You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
In Quaker practice, elders are what other denominations call bishops, except that in ours and other Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonite, Brethren), they’re found within the congregation, rather than over it. And elders can be young folks, if they’re so gifted.
For a free copy of my poetry chapbook, Elders Hold, click here.
There were times I’d joke, “I’m the most conservative person around here,” back when I worked for what was often called an ultraconservative newspaper.
In some ways, I’m not that far from the Amish, at least in my sympathies, and you can’t get more conservative than that. Apart from my electronics gear and some original artwork, my household at the time was plainer than some of the old-order Mennonites I visited. I’m appalled by waste of any kind, and have been frugal by choice and necessity. You can guess what kind of cars I drive — it took me a long time to accept air conditioning over rolled-down windows. In the political sphere, I’m very much in favor of cutting government spending in the one place it’s truly bloated and out-of-control. (The part that doesn’t get audited.) In the realm of the mind, I love old-fashioned music (classical, opera, folk, jazz) and serious literature – the lofty visions of civilization I believe should be preserved for the future. Conservation and ecological awareness and sustainable economics and small-is-beautiful enterprises – don’t they all fit a true conservative outlook? And then there’s the garden and hiking and camping, all back to basics. My personal finances tend toward debt-free, apart from the mortgage and car payment. These days, many of my clothes come from yard sales. Gambling is out of the question. All that before we’d get to the radical Christian perspectives from the Bible (not legalistic mind you, but prophetic).
None of the candidates insisting they’re conservative seem to fit the daily description, even while insisting everyone conform to their political label. Long ago, I learned to look at actions more than words when it comes to trusting a person. Do they match up?
I just wish they’d call their strand something else, something more accurate. Or change their direction to fit the broader picture.
Living in New England, I’ve become enamored with lighthouses. My fascination has nothing to do with the quaint impression many tourists carry but rather an awareness of the ways these now antiquated emblems of peril define our landscape. Along the water, if you can identify the light, you know where you are. Believe me, there are places that would otherwise be difficult.
The night ocean, as I’ve also discovered, can be anything but romantic. It’s a different world from the one visitors encounter during the day. Cold, windy, wet, threatening, even on many summer nights. Yes, on a balmy evening, especially with moonlight, it can be magical. More often, a night ocean can be downright spooky.
Along the dark coastline, the flash of light can help you place yourself in the scene. You triangulate your position using the lights. Each lighthouse beacon has an identifiable pattern – one flash every five seconds. Or ten. Or two flashes. Their colors may be unique in that place, too – blue, green, or red, instead of clear.
The most powerful beams reach out 20 miles or more over the water. Think about that – the light doesn’t scatter but holds together using a technology that predates the laser. How much we take for granted!
And to think, in the old days the illumination came from whale oil or similar fuels.
These days it can be a 110-volt bulb the size of your thumb.
The mechanism that shapes the beams is itself a remarkable piece of technology – the Fresnel lens. Developed by the French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel in 1823, it’s a large sculptured glass cone, where each overlapping leaf joins to focus the ray into one. The larger ones are the size of a child, with the light from inside. Remarkably, these are much thinner than a conventional lens for the job would be – thus allowing more light to pass through and the lens to be mounted in a rotating base. (One we’ve visited floated in a 500-pound pool of mercury.)
A section of a 4th order Fresnel lens is featured on the cover of my booklet.
Just as incredible can be the tales of the lighthouse keepers and their families – lonely work, often tedious, cold, staying awake through the night, put at risk by the storms. Nothing nostalgic there, being faithful.
As I look at the light and its tower, my mind leaps to the universal application of light as a metaphor of religion and spiritual experience. It’s especially prominent in the writings of Quakers (Society of Friends), where it frames an understanding of an alternative Christianity – one earlier generations never dared voice completely. Still, the Light led them in fresh directions – and can still do the same for us today as it reaches far, including into the human heart and mind.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
Within a religious tradition – I’m tempted to say any religious tradition – there are wise, seasoned guides. The ones who know from their own faithful practice what temptations and struggles the aspirant will face and how to overcome them.
