Tag: Quaker

PLAYING UPON THE LOONY TUNES, TOO

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time …

One acquaintance, preparing to be married under the care of another meeting, finally concluded you couldn’t find so many loonies collected in one place if you tried. There are times I suspect most of us would agree, especially when we get jammed on an item of business. We are an intelligent, opinionated, independent bunch of people. It’s said of us, as I also heard Jews at temple refer to themselves, that where twelve are gathered on an issue, you’ll have thirteen points of view.

Our way of doing business, requiring unity but no voting, requires us to try to listen carefully to each Friend. In practice, this can be difficult, especially if someone opposed to a proposal refuses to speak up or speak fully or, perhaps more serious, refuses to attend the business sessions where the matter is being considered. Sometimes, knowing there is unvoiced opposition, we will lay an agenda over to the next session, hoping for better representation – itself an admission that low turnout for our monthly meeting for worship for the conduct of business may also indicate its low priority in our lives. Laying it over, in turn, can often mean beginning all over again as a different set of individuals addresses the issue. Moreover, being present is essential, because miracles can occur in the session. Sending a statement on paper or via another Friend avoids moving with the Spirit in the meeting. There are times when being uncomfortable in the context of business meeting is healthy, and a sense of agreeing to disagree for a while may in turn lead to a third way and innovative resolution.

Our structure of doing business, in which each Friend is expected to participate in the operation of our faith community, can also be subject to breakdown. Individuals may fail to follow through on promised action, or not step forward at all for committee service. The work then falls back on a small core of Friends, who quickly become overburdened. Has there ever been a period when all of our committees were sufficiently filled and operating smoothly? It’s a lovely ideal, all the same, one that makes me all the more grateful for committees that are running well through the year.

Other dysfunctions arise in business meeting when we veer from the decision at hand, usually by trying to introduce a host of other problems and concerns – that is, trying to solve many of the world’s problems instead of replacing a furnace; when we forget the tenderness of the individuals involved and their motivations; when we try to redo work a committee has already labored over; when a committee comes forward to business meeting without finding unity on the proposal, hoping we can do what they couldn’t; or when we leap ahead toward a project we’re unlikely to give full support over time.

Once upon a time, reflecting on the traditional assumption that our business meetings would be led by Christ and that our job is simply to listen for the answer, I jested, “I don’t think Jesus cares what color the carpet is.” A decade or two later, when we were faced with that actual, prolonged decision, I had to add: “But he does care how we engage one another in deciding.” People can and do come away from our deliberations with hurt feelings, and it’s something requiring our mindfulness. Being opinionated doesn’t necessarily have to mean being heartless, even unintentionally. In the rug decision, the reaction of Friends in bringing heirloom Asian carpets to the meetinghouse for the wedding, while we were still deliberating the choice of permanent floor cover, remains a colorful reminder of the third way and its surprises.

We also need to be mindful that working through differences on small things is practice that strengthens us, as a body, for larger, more difficult issues.

COLLECTING LEAVES TO COMPOST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

Dealing with clay soil like ours has convinced me of the value of compost. Not that I hadn’t composted before. But over the years here, I’m watching the ground become more supple and workable and productive, thanks to the effort.

The first autumn, I collected more than 200 bags of leaves from the neighborhood. (Each year, I try to reduce the figure, only to find some of neighbors now expect me to come over for the haul.) To that, we’ve added our garbage (thus reducing our expenditure on the city’s green trash bags). Once we acquired rabbits, their droppings and the hay from their bedding started going into the pile as well.

The process is incredible, watching the volume decrease to a fraction of what it had been. Consider the amount of heat the decomposition produces, and then the arrival of the red wigglers (or wrigglers, I’ve heard both), the friendly worms that do the big work of transformation. Forget his insights about evolution, it’s Darwin’s observations of worms I treasure. What’s left in the end is a gardener’s pure gold.

On a spiritual level, this humus and humility have a lot in common. So much can flourish from their nourishment and grounding.

DISPLACEMENTS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Any scholar of language will be struck by the ways some words drift from one meaning to something quite different. At the time of the King James Bible, for instance, “to prevent” meant “to precede,” from the root “to come before,” rather than “to hinder.” In our own time, we’ve seen “enormity” go from meaning “great evil” to simple “immensity,” and we’ve lost a powerful word in the process. Both “gay” and “queer” have lost timeless, innocent concepts. There are countless other examples where an author from the past tries to tell us something quite different from our current interpretation.

