You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
with a year of composition and retreat
free of alcohol
without the pleasure
of coworkers
the strength saying no
to myself
* * *
as a transition out of selling, this repose
wonderful, wonderful and thanks, hoping
* * *
during my year of isolation
I abstained
mostly
according to mission
Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see the full set, click here.
As I related at the time:
Our Meeting has been undergoing some fascinating growth, both spiritually and in numbers. At the moment, the meetinghouse (1768) is about ten feet in the air, jacked up for another two or three weeks while a new foundation is excavated and poured, to make room for religious education classes and to permit us to use both sides of upstairs for worship. (It’s been getting crowded.)
The resistance I originally encountered to Biblically-based messages has vanished, and these days it’s not uncommon to find two or three members reading quietly from their Bibles at some point during the Meeting, while references to Christ or to Scripture are now heard in a third to half of the vocal messages. That’s encouraging. And now a committee has been appointed to arrange for regular Bible study; though I would prefer we simply work our way through a book at a time (starting with Jonah, then the Gospel of John, one of Paul’s epistles, and the opening chapters of Genesis), there’s some interest in using Mary Morrison’s Pendle Hill pamphlet as the base, while others are leaning toward Sondra Cronk’s Tract Assn. peace booklet. Will be interesting to see what emerges.
~*~
For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.
We, who consider ourselves free spirits, despite any penchant for obligations, still yearn for a steady circle where attendance at worship is less of an option within many alternatives. Let the worship itself have an urgency and regularity, may it be a priority in the weekly schedule, free it to be focused on the One and empowering.
To be one!
Don’t ask me if prayer works. Anymore than singing, birds answer on a May morning.
Our struggle is magnified by our degree of selfless service.
We turn, instead, to free-spirits, where we give fairly selflessly of ourselves.
Only problem is, unlike the Old Order or monastic setting, we’re not surrounded by and bathed in the selfless gifting of everyone else.
They just aren’t reliable, no matter how fine their intentions. Ergo, burnout! (You and I always wind up holding the bag when they default or go off to boogie.)
~*~
For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.
Where I live, seasons differ in their degree of light, not just temperature. Winter has long nights and short days – you can enter the workplace before sunrise, work a normal shift, and still leave after sunset. Summer, of course, reverses the pattern, so that you can go to bed before sunset and get up after sunrise and still have a full night’s sleep.
Here, we also have the ocean, warming and chilling on its own cycle, and, if you’re close enough, reflect light back into the air.
Sailing on the ocean, you try to stay with the compass direction, while the wind twists the boat in one direction and the current, in another. You fear being blown over or far from your destination. “Don’t worry,” you’re told. “If the boat is blown too far to the side, the sails will empty” – and the boat will right itself.
Remember, my awareness of ocean comes principally from my last quarter-century of experience. It’s far from the Midwestern farming cycles imprinted in my soul; even though we lived in a medium-sized city, where our house was a half-block away from a working dairy, and after college I did live on a neglected farm and then the ashram, itself a former farm. Somehow, the changing tides add to my sense of seasons and constant change.
The seasons, in their many forms, become a pulse of life itself, including all of the invisible influences and realities.
~*~
For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.
These Spirit-based reflections each Friday may seem a world apart from my online postings at Jnana’s Red Barn during the 2016 presidential campaign. One, often outraged, passionate, partisan – the other, an overriding sense of calm good order, even holy desire. They’re not really all that disparate. Rather, they form the flip side of the equation – with hope overcoming despair, no matter any present social malaise. It’s a theme that runs through much of the Bible, besides – just think of the times of exile and return.
~*~
For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.
Looking at the political scene, I’m wondering about a wide spectrum of Americans who seem to put their faith in arms – meaning gun ownership, at a personal level, and bloated military expenditures, on the global scene.
Both outlooks are driven by fear, and both are extensions of death over life.
They’re the opposite of Jesus’ life and teaching, in my experience. As he said repeatedly, “Fear not.” Not that it’s easy in practice.
~*~
For more on faithful practice, see my Seasons of the Spirit observations.
One of my ongoing questions about Quaker practice is just how early Friends came to discover – or rediscover – a form of meditative practice while so far removed from Asian spiritual traditions.
