Tag: Spirituality

THE NAYLER PRAYER FLAGS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I’ve mentioned my love of Tibetan prayer flags, from long before they became so popular and easily purchased. One Christmas, though, I was given a kit for making my own, which left me wondering what to design. Early Quakers would have scoffed at the practice, mostly as vanity and superstition, but I do like the reminder to be more prayerful and attentive. So I turned to one of the early major voices of the movement, James Nayler, and began extracting a few words for each square.

Here’s what emerged:

To
ALL
HONEST
HEARTS

Stand still
in the Light
of Jesus.

Come to
SEE
the Life.

If the EYE
be single
NO
darkness.

One power
WORKS
in the
LIGHT.

Believe
and
WAIT.

HAVE
the
LIGHT
of
LIFE.

To
MAKE
MANIFEST

THIS
COVENANT
OF
LIGHT.

TRUTH
PEACE
RIGHTEOUSNESS

THE
FRUIT
YOU
BRING
FORTH

ONE
is the
POWER

Receive
the
LIGHT.

SHINE.

FOLLOW
the
LIGHT.

HEALTHIER BALANCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For most of my adult life, I’ve tended to load up on the fresh vegetables, but fruit’s been another matter. Maybe if you stuck a piece right in front of me, on my plate. Yes, I love blueberries and, with breakfast, a grapefruit. But even after living in an orchard (cherries, plums, pears, peaches, and varieties of apples), I rarely went out of my way for that end of the dietary spectrum. Until I retired.

Maybe it was a sense of reclaiming some of my ashram experience, but once I left full-time employment, I found myself in a routine of setting down for a midmorning meal of fresh homemade toast (with homemade jam or jelly, meaning fruit), fresh homemade yogurt (with fruit), and (in season) an orange I’d just peeled.

And then there are all the goodies from our garden, much of it eaten fresh and the rest, frozen for later, such as the strawberries, blueberries,  and raspberries. That’s even before we get to the trips to the pick-your-own orchards, where we focus on the half-price drops on the ground, such as peaches and apples, or the crab apples we pick from the strips between the sidewalk and some city streets. Add to that a daughter who revels in canning, as well as making jams and jellies.

It may be deep cold outside, but on my table these days, I’m reliving summer. Now, what are we having for dinner?

CONSIDERING THE COMPETITION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After I moved from the ashram, I spent a year-and-a-half in a small city that very much resembles one I call Prairie Depot in several of my novels. And then I returned to my university as a research associate.

While our institute was set in a town very much like Daffodil, there was one difference I omitted. By this time, the town had a large urban ashram and, for several reasons, I chose not to attend classes or other activity there but instead began sitting with the Quakers in their mostly silent worship in a country meetinghouse.

Still, as the joke went, the ashram owned a third of the town. It had a vegetarian restaurant or two, maybe a bakery by this point, a house painting company, art gallery, significant real estate, and maybe much more.

The university, of course, owned the rest.

Or so the joke went, back in the mid-’70s.

My own experience is much more along the lines of what I describe in my novel, Ashram. We barely owned anything.

HOLIDAY GREETINGS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

We’re in that time of the year when we receive cards and letters. Personal ones, I mean, rather than direct-mail advertising.

Each year, I find myself reflecting on differences among generations regarding this custom. My dad’s circles, for instance, would send out and receive about two hundred cards apiece – keeping touch long after their high school and Air Force years, and trailing off only with illness and death. My generation, in contrast, falls away quickly. Each year, more lost connections, often with a pang of disconnection. There are, of course, a few who cling on, often with nothing personal included. There are also some older friends of my parents or a handful of relatives, in some sense of duty. (Only one of my first cousins has kept in touch). There are even a few correspondents who have reconnected, after years of silence. My wife and kids, being of a practical mindset, figure the folks we see regularly know what’s up with us (and so there’s no sense in mailing greetings), while those we don’t see, well, they’re history (so what’s the point?).

I think a lot of my dad’s era was a continuation of an earlier awareness, before cheap long-distance phone calls and then email. Those connections were special. My kids, on the other hand, don’t send letters of any kind, but they do have a wide range of online correspondents and texting. (Should we ask what will happen to the timeless art of the love letter?) What all this says about American society is another matter.

Quakers in some measure maintain an ancient practice of epistles, typically sent from one Meeting to another or even from a Meeting or “weighty Quake” to individuals. Some of our most powerful expressions survive there, and not from George Fox exclusively. Still, in an email world, how do we extend our faith? What efforts will survive? What will be read over the years? How do we reach out with something personal and special? Suddenly, I notice how many people are buying candles, especially at this time of year! Candles, in an electronics age. Remarkable! A spark of Light in the dark!

