A comment from my sister got me thinking. “Sounds like you have a complicated life,” as I recall. Or maybe it was a “complex” life, as if there’s a difference.
My initial reaction was that my schedule’s always been that way, a balancing act of job, relationships, literary endeavors, spiritual practice, outdoors activities, personal care, and so on – sometimes more successfully than others, perhaps, and sometimes better integrated rather than segmented into less than harmonious compartments. And that’s even before we get to the piles and files.
Not that I think my situation’s unique. As I’ve asked before, “Do we ever get caught up?” Often, wondering how other people do it, seemingly so much better, at that, I’m left in awe.
Even so, Sis’ quip had me reviewing the itinerary for the past month or so.
There was painting the front of the barn and one side of the kitchen el, both of them flaking from their facing the direction that our nor’easters blast in from. Glad I got that project done before wet weather and early cold kicked in. (I could go off on a rant, though, about the complications of getting the right replacement paint, a consequence of one brand playing hardball with its dealers and leading to one more coat than I intended.)
Still, there’s something about working outdoors on a crisp autumn morning. As I was moving a ladder into place, I looked up to see a bald eagle circling low over a neighbor’s treetops. Each round, backlit by the sun, the tail would flash white and then, a half-revolution later, the head. The next morning, an eagle circled high overhead. And then there’s the honking of the geese and their checkmark formations above me.
Outdoors also includes a host of garden-related projects in a race before the first killing freeze and, a bit later, deep cold and snow kick in. I see now I haven’t blogged much about the garden over the summer, at least since the groundhog invasion, but I did capture two of the varmints and relocated them to another state and the third finally moved on in its own time. In defrosting a freezer the other day, my wife was surprised by the amount of strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries we put up, along with the green beans and peas.
For now, we’re wrapping up the last of the tomatoes (Juliette’s been our workhorse out of our dozen-plus varieties), roasting them down to something that resembles sundried and then freezing them. And the eggplant gets a similar treatment.
The way the bounty of produce cooks down so much continues to amaze. A full pot of tomatoes, for instance, can reduce to a few cups of soup. How has humanity ever survived?
We’ll soon observe something similar with the kale.
In the meantime, I’ve been a bit hampered by something the doctor tentatively diagnosed as either plantar fascitis or a bruised heel bone, which requires icing and hampers my mobility while it (uh) slowly heals.
My Quaker activities, meanwhile, have included committee sessions in central Maine and on Cape Ann in Massachusetts, plus clerking a wedding and our Meeting’s first-time booth at the city’s annual Apple Harvest Day festival – and each event could be a story in itself.
One pleasant break came in the all-too-short visit of my old roommate from after college – our first time together in nearly four decades (ouch!) and a delightful introduction to his “new” wife of 25 years. (OK, we lost touch for a number of those, but the Internet’s been great for reconnections.) He may have lost his natural ‘fro, but his twinkling blue eyes and goofy humor are as sharp as ever. Again, this could be a story in itself.
The choir, meanwhile, is back in gear with weekly rehearsals that have become my regular outings to the big city. We’re excited to be preparing for performances in Boston’s Copley Square and Faneuil Hall at the end of November, which now looms closer than I’d like.
As for the writing? Well? Never enough to keep up.
No wonder I’m feeling a lack of balance or even focus. After all those years of wondering what “retirement” would be like, I’m still, uh, puzzled.
While my personal struggle bobbled between practicality and art for its own sake, the yoga and Quaker teachings introduced new tensions. Consider:
Creativity? No, God creates. Man discovers. Man cultivates and brings culture and learning, nurtures, softens, establishes coherence. This is the difference between the artist who submits to a greater power and the one who tries to use it for his own ends. The first desires to serve God, by whatever name or description; the second, his or her own ego.
Which leads to: Problems of the ego. Gertie Stein: Every writer wants to be told how good he is, how good he is, how good he is. Insecurities!
Yet in yoga, all for God: the sacrifice, the labor gifted to generate good karma. (As if your boss is another deity, rather than bottom-line motivated and conscious. Here’s a letter of commendation plus your pink slip.)