Early Quaker worship, let’s be certain, was often quite different from the silence-based hour many contemporary Friends claim. Women and children, especially, often released emotional torrents in the gathered assembly – and a decade or two later, in response and en route to something more respectable, many hours of worship were filled by a recognized minister filling most of the time with his own message. (Or, possibly, her.) As Douglas Gwyn remarks in Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience: “These ministers then proceeded to speak almost the length of the meeting …” Even the controversial Elias Hicks, in the early 1800s, could be counted on to deliver vocal ministry lasting 20 to 30 minutes, a detail that would shock many today who insist, as many of the Hicksites would, that a vocal message be brief and pithy.
And so I was startled to hear Douglas Gwyn note another possibility for our traditional silence or open worship:
On another level, it is also intriguing to speculate whether the Quaker movement represented a resurgence of the old Celtic Christian tradition in the North. Celtic Christian emphases upon the indwelling of Christ, the inclusion of all creation in God’s redemptive work, the spiritual authority of women, and the cross as real personal triumph through suffering – all these themes found conspicuous expression in the Quaker movement. Although they were filtered through the thought-forms of Reformation, they still constituted a strong counterpoint to the dominant Puritan message. … in the backwater of the English Reformation, this very old, isolated stream of Western Christianity would have continued as an undercurrent in the faith of country folk. … As he [George Fox] moved westward into Westmorland, Cumberland, and northern Lancashire, where the movement exploded in 1652, he entered the largest area of vestigial Celtic tradition in England.
Hints of the dimensions of the earlier Celtic Christianity can be found in Thomas Cahill’s epic 1995 How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, where he follows a strand of Christianity that was suppressed after the historic confrontations with Roman authorities in the late 600s on the English holy island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland. Quite simply, Roman Catholicism might have taken a much different direction than it has.
Did Celtic Christianity include meditative practices like those we find in yoga or Zen Buddhism? We can only speculate.
Still, as Gwyn remarks of the early Quaker movement nearly a millennium after the Lindisfarne controversies, it was while traveling through Cumberland that John
Burnyeat observes that they still did not know “true striving,” which is “out of self,” “standing still out of our own thoughts, willings, and runnings.” But other Quaker ministers came through the area and guided them “in what to wait, and how to stand still.” Evidently, there was some degree of technique to early Quaker spirituality, or at least some kind of guidance that helped refocus spiritual energies from ego-centered striving to true surrender. Slowly, “a hope began to appear in us, and we met together often, and waited to see the Salvation of God.”
That degree of technique may still be needed for many who come to Friends meetings, not knowing how to center into the silence, especially in today’s media-saturated overload.
Were these Quaker ministers thus reviving something that was already in the peoples’ bones? It makes for some interesting speculation. The fact is that in today’s society, many of us need some help learning to sit still and enter a holy silence.
~*~
More of my own reflections on alternative Christianity are found at Religion Turned Upside Down. Feel free to take a look.
the tension
of the harp
and bow-string
in the poet-king’s hand
taking flight
in the air
* * *
how many Psalms
expressed the same anguish
and trial
in the glorious regime
* * *
how brief the interludes
between exile
the Psalms are poems
or the Psalms are prayers
as if I could define either
* * *
prayer is not what I speak
but what my Deeper Self would utter
despite me
* * *
raise my shield, O Lord,
regardless of the outcome, and lift me
there’s nothing easy about love
New Zion
originally, Bible stories were chanted
rather than read and dissected in the rabbinical twist
hardened into bronze
even in daily devotion
in this quest of salvation
facing Jerusalem
tiring of the routine exile
where’s my power in this place?
my heart, ever so uneasy
* * *
patriots say Peace but mean Victory:
which is hardly the same outcome
or means
festering and darkening
drumbeats summoned
into crowds cheering
uniforms
or invoking the Holy One
the Prince of Peace
to their cause
* * *
even communion tokens
from Colonial-era steeplehouses
witness the contrast to our free-Gospel ministry
with their families, subscribing to box seats
squirming in this theater of pipes
so who exchanged coins
for their purity?
truly, how do you pay
with the psalter?
holy, holy, holy
in a constant delving for treasures
where others see nothing of value
from whom all blessings flow
over each stretch of turmoil
* * *
how many strands of history
and sojourn
converge on me
as I’m walking in prayer
and softly humming
a funeral hymn for comfort
some October night
shivery petals shall upend
a row of headstones, too
called to the cause of justice
counterpoint originates
in the descant over the cantus firmus
or maybe drumming
or the sound of feet dancing
or even droning under the chant
in the conflicted lines
of desire and pain
in the hideous bleeding wrists
and ankles
* * *
O Holy One
contrary to the ancient discipline
I country dance
and sing harmony
to once again crack the thick shell
I build around me
“in the gift of life is also the gift of time”
time, as a signature
for music
for the dance
O Holy One
bless the Singers’ Table
with its poets and musicians
free in the present
free in unity with the Holy Spirit
free in the disciplines we embrace
Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see the full set, click here.