ADVENT AND MORE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

This is the time of year when many people work themselves up into a frenzy of festivity, inevitably followed by a letdown. For whatever reasons, it has me reflecting on the contrasts between many of the expectations and realities in our surrounding culture. For instance, Christmas is supposed to be a holy occasion, but the fact is that one can eliminate all mention of religion and still engage fully in its revelry and spending. Family gatherings, too, are emphasized, although at the office, what we’ve noticed, listening to the police radio scanner, is how family structure is drifting: “live-in boyfriend or girlfriend,” becomes “fiance or fiancee” after their second child together. Maybe that’s a reflection of a widespread fear of commitment in America today – as if having a child isn’t a commitment. Those calls, too, typically arise in domestic abuse or breakdown, in turn arising in other fears. Think, too, of the troops overseas, and their families at home. We might ask, then, what is the real Christmas message.

Here I believe we can look to small children for a clue – those who are old enough to sense that something special is about to happen, but not old enough to equate it with receiving particular products. (Hmm, might the latter suggest something about the expectation of prayer many people seem to hold? Well, that’s another topic.) What I’m thinking about is that tingling anticipation that’s full of wonder and discovery and emotional overflow. Everything is new or newly repeated, from last year or maybe two. Full of hope and questioning, as well. Their exuberance and obsession are contagious. And, yes, they crave the stability of a loving family.

That is the energy early Friends had when they were known as Children of the Light. May we, too, be filled with a revived sense of that vitality and urgency –the ecstasy of apocalyptic faith that shakes the world for miles around, and brings change. And brings us together.

THE STIGMA OF RELIGION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Intolerance, scorn, and judgmental stereotyping are hard enough to behold in public discourse, but they’re especially painful when they come from my side of the spectrum – people who proclaim themselves to be open-minded and smart. Yet the contempt is there, and nowhere more so than at the mention of religion, as Madeleine L’Engle has already pointedly observed. Even so, the fact remains that we do find individuals for whom belief and wisdom are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, even mutually enhancing. Let me suggest Bill Moyers’ Genesis: A Living Conversation, a Doubleday book based on the PBS series, as a demonstration of intelligence and faith in joint action. (Also available in audio or video, if you prefer.)

Admittedly, much of what we see and hear from the religious front can be superficial thought, convoluted logic, or emotional manipulation – quite simply, bad theology that too often goes unchallenged. (Not that we don’t encounter these in advertising, politics, entertainment, or professional athletics.) Curiously, when I listen to the reasons given by many who turn away from religion altogether, I often hear equally shallow arguments. Those who accuse religion of being the cause of all war, for example, blithely ignore Karl Marx’ insistence that it’s economic injustice instead – even as they invoke his axiom of religion as the opiate of the people. Or the way Sigmund Freud’s atheism is touted, while ignoring the degree to which his two key disciples, Karl Jung and Otto Rank, each turned to unique aspects of religion to advance their depth of human insight. I’m of the camp that contends that good theology is the only cure for bad theology, and is essential for progressing social justice. Rabbi Michael Lerner’s The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right offers a fine line of reasoning in this direction. (As for advertising, politics, entertainment, professional athletics …?)

And, yes, the best reply to hypocrisy comes from the discipline of faith itself. Whatever happened to corrective rebuke and redirection, within the faithful group? (What old Quakers used to call “close labor.”)

Oh, my, and here I’d started out to reflect on the unfortunate state of religious fiction and poetry in our time, especially from Christian writers. With little support from my side of the spectrum, what appears is typically constrained by an orthodoxy that inhibits candor and rigorous exploration, and what emerges sounds saccharine, hollow, or even a false note altogether. That’s before we get to that matter of being preachy.

Still, I can point to the growing popularity of Rumi, a Sufi mystic of the 13th century, or to Zen-influenced Americans or Jewish novelists and a few obliquely Christian poets as signs of hope.

Care to add to the list?

TRUE HOSPITALITY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The New Hampshire economy – like the rest of New England, actually – relies heavily on tourism. But to put a smiling face on the cash cow, businesses and public officials alike call it the hospitality industry.

Dictionaries, however, say nothing about making a profit on hospitality. In fact, one calls it “behaving in a kind and generous manner toward guests; fond of entertaining; affording or expressing generosity toward guests.” Generosity extended by the host, we should note, and not the guest.

But looking at the word afresh, I’m also seeing another industry arising: the hospital. As in hospitalization. Oh, my.

ENDLESS PRAIRIE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As a child, we could listen to the grandfathers and uncles talk about the good old days and their friends on the farms they left behind. Those conversations have been lost but remain a part of my heritage, my shaping — I have renounced those things, but return with a sense of ambivalence, that something more is lost — that there is no direction or depth in the changes.

