Tag: Quaker

FREQUENCY OF ATTENDANCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Every week? Every other week? Once a month? How often do you come to worship?

It’s a question that’s nagged at me ever since participating in my first Friends community. There I noticed a number of people who seemed to come every other week, meaning in practice we had two largely separate circles of people. A few years earlier, as part of a monastic practice, I had experienced what group mediation twice every day could do, how the energy would build up and the experience, deepen.

Early Quakers were much more insistent on attendance, including the Midweek Meeting. The Amish, on the other hand, gather every other week, using the off week to visit at a distance. In fairness, on many weekends we do have multiple activities scheduled, and three or four hours in the meetinghouse on Sunday is not uncommon.

Still, we must wonder. Are our lives so busy we haven’t enough time for worship? Or do we need a Sabbath from the labors of Meeting? My views have changed over the years. Yes, Sunday often becomes a time of catching up. But miss worship for a few weeks straight, and getting back into the rhythm and focus of Meeting becomes difficult – it’s easy to slip away. What I do know, often more in theory than practice, is the importance of Sabbath rest – especially the kind that helps us rediscover family and joyous playfulness. Something that’s quite distinct from leisure. Or even thank you and please come again. “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work.” Let that remain our invitation and refreshment.

ONLINE ARCHIVES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

It’s a rare book archive at your fingertips. The Earlham School of Religion’s Digital Quaker Collection, “a digital library containing full text and page images of over 500 individual Quaker works from the 17th and 18th centuries,” is an amazing site, allowing you free access to some very rare volumes, which you can view page by page in both their original typography and a much more readable contemporary typeface. While some of the works are Quaker classics that have been republished and are available in our meeting library, others are next to impossible to find.

Elizabeth Bathurst, for instance, is among the finest writers to delve into Quaker theology in the early years, yet remains essentially unknown except for the single, slim volume found here.

And then there’s the journal of Joseph Hoag, who had close connections to Dover and could claim to have visited every Quaker meeting in the United States. (He was hardly alone in that matter of visitation among Friends.) His recollections of riding across a field he imagined soaked in blood becomes especially chilling when you discover this was Gettysburg a half-century before the Civil War battle – a crossing accompanied by his vision of the nation rent asunder by the enormity of slavery.

The two volumes of Joseph Besse’s Sufferings (to use the much shortened title) records every Quaker known to have been persecuted in the first four decades of Friends. Not only is this a great genealogical resource, it also demonstrates where our meticulous practice of minuting our business originates. For perspective, consider that a fine of 10 pounds was also the price of three or four cows. But you don’t have to recalculate time spent imprisoned.

Rarities can also be found on other sites. The California Digital Library (archive.org), for example, has Fernando G. Cartland’s Southern Heroes or Friends in War Time, detailing the persecution of Quakers in North Carolina, especially, during the Civil War. Their witness needs to be better known.

Another treasure is a set of transcriptions of the surviving minutes of the first monthly meeting in Ireland, in Lurgan (Google “Lurgan Quaker Minutes” or go to cephafisher.net/LurganMinutes). Taken mostly from the “means” or men’s side of the business, these provide insights into the evolving sense of Friends community and reflect the importance of our tradition of minuting. How I love, too, those sessions marked “no business to report.”

To think, you can check ‘em out without having to travel anywhere!

DANCING IN THE WORK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In his volume of essays, Life Work, Donald Hall draws distinctions among jobs, chores, and work. The first is done for the pay, the second because it must, while the third arises as a passion, a calling, often an avocation – and is ultimately energizing and life-affirming. Lucky, he says, is the person whose work is also a paying job. So for income, where do we turn? Retreat into farming? Farmers aren’t surviving.

Wendell Berry speaks of two Muses. In Standing by Words, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983, highly recommended, he writes: “There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’ This is the muse of form.

“The first muse is the one mainly listened to in a cheap energy civilization, in which `economic health’ depends on the assumption that everything desirable lies within easy reach of anyone. It is the willingness to hear the second muse that keeps us cheerful in our work. To hear only the first is to live in the bitterness of disappointment.”

Here, then, is yet another slant on work from an unabashedly Christian poet and essayist.

Robert Bly once said that to write a line of poetry requires two hours. Not so much for the actual writing. Not even for the inspiration. Certainly for the revision.

And revision. And revision. His estimate, it seems, is quite optimistic.

In the practice, I keep asking: Are my facts right? Is this the most appropriate detail? How will the piece open and what structure will it assume? What is unique and most meaningful here? For whom? Does it boogie?