Early church father Tertullian warned, in De Spectaculis, Latin circa 200 C.E. Essentially: “The Author of truth loves no falsehood: all that is feigned is adultery in His sight. The man who counterfeits voice, sex or age, who makes a show of false love, anger, sighs and tears He will not approve, for He condemns all hypocrisy. . . . Why should it be lawful to see what it is a crime to do?” (Translation by Kenneth Morse).
These are hard charges, along with the seduction of “preaching for sin,” as George Fox warned.
So to examine the multiplicity of personality / goals / desires. Just who am I? Who are you? Empathy. Anger. Bliss. All the rest.
Honesty. Our dark sides. Do we really express our weakest aspect in our art? (In vocal ministry, how often the message comes from that area of our current conflict!)
Versus becoming so rarified we lose all sense of joy and delight. The danger of Plainness or strictness, that it suffocates personality, makes us so humbled we cannot move forward in the Holy Spirit to perform bold action. Crushes or stifles the imagination.
So how do we make a living without violating our beliefs? (Military-industrial extensive penetration of all facets of American society: not even the universities immune.)
Or how do you practice your art to the fullest, without undue restraint, while still being faithful?
So what have our children learned, as far as religion goes? What seeds have we planted? Actually, I’m thinking of this not so much as a curriculum matter for the Religious Education committee or as a reflection for parents but rather as a consideration of what’s happened in American society in general – the kind of place where soccer practice is now seen as more valuable (“value enabling”) than Sunday School. Or where a child may develop an aversion to being viewed, in any way, as a “Miss Goody Two-Shoes.”
My thoughts leap ahead to the tension many of us feel in the workplace. As Michael Lerner writes in The Left Hand of God, it’s the conflict of values between our dog-eat-dog competitive economy and those we hold dear and sacred. Fundamentalists, at least, attempt to resolve it by separating the two worlds, but at what cost? Children, of course, pick up on this, tuning out what they see as useless to their survival. And that includes what they observe at home. (Should we note the popularity of so-called “reality TV” – as manifested in The Survivor?) The Amish and other old orders attempt to hold the values of workplace, home, and faith in one sphere, but we can easily imagine the difficulty that, too, presents.
Obviously, I’m not going to resolve any of this in the next few sentences. Without the music of hymns and praise songs, the pageantry of robes, processions, lighting of altar candles, and communion, or the attentive consideration to set prayers and sermons, what do we give our children to cling to? (In the old days, did the plain clothing and “thee/thou” speech offer some refuge or rooting?) Or what invitation do we extend to those “voted off the island”? What I am going to suggest is that the answer is not found so much in any catechism or ceremony as in the way we treat our smallest members, our moments of laboring together, and, yes, the repeated ritual of a certain casserole on youth retreats and its reception.
You asked about my handle, Jnana. In essence, it’s Sanskrit for the spiritual “path of the intellect,” but that knowledge comes into fullness only when it finds harmony with the other forms of devotion – passion and compassion, physical labor, humility, charity, and so on. “Theoretical knowledge” misses the mark; rather, the name was given to me, in the ashram, only when I came to appreciate all the other spiritual gifts people have. Eliade calls it “the knowledge of ultimate realities” as well as “philosophy.” Perhaps “discernment” would be its equivalent in Christian practice. Whatever, I do tend to dwell in the mind and to dance in a field of ideas; I become grateful for those around me who help ground me in everyday applications.
Here it is, two months after hearing of your decision to shutter the place. (Hmm, was it a rooming house, bed-and-breakfast, or mountain inn? – so many possibilities!) Six years is a respectable run and for that, our gratitude and respect.
I once heard that before Caterpillar was launched, its editors had resolved that a journal has only three years of fresh insights to offer, and so they limited its life span to that – truncated, in my opinion, though I have my own theory of being in the public eye, which I first saw when I was pushing new comic strips and text features to newspaper editors: I see the “talent” as having a 10-year creative span – two years for readers to catch on to a new regular feature, and roughly five for a feature to start to take off in popularity; meanwhile, the artist/writer is using up the conceptual reservoir, so at five years the project is going into decline. You can tally your own list of television, radio, newspaper, or magazine projects that continued long after they had gone stale. (Of course, sometimes an individual will catch a second wind, but that’s another story.)