I’ve come to call these shifts “displacements,” especially when they happen by degrees over time and particularly as they relate to religious practice. For example, a cousin who was also a pastor in the Church of the Brethren likes to point out how the “Holy Sabbath” changed over generations to “the Sabbath” and then just “Sunday” before becoming what we know as “the weekend,” preferably of the three-day kind – each stage losing something along the way. I could argue how “my perception of the Truth” is quite distinct from “my truth,” one embracing the ideal of a single verity while the other presents an infinite array of conflicting, what, sensations or tenets, maybe? The “Inward Light” that early Friends proclaimed was quite different from the “Inner Light” version appearing two centuries later. Or “that of God in each person” is quite distinct from each person being a god unto himself or herself. Or even the way the quest for fun has displaced a work ethic and social consciousness. As for “Christmas” turning into “Holiday Season,” remember, it’s not far from becoming a more candid “Shopping Season” altogether. Keep your eyes open; these shifts are all around us, probably in every field of endeavor.

Returning to root meanings can be empowering. “Radical,” after all, comes from the word “root,” and Native American culture tells us, “roots are strong medicine.” Good roots, as gardeners know, are essential for healthy plants. In the world of thought and action, examining the roots can also restore the original vision. Hmm. “Look” and “see” aren’t exactly identical, are they?

SPEAKING OF SPEAKERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes a detail from a specialized strand of knowledge opens up an insight on a broader field. In this case, it springs from my awareness of Quaker history and the naming of children.

One of the pivotal figures in the schisms within the Society of Friends in the first half of the 1800s was a wealthy English banker and evangelist who traveled widely through the United States from 1837 to 1840. Joseph John Gurney (1788-1847) was so popular that “Joseph Johns” became a synonym for potluck dishes in parts of the American South, and many infant boys were named Gurney in his honor. He was even invited by Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House, to use the Capitol’s Legislation Hall to address members of Congress. In the end, a large branch of American Quakers came to be known as Gurneyites.

All that came to my mind while scanning a list of Speakers of the House and wondering if any had become president. (As noted earlier, one had – James K. Polk, who defeated Clay in that election.)

But the name of another Speaker caught my eye: Joseph Gurney Cannon, a Republican from Illinois who led the House of Representatives from 1903 to 1911.

Could there be link to the English evangelist?

As it turns out, yes.

Although Cannon’s biography has him born a Quaker in 1836 in Guilford County, North Carolina, (home of my Hodgson ancestry for many generations), I find no Cannons in the genealogical minutes. His mother, on the other hand, came from an established Friends family, which would have provided Quaker contact but not membership. In fact, her marrying a non-Friend meant losing her own membership in 1828, though she could still attend worship. Joe moved with his family to Indiana in 1840, eventually married in a Methodist service, joined a Masonic lodge, and died a Methodist in 1926. It’s a common story, actually.

What’s more interesting is the argument that “Uncle Joe” was the most dominant Speaker in the history of the House, as well as being its second longest. Time magazine’s first issue (March 3, 1923) featured his portrait on the cover, for good reason. Cannon was the longest-serving Republican in the House, totaling 40 years in office.

So much for the image of meek Quakers, no matter how tenuous the connection. Not just outspoken and pugnacious, Cannon was apparently tyrannical, leading to a crisis not unlike the one facing Congress at the moment. He was stripped of much of his ironfisted control in something resembling a coup by progressive Republicans aligned with Democrats. Sound familiar?

Cannon’s history also plays into another line of mine. He was followed as Speaker by Champ Clark of Missouri, who was somehow closely affiliated in business dealings with one of my mother’s ancestors.

DISTINCTIVES AS A MATTER OF FINE DINING AND FAITH

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Maintaining particular elements that set a faith community apart from the larger society as well as a desire to be like everyone else provokes a basic tension in religious history. In Quaker tradition, we see it especially in the Hicksite Separation and later, with the Gurneyites, as many Friends adopted pastoral worship and turned their meetinghouses into “churches,” sometimes complete with a bell. The problem that arises along the way is that other values, like the Peace Witness, can also be eroded on the road to a generic Protestant practice or New Age miasma. (Or, increasingly these days, both.)