Known in the various traditions as guru, swami, roshi, rinpoche, abbot, mother superior, bishop, or simply elder, among others, the best of these are adept at listening and then asking the right question.
In doing so, they hold the individual and the spiritual teachings together. As I know from my ongoing Quaker practice and earlier training.
These poems pay homage to that role.
~*~
For a free copy of the chapbook, click here.
In college, I went through a soul-searching crisis that questioned whether we could justify subsidizing symphony orchestras or opera companies or art museums and the like in light of the economic inequities in our nation and world. And then I noticed how much of an entertainment industry flowed through the ghetto and Third World, too. That is, everybody has art (even those old Quakers, in a few restricted forms) — it’s not necessarily about money but a need for expression. And all of the emotions and aspirations that go with it. As well as the big bucks, for the big jobs.
In my trials after college, I eventually found myself moving among Friends and then, in time, a few who had grown up under the old restrictions that banned fiction, theater, and even music. Harsh as the old discipline was (and I could have never lived under it), there was also a valid criticism – especially of the superfluous nature of so much of the artistic effort and the egotism so rampant in its ranks.
Maybe the early Friends saw, too, how much the arts were a function of the royal court and its fashions. Or a gilded church. Even the way arts were used to veil the upper crust from the populace and its labors. It turns outs the original Quakers were also picking up on a dialectic from the earliest days of the Christian church, one that contended acting arose in counterfeiting thoughts and actions, many of them of an evil nature.
Within the memory of Quakers, at least, the fine arts have come a long way from the 1650s, pro and con.
Still, proscribing many of the arts did focus Friends on other matters, including abolition and nonviolence. It channeled creative energy into mathematics and science, architecture and industry, poetry and journalism (“We Friends only read true things,” as one Quaker purportedly said, regarding a neighbor’s stack of novels). Go ahead, tally the other fields.
On the other hand, how much of our own focus is deflected by our apparent indulgence? Or how much of it is enriched and deepened?
So how do we make peace with that seemingly artless side of our legacy? Let me suggest we begin with a consideration of “only true things” in our practice. Back to the deeper expression, the part that reflects Truth that goes beyond quantifiable facts. We might even begin with questions of quality or justice or compassion. And then, as they say, the plot thickens.
Think of these poems as an almanac for the year, a monthly calendar of not just rows of days and weeks but also the centuries of New England.
Where the past peers into the present and future.
And you peer back.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
Contrary to the proclamations of many retailers in their countdown to December 25, today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas.
In many parts of the world, January 6, also known as the Feast of the Epiphany or Three Kings Day, is the day for unwrapping gifts and similar Christmas celebration. In our circle, it was time for a party where all the kids who had made gingerbread houses early in December would reunite, bringing their gaily decorated structures to be festively … smashed to pieces! Initially, I was aghast at this custom before learning that it’s real purpose was to liberate all the candy and frosting that had been used to decorate the little dwellings. There was also a cake with three almonds hidden away to determine that year’s Three Kings. Alas, the kids are all grown and the next round hasn’t yet appeared.
Thanks to my wife and her traditions, I’m among those who advocate observing Advent as a way of toning down the holiday stress and hysteria. The commonplace letdown is replaced by a slow easing into winter. Since our Christmas tree wasn’t even cut down and brought indoors till Christmas Eve, we’ll leave it up and decorated until Groundhog Day or later. It brightens those chilly mornings.
So here’s to the gifts of the three Magi.
I’ll admit I laughed when I saw the sticker:
But then I started thinking of the ongoing reconsideration of the era itself, which suggests a far richer and more varied culture than we’ve admitted. Just look at the glorious cathedrals, for starters.
Add to that an awareness of the atheistic evils of the 20th century, beginning with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others. How many millions were murdered as their victims?
The sticker was on a tiny van parked at the trail head, and a bit further I came across its owner in a cloud of smoke.
Not to be judgmental, but I found myself wondering about his alternative. It looked pretty dark. As for me, I’ve seen enough to suggest religion – true religion – can release us from darkness as a people.
Let’s start with the civil rights movement, if you wish. But there are many others.