A year-and-a-half ago I stepped down as clerk of Dover Quarterly Meeting after a six-year term. That meant I had been presiding officer of a fellowship that met four times a year, gathering most of the local Quaker congregations in New Hampshire. (New England Yearly Meeting is the parent body, obviously named.) I was really happy to discover in the Book of Faith and Practice that limit to the length of service in any one post! It was long enough – I had initiated all I could.
More recently, I had hoped to be sending off some new material for you to consider. After a number of upheavals, of a positive sort detailed below, I’m back at writing again – got tied up, though, in some heavy-duty theological drafts rather than “creative” stuff. Things like why “Christ” equals Logos or Light more than Jesus, or why God wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit and why their expulsion from the Garden was not the cause of Original Sin, contrary to Augustine’s teaching. Who knows what those whackos in your neck of the woods would make of all that.
Your observation about the lack of time really hits home. It’s a disease or unease of today’s America – something that has received a lot of consideration in our Friends Meeting when we look at what we’d like to accomplish as a faith community, and then what we feel we can volunteer. Or when I debate whether to accept some OT shifts, which would help with all the bills, but decide instead to decline.
And your plans to move hit home, too. Guess the best place to catch up is just to cannibalize from the long-draft of my annual Yule letter from this past winter. Maybe some will resonate. If it doesn’t, skip!
We’re well into the back-to-school swirl. Considering how many Friends teach for a living, it’s a wonder we don’t talk more about what Quakers used to call Sound Doctrine.
Not dogma, creed, doctrinaire, or even indoctrination, mind you. Doctrine, meaning teaching. The essentials for practicing our faith, just as certain skills are needed in mathematics or foreign language. Or, for that matter, for good cooking or carpentry or sewing.
It’s not just the children, either. Some messages arising in worship are basically teaching, and some are admittedly sounder than others, the latter including those that George Fox derided as mere “notions.” (Consider the Quaker who preached that Friends should not disturb the ground to obtain well water, until another spoke out during worship, “And Abraham digged a well,” citing Genesis 21:30 and apparently settling the matter.) Our own reading and inquiry, meanwhile, can be pretty much hit or miss. Who knows about other sources? Film, television, radio? And, as with all teaching, how strict should one be – and how flexible?
If we were passing a hat to collect slips of paper suggesting what should be included in our own “sound doctrine,” what would you write on yours? For that matter, how much would be a matter of content – and how much, process?
Sometime, perhaps, we’ll even have a session to hear our teachers talk a bit about their teaching – both content and method – and a continuing awareness of learning. Or maybe another, to consider all the ways we have learned from each other – and not just matters of faith, either. The progress of my compost bins, after all, is guided in part by eavesdropping on a few after-meeting conversations and their lessons of patience, humility, and renewal.
~*~
This has me wondering, as well, how we might extend a pursuit of “sound doctrine” into our secular circles. Economics, politics, education, even entertainment could all use a dose of what Friends used to call “close labor” – the effort of living with ever greater integrity. Any ideas?
For much of its history, the Society of Friends forbid the use of engraved gravestones, deeming them vain and superfluous. Even so, another custom emerged, the drafting of memorial minutes for Quakers whose lives might serve as an inspiration for others.
The result was quite different from either the typical obituary or eulogy, and many of them prove surprisingly candid, as genealogists discover. If a eulogy celebrates the person, the memorial minute focuses on the individual’s spiritual life and service, especially in the ways these play out in the world.
Often, the minute would be approved by the local Quaker Meeting and entered into its records. If the individual had been active at a wider level, the minute would also be forwarded to the Quarterly Meeting (a gathering of local meetings that comes together four times a year), where it would be shared and, in due practice, approved. If appropriate, this would be repeated at the larger Yearly Meeting level.
As an example of the practice, here is the nearly finished draft of the minute for one Friend. As a member of the committee that prepared this, I’d like to show the “long” version that includes more of her remarkable career, in contrast to the shortened versions that were approved by the circles of Quaker meetings.
Alanna’s minute was approved by Fresh Pond Monthly Meeting and endorsed by Dover Monthly Meeting, and then accepted by Salem Quarterly Meeting, before being included in the minutes of New England Yearly Meeting’s sessions last month.