MY RESIDENCY IN a yoga ashram introduced its own sequence of seasons. I address these in my novel, Ashram, where different individuals embody different stages in the progression from soul-cleansing to community awareness and service to spiritual illumination. While I limit the plot to the activities of a single day, there’s no way to escape the histories that led each participate to this place or to the conflicts and achievements they’ve already shared in their adventures on the yoga farm.
The ashram allowed a kind of spiritual season I no longer see on American landscape – a place for youths, especially, to undergo intense reorientation and ego-stripping. More traditional monastic settings often point the practitioner in a different direction, something more resembling a career path.
In retrospect, the institution itself was evolving through its own series of seasons. Originating as a kind of laissez-faire hostel and spa before moving into a more rigorous retreat center and monastery and then into a Hindu temple and children’s camp, each season manifested itself quite differently from the others, held together by Swami’s autocratic vision, strengths, and weaknesses.
In season, too, many of my doubts and concerns also bore fruit. When I was ordered to return to the community and refused, only to be ostracized, I was being faithful to a larger Spirit. A different set of seasons was unfolding.
~*~
For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.
If you want to see out-and-out prejudice by people who think themselves to be open-minded, here’s a good litmus test. Raise a matter of Christianity. Or, as a woman, wear a cross necklace. Then ask if it’s the same response you’d get had you presented something from another religion.
Put another way, I’d long ago been appalled by an assumption many of us liberals took in regard to Christians – and to be candid, I was once one who was self-righteously disparaging. Quite frankly, it’s out-and-out judgmentalism that hurts our progressive causes. It’s ignorant of the important support radical faith gave to many movements through the centuries and can still give to the future. It’s a point for dialogue with our opponents, if we’re willing to engage it.
Two common assumptions spring to mind here.
The first involves intelligence. There’s more to life, let me point out, than materiality. Think of love, music, morality, for starters – people with knowledge of ways of empathy, too. Extend that, then, to a recognition that to be a person of faith does not automatically mean stupidity, even if we do see way too many examples in the public arena – not just those of the Christian label, either. Nor do Christian do not come in a one-size-defines-all homogeneity – some denominations, for instance, refuse to bear arms or participate in war as a consequence of Jesus’ command to love our neighbor, while other churches rally around the troops. The ways of thinking and the emphases vary widely, from Fundamentalists to Evangelicals (yes, there are differences there) to Pentecostals to various strands of Calvinists or Lutherans (yes, again some key differences) to various Wesleyan (Methodist) and Baptist and Anabaptist (Amish, Mennonite, Brethren, Quaker) and on to the Unitarians. And that’s just among the Protestants. Add to that the Anglicans (Episcopalians), Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox and you have a very rich mix, indeed.
Within those are some very intelligent and sensitive people, along with circles of personal growth and ethical accountability.
The reality is that religion is capable of engaging our innermost motions – our hopes and fears, especially. It’s a power that can run many ways, challenging the status quo as well as establishing community. The state and the establishment have many reasons to desire to curb it, as history attests. Even at a personal level, it can be scary stuff.
Pointedly, progressive movements have sprung from this source. For centuries, up through America’s civil rights revolution, social change has grown from radical Christianity. A central thread of the Bible has been the evolution of justice and then radical peace and equality. Read it closely, and what emerges remains a challenge to the status quo. Let’s not lose it now!
As the prayer goes, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth …”
Many of us see that as a more loving, just, and peaceful society. Mock it if you wish, but think of the alternatives. Are they really progress?
All of that, of course, leads to my second point: the so-called Christian right, of the political sort, hardly owns the mantel of Jesus. And since any religion has the potential of engaging those most soulful endeavors of human existence, we see across the spectrum instances of appealing to fear and oppression, on one side, as well as forgiveness and oneness, on the other. Religion in this dimension presents an opportunity for conversation and growth, if we allow it.
~*~
For more on radical faith, see my book, Religion Turned Upside Down.
Jnana's Red Barn 