Tag: Spirituality

FORGET THE STEEPLE, IT’S ALL THE PEOPLE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

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.

 

SOCCER MOM, RUGBY DAD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time …

So here we are. Who would have thought we’d be attending kids’ soccer and rugby matches? Not us!

Or dealing with declining parents. Your mother’s dementia must be difficult. You mention that she still remembers people and is in a wheelchair, which makes me wonder if she’s afflicted with Alzheimer’s or something different. My wife and the girls talk fondly of Grandpa Marion and how his Alzheimer’s brought out a sweetness in him, while another, with episodes in the past years, turns mean and paranoid. Parkinson’s is rough, too, with its long decline; I lost a dear Mennonite mentor last January, in Virginia, and one of my best friends here is in the early stages – so far, controlled by medication, when they get it right.

Galapagos? My elder girl will be very envious. At age 11, she went on a big Darwin kick, a passion that has never abated. A few years ago, we went down to the Boston Museum of Science for a special exhibit they had, and it was quite impressive. In all of the historical debate over his insights, I’m surprised we don’t hear more about the religious roots of his work – most of his encouragement and support seemed to come from clergymen. Me, I’m quite fond of his later affection with earthworms. Maybe it has to do with my monster composting.

Now I still want to hear how you distinguish between mystery and magic. I have a few ideas, but I doubt they’re as expansive or insightful as yours.

In the meantime, I’m hoping to get back to poetry by early fall. Why can’t I stick to just one kind of writing? Or be somehow easily identifiable? A good friend’s son, who is a successful serious novelist, seems to have the same problem. He, too, wants every book to be unique, rather than a continuation of or variation on his others.

Gotta run … time to commute, again. And tomorrow, another birthday. How can that be?

IN THE MIX

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

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.

TRULY CORRESPONDENCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

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.

As I said, I’m impressed.

WITH OR WITHOUT A PULPIT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

If I speak of pastoral Friends, it’s often because I often see there some attempts to respond to problems we, too, face. There are ways their side has adapted from broader society, just as we have, in our own manner. We typically share periods of open worship, though theirs are admittedly much shorter and often filled with prayer requests. We share some common difficulties, starting with the “herding cats” problem or the attempt to transport a hundred frogs in a wheelbarrow; at least we don’t have to go through the trials of hiring or firing a pastor. But there are times, admittedly, when I wish we had someone who could devote more full attention to the demands of our Meeting.

Visiting among pastoral Friends can be challenging, as well as rewarding. There are often differences in language and understanding – same-gender marriage being one. Sometimes we can see ways we fail to reach out into the wider community; I recall one minister telling of making a pastoral call here in New England, where he entered the kitchen of one of his parishioners to find the man seated under a bare light bulb, wearing an undershirt, smoking, and drinking a can of beer. “I go because it’s the neighborhood church,” the pastor was told, as if we should be so inviting. Sometimes it’s the insights from our Puente connection, and the life of Cuban Friends as a community of faith. These encounters certainly help me look at Dover Meeting from fresh perspectives.

Some of the most interesting dialogue among Friends has been happening in the journal, Quaker Religious Thought, which is found in our Meeting library. It’s not just that we share a common root, but also that we face a common future that fascinates me. Often, our experience has more in common than we might care to admit. Sometimes there’s even strength in numbers.

CHOOSING FRIENDS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

Theological issues play very little into why a family chooses one church over another. So the surveys tell us. Instead of its beliefs, a church is chosen for its youth program, its overall vitality, music, the kinds of expectations it will or won’t place on members, and so on.

Puts Friends in a pretty strange position, doesn’t it? What committee do you want to serve on?

On the other hand, our existence as a “do-it-yourself” congregation requires us, personally and as a group, to draw out individuals and families and engage in their daily lives. One of our strengths is that Quaker meeting allows room for spiritual growth over the years, within a wide range of activity, while maintaining an intimate connection. Our small size, in an era of mega-churches, presents us with advantages, especially in knowing one another authentically. Besides, worship is quite distinct from entertainment.

Now, how do we roll out this welcome mat? Maybe I would remind folks that our place of worship is a house, first and foremost. Come on in and get comfortable. And then be fed. Be sure, of course, to lend a hand with the dishes.

WITHOUT A DOMINANT LEADER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I wrote at the time:

My spiritual work from my Yakima years on has always been within a collegial circle, rather than with a dominant leader. In this, much of my reading/study of Scripture has been along the lines of Arthur Waskow’s book, Godwrestling, a Jewish communal tradition of arguing with the text, asking if the writers had it right, if there were alternate outcomes, and so on. This is quite different from the legalistic approach taken by fundamentalists of all stripes or even much of the mainstream.

Quaker Theology has published my piece, “The Quaker Enterprise of Metaphor,” laying out an alternative way of thinking, one based on personal experience more than speculation or splitting hairs. Your mention of Kaballah reminds me of a volume I got as a present, The Jew in the Lotus, about an individual who discovered the mystical and varied sides of his heritage while traveling in a small delegation to the Dalai Lama, who was curious not just about angels being everywhere but also about keeping a faith alive in Diaspora.

