HALFWAY THROUGH WINTER
SNOW MUCH SNOW
It’s snowing again, a nor’easter that’s expected to drop up to 15 inches on us before dawn. That’s on top of 5 or so a little over a week ago, plus last Tuesday’s 30-inch blizzard blast and Friday’s 7.5. That’s close to 5 feet of snowfall in a week-and-a-half and we still have two more winter months left – the two that traditionally can get the biggest totals, especially if we settle into a twice-a-week storm pattern as we seem to be.
Admittedly, even with subzero and single-digit lows, some has melted between rounds, but much of that’s also refrozen into compacted snow and ice below the surface. The landscape’s getting wild, even before the next foot or so expected later in the week. Add to that the monster icicles clinging to the eaves – cold claws growing at our windows.
I keep looking out at the falling, windblown flakes and at the driveway and pathways that are already obliterated again. With an overcast sky, half of the landscape appears to be erased from existence.
This is hardly the quaint Currier and Ives stereotype of New England winter. It’s the reason barns and outbuildings were connected to the farmhouse itself. In earlier times, it could prompt madness and a feeling of being buried alive, with or without others.
Nowadays, we usually have recourse to mobility and entertainment throughout all but the worst outbursts – or the increasingly common power outages.
Still, it’s such a relief to not be commuting to and from the newsroom these days, but that’s no cause for smugness as I consider so many workers who must venture forth in public service.
And here comes a city snowplow, making one more pass down our street – and adding to the blockage at the end of our driveway.
Back to the digging, then. Round by round.
A PILLAR OR MILESTONE
When I was asked to write a newspaper column two or three times during my senior year of college, I chose – out of the blue – to call it “A Corinthian Column.” Maybe it was just a quirky play on words, crossing the distinctive Greek architectural element with a then very vague sense of New Testament or even prophecy. At the time, my faith was somewhere between agnostic and logical positivist – and vehemently anti-Vietnam war and, to a milder extent, anti-Christian. Yet when someone asked, “Where do you think you’ll wind up, as far as religion goes?” I blurted, “Probably something like Zen-Quaker” – this, when I had little idea of either practice or, for that matter, the way that becoming a yogi a few years later would lead me here in the radical Christian sphere.
Decades later, being nominated to serve as clerk of our meeting had me feeling a similar sense of embarking anew. I could list a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t be clerk. First confession: my motto tends toward “Just do it,” and I worked under relentless daily newspaper deadlines. Either way, this means my patience easily wears thin in many Quaker business sessions. Process? I also wish we had a better system of upholding of our community than committee work. Even so, here we are, all the same.
In the interim, Corinthian Column abbreviates to “C.C.” – the same as Clerk’s Corner. When I set out, I intended to draft some short pieces for the congregation’s newsletter – holding each to just three paragraphs – for upcoming issues. Collect random thoughts on our practice, especially. Maybe even without much (overt) theology. So here’s what happened, Friends. Rarely did it hold to just three ‘graphs, though I usually kept it under a page of copy.
What has surprised me is the way these became pastoral letters after all, much the way the Apostle Paul did, in his own letters to the Corinthians. Yes, I largely avoided the theology, unlike Paul, though I address it elsewhere. The effort of living as a community of faith is interesting enough, as it is.
~*~
You may have guessed many of those newsletter items have now resurfaced in one guise or another here at the Red Barn. My intent this time is aimed at encouraging your own spiritual exploration and growth and possibly even some mutually enhancing discussion of how one tradition can infuse new life or understanding for another.
I love hearing of similar encounters from other directions.
MISSING IN ACTION
While I wrote this for a Quaker audience, I’m hearing it’s true in many other faith traditions.
~*~
It’s not just teenagers, first, and then small children. Where are the men? Looking at attendance patterns across denominations, one might ask if religion’s becoming a “women’s concern.” (We might contrast this to some Orthodox Jewish traditions, where the women stay home, figuring men need to do the heavy spiritual work or at least some soul-searching, so everyone will benefit; pardon me if I oversimplify in reaching for a point.) It’s bad enough we Friends now expect the teens to disappear, as well as the college-age youths. There are mornings in our worship when women outnumber men three-to-one, or more. I’m calling for some equality here, or we’ll all suffer. (I recall one researcher who pinned the decline of the Shakers to four decades before the actual collapse became apparent; the point came when the number of men joining the movement fell off sharply.)
Admittedly, there are some pretty powerful countercurrents running through American society. Many of the men are working six-day weeks to make ends meet, and Sunday’s the only day for rest – if not a second job itself. Sports has replaced religion and even politics as the male topic of discussion. Some church planners have gone as far as to suggest stadium seating in response, and Starbucks during the sermon is already customary in the trendiest congregations – especially those gathering in rented movie theaters. This doesn’t even begin to address single-parent or two-worker families, soccer leagues, the claustrophobia-inducing Saturday rounds of shopping, parties, or entertainment venues. Something’s deeply out of balance.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not calling for any return to patriarchy, and I’m grateful for many of the ways feminist theology has liberated our understanding of Scripture and early church practice. I’m even concerned that women pastors are largely confined to the smaller, lower-paying parishes – or excluded from others. I’m proud of the leadership women have provided in our Quaker Meetings.
I’m simply lamenting the fact that we’re not as diverse and vibrant as we might be. Any suggestions?