The prairie was endless for the Amerindian, who lived securely within its radiance of circles, rippling harmonies, its ecologies — man, four-legged brothers, and spirits. Then the white man broke this, with straight lines: plows and axes. Like a bottle, the endless prairie was broken; its essence oozed away, like a bleeding wound.  In breaking the tall grassed prairie, the white man created a new one — a desert of desolate spaces he could not understand, replenish, or be replenished by. He was depleting that which he came to find, forever. The history we consider is blazed by changes — turmoil, revolts, new kingdoms overriding the old; the Israeli history of ancient tentacles — it is not a history of land and people eternal, but rather a history of decay, of individual men or, at best, their generations as the whole thing changes in directions no one can foresee — the concept of PROGRESS with its central OGRE . . . the hidden desires to somehow make static or permanent the very creations of the destruction, which must obviously fail. In this new prairie the automobile was created and perfected — a means for fleeing, for destroying the COMMON UNITY of persons living through necessity in some kind of harmonic chord with the land (even the pioneers who broke the prairie and its Indian harmonies, had at least the peasants’ sense of the value of earth to man — they knew the traces of tribe in themselves and could still revere Mother Earth) — but with AUTO the prairie could be leveled even more — consider the vertical element that had been eliminated when BUFFALO were exterminated!  enclaves of community become vulnerable, to escape as well as invasion — The Endless Prairie we have now can be broken. Pilgrimage made. The mind freed. We have our options, to fly away, or to enter inner circles. Either way, to become Indians (of America or Asia — both have ways). To focus, not upon the flatness, but on the hidden paths appearing in the Small Things.

As I used to chant: Hari Om Prasad!

RETHINKING FUNERALS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

A few Saturdays ago, I attended an all-day workshop at the meetinghouse that addressed alternatives to America’s modern funeral industry. Yes, we Friends advocate simplicity and equality and environmental sustainability, among other things, but this was quite an eye-opener.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably assumed that much of the practice is simply not up for discussion – that you have to go through a funeral director, have a corpse embalmed, use a casket and vault, for instance. Not so, at least here in New England, as we learned.

For starters, my big shock came at looking at the price-tag on funeral services – and even though the Federal Trade Commission requires establishments to hand out a general price list to all who ask, two of the largest funeral homes in our area refused to provide that information. So much for comparison shopping on a major expenditure. Even so, we could see that the billing starts at a “basic fee” of about $2,000 or more … and then every activity or product gets added on. As I sat there, I calculated that even without embalming, dressing, casketing, hearse and limo, or a funeral home ceremony, simple cremation could run over five grand. Huh?

You can imagine what a full funeral begins to run. Me, I’d rather leave my heirs a new car.

This was before we even considered the heavy pollution arising from either embalming and burial or cremation or other negative social costs.

Compounding all this, of course, is the fact that few people are willing to look directly at the inevitability of death, especially their own. (Otto Rank, one of Freud’s two major disciples, saw the fear of death as the central psychological problem, rather than sex.) To consider these issues calmly and clearly, then, becomes a spiritual or religious act that embraces the totality of life itself.

What we found in the workshop was that rather than morbidity, we were celebrating life as an entire cycle.

There were two separate parts under consideration, and each could be done independently of the other.

  • Home funeral: This is the option of keeping the deceased’s body in the home before burial or cremation, and of arranging ceremonies or observations that fit the family’s desires. This includes cleansing and preparation of the body, as desired.
  • Green burial: This is chemical-free, without a vault, and allows the body to decompose naturally. The coffin may be made locally, or one may prefer to use a shroud alone.

As we “walked through” the preparation of a body (a volunteer from our circle), we began to feel how loving and caring the activity could be, especially as part of a community. We were especially moved by the simple beauty of a shroud and its outer wrapping as an alternative to a coffin. (I’d long been intrigued by the Amish use of a shroud, and now I’m sold – it’s elegant and far more natural than a traditional casket.)

We have much to think about and examine. Among them is what steps we need to take to assure we can do this in our own burial ground – is the soil proper, are there any zoning restrictions, do we want to let one section revert to forest after burials?

But at least we’re thinking.

If this strikes a chord with you, feel free to check out National Home Funeral Alliance for contacts and directions.

WHAT ARE THE DEEPER VALUES?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I like a faith that values questions. Especially the ones that elude easy answer. The ones that keep us on our toes. The ones that keep us digging.

What have you done today has much more meaning than one that asks what you believe.

Questions of where have you encountered the Holy One? … and where have you served? … are more fitting.

The matters of peace and joy and hope and justice and, well, it’s a long list – are meaningless unless we manifest them in our daily encounters. Like St. Paul’s insistence on praying without ceasing, it’s an impossible task, which is precisely the point. Keep trying! And maybe you find out it’s not just up to you alone, but the Holy One as well. Again, we return to relationship.

I began these reflections as a matter of yoga and the question of whether it’s religion. Are you letting go of yourself (and your tensions and anger and desires and …) as you exercise? In your meditation? In your service to others during the day? Are you sensing the presence of the Holy One throughout?

Are you aware of the obstacles and barriers that arise as well?

If you are, it’s religion.

As for teaching kids in a classroom, what’s wrong with that? Just don’t confine it to a box with labels and wrapping.

So now we’re down to the core conundrum in the separation of church and state issue. How do you live your faith without demanding others do it for you? Or, to a lesser extent, live it the way you would?

Inhale, stretch. Exhale, touch your toes. You still have to do it! Close your eyes, then, and feel what’s happening within.