It’s important that we remain aware of what are known as “distinctives” – in our stream of Quakerism, the unprogrammed worship, simple meetinghouses, and decision-making process are highly obvious. Once, our discipline of Plain dress and speech, our system of “guarded education” in Quaker parochial schools, and our avoidance of public entertainments would have also set us apart. Scholars look for distinctives when they examine a spectrum ranging from sect to denomination, where something like the presence of an American flag in the sanctuary can say much about how far the congregation buys into the values of the surrounding culture. (The Mennonite fellowship I participated in was viewed with some suspicion because we enjoyed going to Baltimore Orioles games – together, at that. Ahem.) Often, it’s seen as those scholars look to reasons one Amish group differs from another. The width of a man’s hat band, for instance, or even buttons. It’s the way the little things add up to strengthen more important matters. I’m not saying any of this is easy.

Once, while dining in Little Italy in Baltimore, I overheard a couple talking to the co-owner of a restaurant. They were telling him how, on a visit to New York, they kept hearing everyone speak about how his place was the best one back home. Finally, he interrupted, saying, “If you don’t believe you’re the best restaurant in Little Italy, you shouldn’t be here.” While some people detect a degree of arrogance in that, I sense a humility and an admiration of his competitors – a desire for excellence and an admiration for those touches that make each restaurant distinctive. Ways that encourage each other to do better, too.

I turn that to our own neighboring faith communities with an admiration for congregations that uphold their own meaningful distinctives. Each one, with the potential of enriching the others. We Friends need not add glittering icons or glorious pipe organs or triune water baptism to our service, but we can dialogue and even worship with those who have them – and maybe all come away with deeper amazement and resolve in our own daily practice.

Hey, it was only a month ago I was reveling in Greek dancing — admittedly, not as part of the Orthodox service but certainly as part of the community. Along with all of the food.

MONET AT THE WINDOW

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

I’ve often joked (or was it boasted?) that we have the best stained glass windows in town. And not just at this time of year. Actually, there’s something basic in the Quaker practice of having clear windows, whether the view opens to the city jail next door or a busy highway or a placid burial ground – we’re not isolating ourselves from reality when we worship.

Sitting on the clerk’s bench one morning one May, I found myself looking out at a Monet. Well, the spring green for three-quarters of the hour fit the tones he used, until it turned metallic in the last quarter-hour when the sunlight turned harsh. Most weeks after that, I tried to identify which painter the view brought to mind – a sequence of Corot, Diebenkorn, Mitchell, Twombly, Klimt, Pollack, even the Zen painting of six persimmons (ours, however, had about twice that amount of fruit), and maybe a bit of Chagall or Hopper. (What was I saying about our Meeting not being blue-collar? Here I am, expecting most Dover Friends to know most of these artists!) Occasionally, even a Kaufmann, as Dick and Jane’s heads appeared in the lower corner while they walked up the ramp to the door. Sometimes the dogwood tree presented a flat image; other times it had holes, opening to the depth behind it; eventually, come winter, it was only sketches in front of a more distant landscape, and etchings, rather than paintings, came to mind. Expecting the Monet to return the next May, it didn’t, for whatever combination of reasons, although there was one week when it was adorned with pale stars – its flowers.

Not that any of this is essentially profound, other than as a recognition of the play of light – just as we encounter various presentations of Light within the room and ourselves through the hour. But I do consider ways our perceptions and expressions differ from the earliest Friends who sat in the room. These artists, for one thing, came after them, except for the 12th century persimmons (and those were off in China, anyway); the now familiar language from science or psychology, too, to say nothing of sports jargon and even military expressions. Did those Friends ever have a bagpiper playing at the edge of the yard, or some equivalent to our sirens on the street or music from a neighboring church? How did they see the world, in ways that we don’t? Somehow, all kinds of differing eras come together when we, too, sit together. So just how do we see each other through all of these seasons and ages?

~*~

This piece originally appeared in Types and Shadows, the newsletter of the Fellowship of Quaker Artists.

AN ABOLITIONIST NEXUS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Coming upon Moses Brown Square in Newburyport, Massachusetts, one evening threw me for a loop. The plaque said this Moses, 1742-1827, was a prominent shipbuilder and merchant active in the slave trade. (Not to be confused with a Capt. Moses Brown, 1742-1802, a privateer – that is, a licensed pirate living nearby — also on the wrong side of my moral compass.)