Think of religion as a sword that cuts both ways, depending on its user and that matter of love. And then ask, How else are we to aspire to a better world?
With my plunge into yoga discipline early in my adult years, I came to an appreciation of non-Western ways of perceiving the world around us. For someone rooted in scientific, empirical , Aristotelian logical thought, this came as a jolt. Or, as Gary Snyder has argued, every poet must have an appreciation of some archaic system of awareness, be it astrology, I Ching, tarot, palmistry, well, you get the picture. Just listen and look.
What I’ve come to appreciate is the alternative wisdom carried by Native American elders, gurus of all sorts, and the range of those labeled shamans, East and West.
And so, at last summer’s sessions of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, I was intrigued by an opportunity to view a movie on Mongolian shamans. It’s a remarkable work, by a registered nurse who has worked for two decades with nomadic reindeer herders in Mongolia. Having earned their trust and respect, and realizing their own vulnerability in the face of global changes, the shamans allowed her to film their healing ceremonies.
As I viewed the documentary, I was struck by how much of what she observed leads into Tibetan Buddhism, too.
This is remarkable work. What is healing, anyway? From a Christian point of view, I can say healing can differ from a cure. So just what happens in a shaman ceremony? And where can Eastern and Western health care interact? How much of our physical state is a reflection of our emotional and spiritual conditions.
We might wonder, too, how the Nativity stories would appear from the world view of the herders, how much their insights would inform us about shepherds and angels. Would a stable be that much different from the homes where the shamans enact their rites? As for the Magi? Or the heavenly wonder? Or even an oppressive political and economic presence? As the Gospel message insists, the world needs healing, no doubt about it.
To learn more of the reindeer herder perspective, go to Nomadicare.
While walking to Quaker Meeting one Sunday morning, I heard a familiar hymn from my childhood wafting from the open doors at St. Mary’s. About a block later, still humming along, I realized it was the Protestant hymn, “Faith of Our Fathers.”
Well, I thought it was a Protestant hymn, especially now that this music is as likely to be heard in American Catholic services as in the mainstream Protestant ones, which have been drifting toward the newer pop-influenced praise songs. (A musically literate friend, by the way, dubs the rocking chants the Rupture songs.)
Imagine my surprise in learning the hymn in question was written to commemorate the English Catholics martyred in the schism that created the Church of England!
Either way, the questions remain, Whose father? And which faith?
And, as a digression seen in genealogy, we can add that it’s often the mother’s faith that’s followed.
Still, any way you want to look at this, I think it reflects a widespread sense of an earlier “golden age” of faith. Early Quakers, for instance, insisted that they weren’t intent on reforming Christianity, but rather restoring it to a richness from “before the great darkness of apostasy that set upon the church,” something I’d deduced meant from before the first Nicene Council.
And, for balance, many later Quakers looked and still look to the upheavals of that first generation or two of the Society of Friends as a golden era of faithful devotion, something a closer reading of history will challenge.
Now that image of the early church has in turn been challenged in my reading of Richard E. Rubenstein’s When Jesus Became God, which focuses on the tribulations leading up to the Nicene Council and then flowing out of it.
The fact that both major sides in this confrontation were so violent, often as roving mobs, continues to rattle me, along with their allegiance to priests and bishops and the secular power those clergy already carried, even when Christianity itself was at odds with the Roman empire.
More subtle is the emerging schism between the Greek-speaking Christians of the eastern Mediterranean, with their complexity of thought and love of philosophical speculation, in contrast to the more action-oriented Latin-speaking Christians to the west, who lost much of the subtlety of the debate. Already, the tensions between the metropolitan bishops, or theoretically equal “popes,” of the eastern Mediterranean sea and Rome were mounting. If Rubenstein is right, the schism between the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholics was taking shape even before the Nicene Council, no matter how later history records the tragic events.
All of this leaves me asking just when the church moved from synagogues and home-based circles into a priestly class abetted by passionate mobs in the streets.
As Rubenstein repeats, there came a point when Jews were no longer part of the discussion but were rather persecuted.
Now, let us consider. Could that be when “the dark night of apostasy” arose?
Jnana's Red Barn 