Alanna and me early in our friendship.
ALANNA CONNORS
September 25, 1956 – February 2, 2013
From an early age, Alanna Connors discovered a need and a capacity to trust her own compass. She was a mathematician at a place in time where women were seldom found. When her high school math teacher flunked her for excellent work, another teacher told her: “You know he’s giving good grades to boys and not to you, because you’re a girl.” Recounting the story in later years, Alanna said, “I didn’t need that; I knew I could do the math.” She held true to her course.
Long before finding Quakers, Alanna lived the testimony of experiencing God in everyone. While most of us have tight circles of caring – our family, friends, coworkers – Alanna’s circles were as unbounded as a wave expanding to all of space. It seems no accident her profession became looking at objects distant in the universe: across the many communities of her life’s paths, she welcomed all beings. Living with her was a joy; her love for others was never abstract but a centered flame close to her and everyone she touched.
Alanna was born September 25, 1956, in Hong Kong to Richard and Sonia Mitchell Connors. Her mother, who herself had a degree in mathematics and studied with Jean Piaget at the Sorbonne in Paris, ultimately worked as a font designer. Richard learned to fly in his youth and became a pilot with Pan American Airways, stationed in Hong Kong. Through his delight in sailing, his five children all learned to sail. Alanna took the lead, becoming a competitive sailor in her time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Returning to the United States in 1963, Alanna’s family settled in Greenwich, Connecticut. Living with four siblings – one older, Cynthia, and three younger, Kathleen, Noirin, and Patrick – in environments not always centered on these children’s welfare, Alanna developed an immense capacity to listen and extend empathy. Imagination shone through her grade school writings; her elaborate, award-winning gingerbread houses; and family-staged dramas.
Alanna was irrepressibly fascinated by math and science. She thrilled to the elegance of mathematics in expressing, revealing, and predicting physical behaviors. For her, mathematical physics was inseparable from the playfulness, color, artistry, and imagination by which she produced it. Whether it was classroom notes, derivations on scratch paper or napkins, or formal solutions, her handwritten analyses were crafted in flourishing script, vivid with colored pencil illuminations, and playfully annotated with such characteristically inventive words as “whatsit.”
Alanna’s dorm room hosted a wide array of human spirits. Her hotplate, washstand, handmade teapot, and mismatched cups provided hearth and an excuse for tea and convivial warmth at all hours of the night.
She met fellow student Phillip A. Veatch while they were both organizing MIT’s first on-campus food cooperative. After a year of courtship, they exchanged private vows of marriage in 1978, on a basketball court in East Cambridge. Alanna was opposed to the state-sanctioned institution of marriage because of its historical role in the oppression of women.
Communal living, conceived around Alanna’s dorm room, continued into her committed life with Phil through group houses with shared vegetarian cooking. While in Maryland during her doctoral years, they asked all prospective housemates: “Can you have: 1) too much garlic; 2) too much chocolate?” A no answer on both questions was mandatory for joining the group house.
With one housemate, Alanna went “church shopping.” While appreciating the wide span of worship experiences, Alanna gravitated to the Religious Society of Friends in 1982 in Adelphi, Maryland, dragging along her then-reluctant partner. A deep commitment to the Quaker principles of simplicity, peace, integrity, and justice soon enriched both of their lives. They continued at Dover Monthly Meeting in New Hampshire and finally settled at Fresh Pond Monthly Meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1998.
Wanting to understand stars, she became a groundbreaker in charting the sky of X-ray sources. Being of a mind to “like thinking we are all professional visionaries,” Alanna’s deep searches into the distant sky uncovered new observations and questions. After earning her doctorate at the University of Maryland, Alanna made significant contributions to the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory as a research scientist at the Space Science Center at the University of New Hampshire. She introduced astrophysics to Bayesian methods of statistics, which start from an assumption that knowledge about a problem is always incomplete. Applying this rigorous data analysis to X-ray and gamma-ray astrophysics, she provided a foundation for statistical methods generally unknown to astronomers in the early 1990s.
As a banjo player, she encouraged use of the Rise Up Singing songbook, learning by heart its song “Julian of Norwich.” Original lyrics and tunes came to her, either fully formed or developing through writing. Alanna’s spirit still comes to us through the texts and music of the dozen songs she set down in composition.