The ringer, as I read, was that Newburyport, with all its wealth based on the rum, sugar, slave trade triangle, was hostile to abolitionists, and its Moses had soon become its wealthiest resident. So that was the funding for those glorious houses on High Street, not the whaling trade? I hadn’t suspect this turn.

What a contrast to the more famous Moses Brown (1738-1836), a Rhode Island Quaker convert who became both an avid abolitionist and a pioneer of the Industrial Revolution in America – himself quite wealthy and a founder of what’s now the prestigious Moses Brown School in Providence, adjacent to Brown University.

I’m guessing they were all cousins, given the naming patterns and wealth.

What further intrigues, though, is the other statue in the square, this one for William Lloyd Garrison, an abolitionist who was also from Newburyport. There you learn of the depths of the town’s virulent support of slavery and their collaboration with its institution.

Curiously, Garrison “the Great Liberator” found two important colleagues from upstream on the Merrimack River.

The first was John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet living in neighboring Amesbury, Massachusetts, kitty-corner upstream.

And the other was the journalist Horace Greeley, born in Amherst, New Hampshire, further upriver.

What I see in all this is a hint at the hot pockets, pro and con, on a contentious issue of the time – sometimes within a stretch of the map, sometimes with a family. Not that things are always any different today.

IN THIS JOURNEY TOGETHER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 14 Comments

I’m always startled to hear people say they can pursue spirituality without any teacher or community. Nothing in my experience, as a yogi or a Christian, supports that. If you point to George Fox’s time of sitting “in hollow trees and lonesome places,” and his recognition that among the priests (and preachers) he consulted, “there was none among them that could speak to my condition,” and his eventual proclamation of discovering “the pure knowledge of God and of Christ alone, without the help of any man, book, or writing,” the fact remains that he was stimulated by that early dialogue and, once he’d experienced Divine Revelation, did not keep it to himself but was instead drawn out to others who were having similar transformations.

I would point, too, to the spiritual support he received initially from Elizabeth Hooten – whom I consider the first Quaker and who, incidentally, came across the Atlantic in her advanced age to Dover to minister among Friends here — and later from Margaret Fell.

One reason we need community to accompany our spiritual deepening and expansion comes in the ways it can counter tendencies toward self-deception, human weakness, laziness, or distraction. In the practice of our faith, we instruct, encourage, acknowledge, embrace, correct, inspire, comfort, guide – even rebuke – one another. These are matters the New Testament calls discipleship.

Lloyd Lee Wilson has reminded us there are no Quakers apart from the meeting, which is another way of saying each Friend needs to be part of this interactive dynamic. I remember my shock in picking up a book on leaders of the Confederacy and finding three Quakers indexed; “Impossible,” I muttered, until seeing in the text that all three had been raised in Quaker households but resided far from any meeting – and its corrective discipline – when the war erupted.

Try dressing Plain and adhering to Plain speech without a circle of Plain Friends at hand, and you’ll discover just how hard it is to continue even an outward practice. Maintaining a witness is no less difficult. Moreover, I find it’s hard to keep from being overwhelmed by the negative influences around us. Maybe part of the restorative answer is right in front of us all along – Society of Friends, plural.

Or in some other, similar circle.

TALK ABOUT HARSH CRITICS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Perhaps nothing separates us from earlier generations of Quakers more than our love of arts and entertainment. It’s not just that our frequent references to music, fictional stories, and visual arts would have perplexed or even annoyed them. Especially as part of our vocal ministry during worship.

Rather, these were simply forbidden as vain or even useless. The focus was on piety and humble service.

Pleasure for its own sake? We wouldn’t have been members back then, period.

~*~

And now I find myself envisioning some of Peter Milton’s wonderful lithographs in which earlier generations of artists watch from the balconies or wings of the scene unfolding. I often have that sense of the past watching us — and that includes in our Quaker circles.

A FINE EQUATION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Simplicity = enough = balance.

Or we could start with an unbalanced state, where many if not most of us seem to be, and work backward. How much is enough, after all? And so you simplify.

I also like the aesthetic equation (when it’s all in balance):

Elegance = simplicity = beauty.

It all adds up. Satisfaction.

When you’re ready.