUSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Around here, if you mention New Englander as a style of house, everybody knows what you mean. Gable end to the street, perhaps a bay window beside the front door, typically two full stories and a usable third floor. Not Greek Revival, except in a stripped-down way with some carpenter gothic touches, and definitely not Colonial Revival. Modest, middle-class – maybe even working class – sometimes even as a duplex.

But try looking it up and the best you can find is an accusation that it’s New Hampshire Realtor BS.

Well, that’s where we live. Ours seems to be from the 1890s.

~*~

My poems on the challenges of renovations, repairs, and relating as a husband are collected as Home Maintenance, a free ebook at Thistle/Flinch editions.

A CASE FOR NURTURING SERIOUS READERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

One of the challenges facing contemporary society is the shrinking percentage of active readers. (I say percentage, but fear what we face is more a shrinkage of actual numbers.) It’s not simply the decline in readers of fiction or the number of people who recite poetry from heart, but the lack of literary engagement of any kind. So I rat on myself early here, with my belief that the act of reading carries social value – especially when serious literature is the subject.

It is no mere coincidence that Americans’ widespread ignorance of history and our political system has accompanied the growing addiction to a sensual media orgy – large-screen television, movies, rock music – while habitual reading, including newspapers, has been declining. That is, what is superficial and easy – and ephemeral — has the upper hand. Little is demanded of the receptor, and loud excitement, rather than a deepened awareness, is the expectation; escapism, rather than engagement with life itself. Several European writers have suggested something more troubling is at work – the loss of reflective people, contemplative individuals – a theme I see developed, obliquely, in Stephen L. Carter’s Integrity and the labor of moral discernment. In other words, is the mind being enlarged or merely numbed? The fact that so many people cannot name their own senators or governors or are largely ignorant of geography, yet recognize countless actors and rockers points toward a disintegration of community and social service.

Paradoxically, the act of reading is largely a private enterprise. It’s a dialogue between a reader and a writer, sometimes separated by continents or centuries. It requires more activity from the receptor than a movie, short song, or television sit-com does – in fact, one of the concerns these days is the atrophied state of the imagination among those who have been raised on “electronic media” rather than the printed word or, for that matter, stories read aloud or in radio broadcasts. (There are, after all, degrees of imaginative challenge.) In the act of reading, there are no visible intermediaries – no actors, soundtrack, directors, sets, or costumes. The editor or printer or bookseller is of an entire order altogether. Here, the reader and the writer engage in a dance of the soul or a passionate argument. (Serious readers can be as demanding as lovers when it comes to this relationship.)

But the act of reading can also take us into the existence of another person, viewing the world from within that context. A movie, in contrast, leaves us looking at that person, hoping for a hint of emotion or profundity. The author can reflect on the situation, suggest ranges of experience, voice moral struggles in ways a movie might only touch in passing.

Here I think, too, of large-scale musical compositions – symphonies or string quartets, for instance – that demand intense listening, inducing reflection and emotional awareness. Like reading, the audience for serious music is in decline – and with it, a link to the riches of the past and its aspirations and wisdom.

BEYOND THOSE GLOSSY ARCHITECTURAL MAGAZINE PHOTO SPREADS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

More and more, when I look at a dream house, my reaction turns the other direction. Is that where I’d want to live? Who keeps it clean? How do you get truly comfortable? Make a mess? The kitchen, especially, looks like nobody’s used it for anything more than microwaving a frozen entree.

~*~

My poems on the challenges of renovations, repairs, and relating as a husband are collected as Home Maintenance, a free ebook at Thistle/Flinch editions.