Despite being an intense introvert, she harbored a lifelong belief in the importance of community-building. She cofounded an astrophysics statistical working group at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. As a senior scientist, she was known for her support of young graduate students. She founded a singing group at Dover Meeting, and while living in Arlington, Massachusetts, enjoyed singing with Nick Page’s Mystic Chorale Singers. After the birth of her son, Roy, in 1999, she worked with other parents to reform special education in the Arlington public schools. She volunteered regularly at New England Yearly Meeting annual sessions working both in child care and the bookstore. She regularly attended the Women’s Group at Fresh Pond Meeting, where she spoke regularly about her concerns in raising her gifted son.
Alanna envisioned and encouraged public science education. She taught astrophysics at Wellesley College as a visiting professor, participated in university physics instruction at UNH and UMD, contributed to public education in science through projects at the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord New Hampshire, c0-organized family science days at her son’s elementary school, and encouraged exploratory science learning and teaching through many other avenues. She had an abiding interest in the history of physics and astronomy from its ancient origins, in welcoming women’s participation in physics, and in celebrating stories of diverse contributors to science.
Alanna was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995. She lived with the disease for 18 years. Characteristically, through its recurrences and treatment, she refused to be defined by the disease and conceived her son, Roy, born in March 1999. To her, the illness was but a single strand of her life. When Roy was 4, her disease recurred, and she took him with her to treatments, where he found the hospital’s high-energy accelerator intensely interesting. Whatever life brought her, she lived with it; she saw illness as no excuse to build walls. When her disease recurred for the last time, in an advanced form, Phil asked if she wanted to go on a special vacation. She did not, preferring to live in her callings.
At Dover Meeting, 1988-1998, she rotated through nearly every committee but also stayed long on Buildings and Grounds. During the first Persian Gulf War, Dover Friends called on her to write a compelling minute explaining the Meeting’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq and Kuwait. Phil and Alanna were lifelong advocates of same-sex marriage. When they decided for Roy’s sake to get legally married, they would not seek marriage under the care of Dover, as that meeting had not yet completed its process of hosting marriages for same gender (it has since done so).
During her time at Fresh Pond, her participation in committee work was limited by parenting and the recurrences and treatments of breast cancer. She was, however, a quiet and regular presence at Meeting for Business and an infrequent but powerful minister during Meeting for Worship, where her ministry was often structured around song.
Just as she knew not to take to heart a teacher’s censure that could have devastated a young mathematician, Alanna maintained integrity without ceding herself, her work, or others to be diminished. Mathematics was one route by which she independently investigated, questioned, and confirmed the truth for herself without relying on the claims of teachers and other external authorities. She stood up for discovering and expressing the full potential of one’s mind and heart, inspiring those around her to undertake aspirations and risks of which they did not suppose themselves to be capable. She knew greater being lies imminent within us all. Whether it was the rights of any couple to publicly live their committed love or a child’s mind emerging along ways and curiosities differing from the school norm, Alanna honored and worked for the fuller life she knew to be there.
Alanna’s spirit lives with us and continues to teach us. We remember her implacable but gentle striving to see the truth and to tell it. The women of Fresh Pond recall Alanna’s intense, powerful mothering, against all odds. Throughout her life she resisted the limits and distortions that social norms can impose on our vision of others. Knowing that a prism takes a beam of light and separates it into many separate parts, Alanna lived her life striving to bring the many separate parts of our world together into one shining beam.
Her memorial service was March 2, 2013, in the Wellesley Friends meetinghouse under the care of Fresh Pond Meeting. She was 56.
So here I am, looking at a catalogue of “every Sunday bulletin subscription service and other ministry resources.” You’d be surprised by some of the products addressed to a Quaker meetinghouse, and I’m still wondering why church furniture has to be so uniformly ugly. This one, however, catches my imagination.
If you’ve ever been part of a congregation that has ushers, you likely remember how they hand out a leaflet while leading you to a pew. The folded paper would have a colorful image on the front and a meditative reflection on the back. Inside, mimeographed back in the days I remember, was the order of service and an array of announcements. I have to say that the graphics have improved in recent years, and I rather like the format that opens into three leaves, rather than two. For a moment, I consider this as an alternative to our announcements period, at least until I realize that someone would have to type and print them. Still, the thought of ushers revives my meeting’s concern for having greeters at the door.