All of this to guard against shoddy workmanship; anything lazy, even deceitful; the artiste and the counterfeit.

PRACTICE AS THE WAY ITSELF

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Central to a life in art is the matter of practice. By this, I do not mean a dry run for a finished performance or product, but rather the repeated exercises that make an action habitual or proficient or even, in its variant, practical. Everyday, useful, helpful, sensible. At its core, the Greek root for practice means “to do,” something we see repeated when a musician practices scales, a physician practices medicine, an attorney practices law, an athlete practices basketball – it’s what one does or must do to be a musician, a physician, an attorney, a ballplayer. In its purity, a practice is pursued apart from an intended outcome – a concert, a healing, or courtroom victory – but rather as the daily discipline itself, which may in turn possibly lead to discovery and increased proficiency. To accomplish this requires time and physical space for experiment: what if I try it this way, what happens if I change that?

All of this requires time, of course – especially time free of specific outcome. (The Shakers, for all of their “Hands for work, hearts to God” ethic, left enough unencumbered time in their labors to experiment and invent – the creative acts that have become their legacy and living witness.) Still, I often find myself coming to my writing with a sense of guilt. (For that matter, even sitting down to read can be accompanied by that burden.) Other people lay claim to my time and attention. They see my writing, revising, and publishing as feeding my own vanity, rather than their needs and desires. There are dishes to wash, a garden to weed, a lawn to mow, walls needing paint. Looking to larger issues, some point to a world full of social injustices and programs that cry out for volunteer action. Somewhere deep in my bones I even carry that ancestral aversion to art for art’s sake, superfluity, escapism, dissolution. (Nowhere do they note how Jesus kept returning to the wilderness for prayer and renewal, leaving the fervid crowds far behind.) This is all complicated by the American measure of ultimate success – the almighty dollar. Its corollary, that a professional is superior to an amateur. Or that making the best-seller list is the measure of a great author. (No poets need apply.) (Inducing its own layers of anxiety and guilt: could I be making more? Have I sold out? Am I somehow now trapped by expectations?) Here, I could have been working overtime at the office.

All of this complicated by Samuel Johnson’s admonition, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” (Which may even be a grumpy acknowledgement that writing remains work, paid or unpaid. Or of his frequent status as a hack writer.)

To push this a step deeper, consider the practice of prayer. I’ve long sensed that poetry and prayer – or, from another perspective, art and religion – spring from a common root in antiquity. The spells, rituals, and restrictions that accompanied fertility, hunting and harvesting, and death lead to both pathways. (“And God saw that is was good,” in Genesis 1, has the meaning of “good to eat” – that is, nourishing – that soon evolves into morally and aesthetically good as well.)

I’m not alone here. For instance, Carmine Starnino, in “Lazy Bastardism: A Notebook” (Poetry, January 2010), admits a similar unease about both reading and writing and then says, “My first contact with poetry was the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary.’ Yes, they’re prayers, but they’re also pockets of linguistic energy … epic-accented statements … wonderfully archaic usages.” In his reflection, he argues, “Other prayers were loaded with religiosity, but uninterestingly flat,” and concludes, “Writing poetry is not, in itself, a prayerful activity. That’s because prayer is not a craft; it is the opposite of a craft,” one he sees as essentially secular: “poetry might even be said to be a menace to religious belief … because poetry, to work, needs to strip religious belief of its theological privilege.” To which he adds, “The best religious verse … flirts with faithlessness.” As he move on to other topics, he leaves me recognizing how narrow his understanding of prayer ultimately is and how much of his argument can be turned as a critique of poetry, as well. Many well-crafted poems, I find, remain uninterestingly flat – contrived and spiritless. Many hover well within the bounds of literary privilege. Read at weddings or funerals, they sound obscure and stuffy, as welcome as the parking attendant. Just as we struggle to define a poem within the range of writing today, so too does prayer run a range, from the unintelligible babbling of glossolalia (“praying in tongues,” in Pentecostal practice, as a craft, in some cases, to a raw emotional outpouring, in others) to intimate confessions to the formal Book of Prayer-type compositions of Starnino’s experience. At one end are those who pray for something specific (including a job, love, money, or healing), on to those who seek only to know God’s will and then to those mystics who sit silently waiting to listen to the divine voice in their hearts and bones. The tradition of English poetry, meanwhile, is prey to sermonizing, however secular or prosaic. Only when we break free of our prevailing orthodoxy – religious or artistic – do we truly “flirt with faithlessness,” finding ourselves defenseless in the face of ecstasy or despair, in the face of the one that cannot be named. This is the realm of epiphany, sacred or secular (or both).