POINT NOTED
Few Friends in unprogrammed (or “silent”) Meetings of our size would admit that we need a pastor. Not for a sermon or vocal prayers, mind you, but simply to provide all the behind-the-scenes counseling and comfort, as well as some administrative oversight. But it’s true.
The job of clerk as envisioned is one of a chairman/moderator. As it turns out is something altogether different. We have no chief administrative executive, and that creates a vacuum, especially if Friends in the meeting fail to step up to do their share of community service.
As one former pastor from another denomination quipped, watching our clerk be besieged by questions in the few minutes before we settled in for worship, “You need an office manager.”
Point noted. That would be a step in a useful direction.
AUXILIARY HEAT
MORE GREETINGS FROM THE PAST
As I wrote to a long-lost friend at the time …
Maybe it was the James Tayler concert broadcast from Tanglewood at the end of August, as I sat in the newly accessible and lighted loft of my barn and sorted through some files that had been long packed away. Maybe it was the martini that accompanied it. Or maybe it was simply an aspect of a larger interest these days, of simply trying to figure out how I wound up here after what’s often seemed a zig-zag journey through some rather disparate circles across the continent – a route that’s included divorce, a broken engagement, and finally a second marriage approaching 10 years now.
What I felt was a keen appreciation for you, especially, and Maggie and Ise, wondering how your life has prospered and, hopefully, deepened. Glenn got in touch with me a few years back, when he and Mary moved to a cabin in the New Jersey woods … and she didn’t drive. Am not sure she does yet, either.
At any rate, thanks to the Internet, I find two versions of your name both at the same address – can’t be too many who earned their law degrees where you did or started practice in that year. So here’s hoping.
If nothing else, I ought to thank you for introducing me to The River. Or should I say the ritual of repeated returning to The River for periods of introspection and, pardon the pun, reflection? That year of the Susquehanna; later, the irrigation canal bank in the desert orchards of Washington State and then three years along the Merrimack here in New Hampshire. Or the Cocheco, with its waterfalls that drop down just before passing through a stone arch in the big brick mill in downtown Dover. These days, it’s also the Atlantic, especially when my older one’s managing the seaside motel. This has been my summer for discovering the night ocean in all of its moodiness and mystery.
And now, revisiting my journals (which didn’t even start out to be journals, as I discover) as well as letters from the period has been eye-opening, and often delightful. What I remembered as being an essentially depressed period for me was filled with a lot of wonderful encounters and growth. To say nothing of humor, especially Maggie’s. And there’s so much I had forgotten, or that turns out to be different from my memory. More than ever, I think our Hawley Street (and subsequent apartments) would have made a better sitcom than Friends. Nor could anyone have played you better than you. Maybe Cosmo Cramer would have portrayed me. As for Glenn?
Life these days is, I must admit, even fuller, but that’s a long story. My wife’s an incredible woman who’s off seeing an architect at the moment about moving a charter school to the ground floor of one of our old mills, a lovely space overlooking the bend in the river where ships used to dock. (Right now the school’s on the fifth floor next door, with some amazing views of the town.) It’s just one of her (unpaid) jobs as chairman of the board. … Such as it is.
I’m hanging on, glad to have a union card, and wondering how much longer the entire industry can continue to give away the product online. Professionally, it’s been grim all over. Without planning to do so, about 24 years ago I made the decision not to continue in the management ladder but return to the ranks – something that’s allowed me to focus instead on my own writing, Quaker practice and leadership, and a personal life, including New England contradancing and choral singing, on occasion. And homebrewing, at least until we redid the kitchen. Etc.
Well, that’s a sketch from this end. I hope you’re in good health, feeling accomplished and fulfilled, and maybe even content. I would love to hear from you, however briefly – and maybe even give my wife an independent account of our by-now ancient history.
Best regards …
ALL THE EXTRA TOUCHES ADDED UP
Another of the nation’s once-remarkable papers was the Des Moines Register. It assumed a thoroughly statewide focus, with locator maps pointing out where many of the communities were and an amazing ability to note where anyone mentioned in a national story had ever lived anywhere in Iowa. The front page had an old-fashioned, authoritative appearance with a prominent, staff-produced editorial cartoon and block-letter capital-letter banner headline. I appreciated the frequency of national and international stories that carried the byline, “Combined Wire Services,” meaning a copy editor had spent several hours comparing Associated Press, United Press International, New York Times, and other dispatches to glean details to rewrite into a more comprehensive report. All of that, of course, cost money.
Statewide newspapers began cutting back as the costs of distribution soared, combined with a recognition that nearly all of the advertisers – the principal source of revenue – were aiming at only the major metropolitan area.
It wasn’t just statewide coverage, either, that has been curtailed. Most of the biggest papers have since shuttered their foreign offices and cut back on national reporting, as well.
You can as easily say they’ve cheapened the product, but that’s a longer term issue.
~*~
For a surreal, playful, and often gallows-humor trip within one young and ambitious newsroom, pick up my novel, Hometown News.
WHO’S THERE?
Overhearing a cadence of one of the littlest kids in our otherwise silent worship sounded like “Knock, knock!” – which, the mother confirmed afterward, it was.
In the room, though, the pattern led to my silent echo:
“Knock! Knock!”
“Who’s there?”
“God!”
A pause, with multiple directions:
“God who?”
Or “Go away, I’m busy!”
Or Revelation 3:20 or even Matthew 7:7 or Luke 11:9 and 13:25.
THROUGH THE YARD
Jnana's Red Barn 