As I look over the samples, however, I must admit how foreign most of them are to our experience. The one with a large American flag and a kneeling soldier over the words, Lord Jesus, is especially troubling. Others seem superficial with their platitudes or cliché. Maybe there would be shock value in some, with their communion cup and bread or photos of country church spires. One set proclaiming nature’s splendor comes close, if it weren’t for the cutesy texts, while the set I find most acceptable is aimed at black congregations – which isn’t quite us, either. Not with all our blue eyes and master’s and doctorate degrees.
I guess if we ever have a need of weekly bulletins, our best option would be to feature work by our resident artists – Brown, Carolyn, Connie, Edi, Gail, Jane … and, of course, the children. Now that would be inspiring.
One of the most revolutionary concepts the Society of Friends has upheld is an understanding of “church” as a body of believers – not as the building (“the Methodist Church” beside the river) or the organization (“Presbyterian” or “Congregational”) or a hierarchy (“the Vatican” or even a nearby bishop I once heard quoted as saying, “I am the church.”) This sense of a gathering of the saints is the reason ours is a “meeting” of the church – of the believers – and why we gather in a meetinghouse, rather than calling the building itself the church. For that matter, early Friends typically referred to the gathering place of other denominations as a “steeplehouse,” thus emphasizing a distinction between the building and its users.
Keep your eyes and ears open, though, and you’ll observe the inevitable turns that try to fit us into those other concepts. Calling us, for instance, “the meetinghouse people” or our organization the Dover Friends Meetinghouse, rather than Meeting. While there is something quaint about referring to a “Quaker Church” down the road, it misses the point entirely. For us, a church does not burn to the ground – its martyrs may burn at the stake or we may burn with a passionate cause, but the church itself will be found everywhere, with many different individuals, and at odd moments. In fact, in this understanding, “church” even becomes a verb – something that can happen on a street corner or a field or our workplace as easily as in our historic meetinghouse. As I remember one couple saying, “We were unchurched and then we discovered Quakers.”
By extension, the Society of Friends was envisioned as being a people of God, modeled loosely on the Jewish people, with much of the teaching and practice coming down at home through generations of families. Whatever shortcomings Quakers have experienced in instilling the continued practice in their children, we remain a people of faith – one chosen freely, and experienced both personally and together. We meet, indeed, in many ways.
I’ve heard it said at both ends of the Society of Friends that it takes three committed families to plant a new Meeting. So even with a pastor, a healthy mix of talents is required. This is probably true of other congregations as well, but I’ll continue to use “meeting” here because I think much more is involved than just seeing each other on Sunday morning.
In envisioning an ideal Meeting, let me ask if having six committed families or if having sixty not-so-committed members would be preferable. That is, a smaller group that is highly responsive to each other in their daily activities, or a larger, more loosely knit group that is more widespread through the surrounding community. I’d say there are pros and cons both ways.
The question becomes less abstract when we consider our own expectations of our local family of faith. First, what do you require from a faith community, and then how willing you are to work toward achieving that? Second, how do your personal expectations and participation differ from others in that faith circle? And third, considering the future of the Meeting, what would you hope for? (These, by the way, might be good queries for the annual State of Society Report answers.)
Planting a new Meeting is, of course, only a start. Nurturing it is another matter. My guess is that three families form the minimum requirement because of the range of vision they engender and can pursue together – a microcosm of what we already have here where I worship.
A while back, while reading a selection of letters by the itinerant Quaker minister Elias Hicks (1748-1830), I was impressed by the length and quality of some of the individual correspondence. These were pieces that could have been published essays, yet were addressed to a specific individual – pieces, I should add, from a farmer by trade.
I’m left wondering about the amount of time some Friends (and others, of course) spent daily or weekly in reading and writing as well as reflecting on the issues at hand.
Don’t tell me it was a slower era or that they had more time to employ – labor was more demanding and often tedious, after all. I think something else is at play here.
Jnana's Red Barn 