I think Starnino loses the trail when he sees poetry as a craft, rather than a practice. Craft emphasizes a finished artifact, unlike practice, which embraces the activity itself. Practice can often resemble a hike in the woods or taking a trail up a mountain, with all the stages of attention or inattention that go with it. As you build stamina and endurance, you can also gain freedom. Whether mountain climbing, praying, or writing poetry, you may unexpectedly break free of the exertion itself – and cross into a state of oneness I’ll call the Zone. Others may discuss whether such moments of communion are epiphanies or a state of grace, or even secular or sacred, but when they come when I’m writing or revising, the lines seem to appear on their own, each move feels surefooted, the world around me appears as vibrant imagery and context. In this realm, I would declare poetry or literature to be a state of awareness, more than any artifact on a page or bound between covers. Likewise, the Zone may appear – it can never be summoned – in any of a number of disciplined activities. My wife experiences it while cooking and gardening; I enter it while dancing or singing, as well. Often, the Zone overlaps multiple ongoing activities: I jot the lines of a poem at a bend in the trail approaching a mountaintop.

I am left wondering why we cannot remain in the Zone long. Whether it would even be healthy. Whether we need some resistance or grit to balance the ethereal. Whether this reflects a basic mind/body, spirit/flesh duality.

Still, sustained practice is not easy. It remains work. Given a choice, the rational decision would be to sit back and devour great pages already given to us by others. (Or view great paintings or plays or films or dance productions and so on.) We can even ask, do we need more books? Who’s reading the ones we have now? I’m not speaking of all the junk fiction, junk movies, junk television, either. All that other kind of butt time. (Yes, I see a need for a slew of Creative Reading programs, more than Creative Writing, but that’s another facet of the work.)

HAS THEE BEEN REFRESHED?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

It’s an ancient question after the hour of worship, along with “Has thee been fruitful?” or “How has Truth prospered?” A related question would ask just what draws each of us to sit in the communal quiet in the first place. On the one hand, there’s a need for relief from the conflicts of daily life – a desire for a time of lightness and joy. But ours is not a religion of escape, and I’ve become quite aware that the quest for social justice is also a central Biblical theme. Some weeks, in fact, we come quite close to “praying the newspaper,” as our hearts carry a world of suffering to the invisible altar.

While we reflect on the world, on one hand, we also examine ourselves in our worship. Maybe it’s impossible, if not just difficult, to be as thoroughly honest with ourselves at the deepest levels as we’d like. A therapist, after all, keeps redirecting the client back to the questions being skirted. Still, it’s important we try. Salvation, including being saved from our own negative thoughts and actions, has a root word related to healing. As I’ve been sitting on a succession of Psalms week after week, I’ve come to appreciate the authors’ growing candor – first, to admit the array of enemies, something many of us might have difficulty addressing – and then, in asking that they be smited or the petitioner be sheltered from their assault, which becomes an act of distancing and handing over the desire for revenge; it’s not, after all, no longer, “Let me smite them!” As we survey the realm of struggle around us, let me suggest that saving the world has a direct connection to saving ourselves, in all senses of the meaning. (I’ve always liked the bumper sticker, SAVE THE WHALES.)

Placing the question “Has thee been refreshed?” within this framework has a dimension of renewal and recharging for the work at hand. It’s for more than an hour, then, isn’t it.

NAMING THE CHANGES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
My fondness for mountain laurel goes back to my days of living in the ashram in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. There, the undergrowth of the forest was filled with these blossoms in season.

Over the years, my own spiritual practices have undergone many changes. Even in a tradition like the one I’ve embraced, seemingly free from the annual routines of a liturgical calendar or outward emblems, there appear cyclical changes mirroring those of the seasons. Cycles, too, like those of progressing from childhood and parenthood into retirement or release. In Salem Quarterly Meeting in Ohio, the session each Fifth Month meant rhubarb in the applesauce. See it as sacrificial and special.

There are times of struggle, doubt, and distrust. Times of whirlwind passion and excitement. Times of discovery. Times of drought or deep winter, relying on what’s brought out of storage. Times of renewal and recharge.

This has manifested as periods where I’ve been able to dedicate significant time to meditation, solitude, travel in ministry, prayer, Bible study, research into history and theology, organizational service, teaching, correspondence, or writing, as well as to regular disciplines such as fasting or physical spiritual exercise (the hatha yoga sessions or even wilderness hiking). Emphatically, however, one would predominate while others would likely be absent or greatly diminished. In addition, they would be strongly impacted by the events of my daily life itself – whether I was single, married, divorced, or “in relationship,” my hours and nature of employment, my friendships and faith community, my driving patterns through the week.

The result of all of this would be a crazy-quilt tapestry or a ricochet trajectory if it weren’t for a spiraling within it. That is, over the years, various periods and interests begin to overlap one another, creating a kind of harmony or accumulated depth. My asparagus bed in New Hampshire has roots in my experience of asparagus along irrigation canal banks in Far West desert three decades earlier. A dog sitting through Quaker meeting here is a reminder of dogs sitting through predawn meditation sessions in the Pocono Mountains, or of the cats aligned on the scaffolding outside the windows, as if they, too, were deep in concentrated worship. I read a particular Psalm and see the passage taking twists I hadn’t perceived earlier.

In my own life, my childhood was filled with natural science, hiking, and camping, each with its mystical visions and moments. Adolescence led into politics, classical music, opera, and writing complicated by unrequited sexual yearning. Without romantic companionship, a Lone Ranger journey. Rejection of existing creed while ensconced in church office was followed by flight into atheism and hippie excess landing, inexplicably, in a yoga ashram with its Hatha exercises and sustained meditation. From there, into Quaker practice, though of the ABC – or “anything but Christ” variety. The ashram lessons were applied here, in circles of deepening prayer life. By steps, I moved toward Christocentric and Plain speech, and an especially faith fervent language. Among the Wilburite Friends as well as Mennonites, especially, I came to wrestle within Scripture while similtaneously undergoing repeated Dark Night journeys and questioning. Turning to therapy, I wondered if anyone could come along with me through all of this. By now I was no longer meditating to get high, or transcend, but rather to center down to the Seed. Here, with all of its committee work, I was engaged in a religion that combines mystical experience with social witness and activism. In a nutshell, then.

Each swirl also stirs up something from before. What failed in earlier marriage or relationships reappears. What has been left unfinished is not left entirely behind. What has been shredded remains to be woven. I heard this opera in its entirety a hundred times. Have I ever heard this note before?

I moved from the Midwest to the East Coast and back before heading on to the Pacific Northwest in what seemed an epiphany but instead shattered amid volcanic eruption and devastation. I left the wilderness for another kind of wilderness, back across the Midwest to the East Coast. The pendulum, as they say. Here, I now see life as both linear and circular – that is, spiraling. The spirit requires flesh, or is it that flesh requires spirit? Seasons include times that are full or overflowing, and times that are barren or dry. I now welcome the questioning that is not hostile is both essential and healthy.

My first spring in the orchard, I expected all of the trees to blossom simultaneously. They don’t. The apricots and cherry petals give way to plums, pears, and peaches. The apple blooms arrive last, when others are already gone.

Experiencing a new place through a full year or repeated years provides a much different understanding than a tourist gets – even one who spends several months there. Relocating requires a year-and-a-half to gain familiarity with the new surroundings – to get beyond the obvious, to establish friendships, to be oriented with the elements one finds essential or special. A favorite restaurant, a woodland pathway or place to swim, a boutique or gallery.

There are seasons for a person of faith, from winter to spring elation and then into fullness, dryness, struggle, or disillusionment. To harvest, perchance. Marriage? Family? Children? Extended into joy, compassion, humility, appreciation – one begins observing and naming.

The turning point in my own journey came when I accepted a new name.

HOW HUMBLING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Even though I’ve never asked previous clerks how they experienced sitting at the head of an institution founded in the 1660s, I found it humbling. The mere thought of superintending the construction of our present meetinghouse (1768) is overwhelming, as is the faithfulness that led the congregation through the Revolutionary and Civil wars. To think of the succession of mighty Quakers who came here in traveling ministry reflects the history of the movement itself, beginning with Elizabeth Hooton, who first nurtured George Fox in the emerging faith. Dover Friends sat down to worship originally in homes and barns, then in our first two meetinghouses, and finally in the room we know so well.

Visit historic Plimoth Plantation, and you get a taste of what Dover must have been like – already four years old at the time those enactors portray. It’s probably not that different from what the first Friends encountered just 3½ decades later when they stirred up what would become our Meeting. Just think of the differences in dialects and vocabulary. (Plimouth, to represent a population of slightly more than a hundred people, employs seventeen dialects, moderating them enough to make them understandable to modern visitors; Dover was likely no less divergent.) From all the evidence of smoke-filled houses, bitter winters, mosquito-infested summers, this must have been a rough-and-tumble community where Friends required generations to evolve into the sedate image we often treasure.

There aren’t many places in the United States having organizations with such long histories. We know only a portion of ours. Even so, we’ve been entrusted with this legacy, and to fulfill it and pass it on. How humbling, indeed.

MYSTERY SOLVED?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While Dover Friends (Quakers) proclaim that we worship in our third meetinghouse, erected in 1768, our history of the previous two structures becomes a bit foggy. Even so, ours is the oldest house of worship in use in the city.

In his authoritative New England Quaker Meetinghouses (Friends United Press, 2001), Silas Weeks mentions that our first house of worship was built about 1680 on Dover Neck, just south of the present St. Thomas Aquinas High School. Correcting an earlier version of the relocation of the structure to Maine, he writes that in 1769 “the 1680 house from Dover Neck was taken apart and re-erected in Eliot at the corner of what are now State and River Roads. There is a bronze plaque marking the site …” (Alas, there goes the tale of its being skidded by oxen across a frozen Piscataqua River. Taken apart and put on a boat now seems more likely.)

Apparently, when our current house was built, we had no need for the smaller structure. I suspect that until our current meetinghouse was available, Dover Friends met for worship in the two smaller structures and gathered together for business sessions.

The disposition of the second house, though, had eluded his investigation. It had stood at what Silas “believed to be the present corner of Locust and Silver Streets,” but there was no indication it had been incorporated in later buildings on the site.

A publication from the Dover Chamber of Commerce, however, may have the answer. Dover’s Heritage Trails, a guide to historic walking tours through the city, notes this at 3-5 Spring Street: “This old dwelling was Dover’s second Quaker Meeting House, built originally at the corner of Silver and Locust Streets and moved to this location in 1728, before Spring Street existed.”

Silas reported “The second was erected in 1712 on land belonging to Ebenezer Varney. The deed, transferred to Friends in 1735, described the site …” in ways that support the Silver and Locust location. My guess is that the structure was moved in 1828, since the Chamber pamphlet mentions that neighboring houses were built in 1810 and 1811.

The building has no doubt changed a lot, inside and out, since it was erected three centuries ago -- including the addition of chimneys. But the shape is right for a Friends meetinghouse.
The building has no doubt changed a lot, inside and out, since it was erected three centuries ago — including the addition of chimneys. But the shape is right for a Friends meetinghouse.

As they say, the plot thickens. And to think, the answer to our search may wind up just a bit more than a block up the street from where we gather.

BECOMING A CHARACTER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Everyone where she was from said simply, “Oh, that Anna! She’s a character!” But they’d never say why.

I met her long after she’d moved east, and sensed in her a deep spiritual presence.

Still, when it came to opening her memorial service, I couldn’t refrain from mentioning her identity as a character. What emerged in the next hour was quite a lesson.

Afterward, as I drove home from New Jersey, I embraced this mandate: we have the first 40 years of our lives to get our act together – and the next 40 to become a character. If we can. If we’re worthy.

SEASONS OF THE SPIRIT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

To perceive a spiritual journey as Seasons of the Spirit acknowledges how much of it is out of our own hands, like the weather. We yield to the Spirit and are guided by it, to the extent we are faithful. “Which Spirit is thee speaking of?” I hear echoing, a memory of elder Mary Hawkins of rural Ohio before she counseled me of other spirits, such as anger and jealousy and so on. For the record, then, this is what I now call the Spirit of Christ – specifically, the Light and Life addressed in the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. You may define your encounters as you may. My interest here is with an experienced connection with the Divine and a heightened awareness of its manifestations among us.

While everyone talks about the weather, few openly discuss religion. Too often, those who do raise the subject seem unwilling to listen, at least openly, and their arguments are cast along the lines of dogma or creed. Again, my focus is not on what we have been taught about faith, but what we can say about its workings in our own lives. When we can get past the formulaic responses, a discussion of religious experience allows us to search some of the deepest desires and fears of human existence. It can also unleash extraordinary social reform, as we might see looking through history, or be constrained to do the precise opposite.

 *   *   *

To speak of Spirit in this manner requires us to search for the ways it becomes embodied in our lives and our world. That is, how it takes flesh. What is abstract reveals itself in concrete decisions and actions, as well as thoughts and emotions.