Over the past few years, I’ve been connecting the dots of an alternative Christianity, one that apparently flourished before the Nicene Council in 325 C.E. and resurfaced in the early Quaker movement, which had to couch its articulation because the Blasphemy Act still included capital punishment. This line of reasoning remains controversial, and I hesitate to say too much too early in my writing. Essentially, “Christ” is something other than the historic person known as Jesus – more along the lines of the Judaic Sophia and the Greek Logos concepts or principles. (So I had to laugh when you reminded me, regarding the spelling of Chanukah, of Jesus’ last name! No, it’s not Christ! It would have been Joshua bar Joseph!) This version also points away from the conventional teaching of Trinity, or of Jesus as God incarnate, and toward a different framework. Just don’t try this on your more conventional neighbors, even with chapter and verse from the New Testament. They’d be really baffled by the short version: Christ is bigger than Jesus.

In all of this, I recognize that something happens in the meditative silence, or “waiting worship,” no matter how we try to define it. In sitting, especially among others, I’m somehow reconnected to intuition and deep emotions, as well as to the other people in our circle. And without it, I really can’t write poetry. (Prose is another matter.)

Still, as my wife asks, how does this make me a better person? I hate to think what the replacement would be!

WORKING BEHIND THE SCENES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

For me, one line of career growth involved a growing recognition of the importance of working behind the scenes. As I watched the conductor Max Rudolf eschew stardom and New York for music-making in Cincinnati, I perceived something quite different from Leonard Bernstein or Herbert von Karajan’s being in the celebrity spotlight. Similarly, Glenn Thompson, the first editor to hire me, had a knack for giving other people credit for his own ideas and visions, and then pushing them forward to completion – including the new Wright State University I attended my first year and a half of college. Glenn, too, was the one who impressed upon me the importance of keeping a personal journal.

Another line stemmed from the illustrations accompanying profiles of serious authors that showed intensive revision of a single page of work. This was much more complex than daily deadline writing, even when the copy desk had finished its round on the text itself. Extended interviews, such as those in the Paris Review, demonstrated how vastly different individual writers functioned, too: fastidious Nabokov, for instance, contrasted to runaway Kerouac.

Still another line reflected economic changes. A few months before my graduation from college, the Wall Street Journal, which had expressed interest in hiring me, instead laid off several hundred reporters and editors. Rather than moving to a big city, as anticipated, I wound up laboring in out-of-the way communities, which presented me with other experiences and insights. As my career grew, I worked largely behind the scenes, editing other people’s writing and presenting the day’s stories and photos for our many readers. I was fortunate to have a series of bosses I admired and respected, and making them look good was also one of my priorities. Again, it was working behind the scenes, an approach I later realize had also been my father’s. In the long run, the economic changes have continued to buffet the publishing industry, from books and magazines to newspapers themselves, all struggling against decline and marginalization. Over the years, we’ve watched the declining importance of reading and writing among the general populace: the term “famous novelist” going from Hemingway and Faulkner to Mailer and Heller to Stephen King and Anne Rice, for instance. Or who now can name a newspaper editor or publisher, after the likes of Scotty Reston, Ben Bradlee, or Vermont Connecticut Royster? Or a major poet, after Ginsberg or Plath?

From my college years on, I’ve taken a route tempered by the hippie influence, which initially challenged many of my assumptions and goals and led to the yoga ashram instead of graduate school – or even law school, which had once appealed. The ashram practice worked to crush much of my ego, instilled a degree of humility, and opened me to spiritual awareness and discipline, before sending me forth again on a journey that eventually brought me into Quaker circles, or the Society of Friends, which I much later discovered was the faith of my Hodson ancestors. Crucially, the practice of meditation – first as a yogi, and then as a Quaker – also opened an appreciation and understanding of poetry for me in ways the classroom could not. Maybe it was just the silence as a breath of light.

In my personal writing, what has unfolded is more a practice of meditation, reflection, collection of otherwise random thoughts and feelings, and inner playfulness, than a quest for any “finished” product. Not that a set of poems or a polished novel in hand does not also give pleasure.  So here we are, backstage, as it were. Or, with the blog, in the loft. Not a bad place now, is it?

BUSINESS AT HAND: IN THE MINUTES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Much in our Quaker practice seems quaint, none more than our practice of minuting. It’s not the same as taking minutes of a company board meeting or city council session, but has a dimension all its own. Originating in the recording of persecutions in the initial decades of the Quaker movement, and in the subsequent petitions for redress and justice, our earliest minutes tell of “sufferings for Truth’s sake” and soon lead into the efforts of determining just what it means to live as a people of conscience.

Sometimes today we find the practice burdensome or unnecessary. Friends who follow the Old Ways in this matter will draft and read aloud the record on that part of the agenda, moving ahead only after that minute has been revised to satisfaction and approved. It’s slow and tedious, but it does focus the deliberations.

Here, the concept of clerking – especially for the recording clerk – has a meaning related to “clerk of court,” where the official records decisions from the bench above. In our case, Friends traditionally feel the high judge as Christ, and the meeting gathered as witnesses who would voice the sense of the resolution. I suppose we might see Friends attending our business sessions as a jury, then. If it were only as simple as guilty or not guilty!

Revisiting historic minutes, as I’ve done as a genealogist in the archives at Swarthmore and Guilford colleges, opens an appreciation for the practice as an art form. Perhaps no other records in America before the 1850 Census offer as much genealogical information as ours do. Even so, one discovers how faulty even the best efforts become. A individual simply fades from sight, a family moving away is recorded simply as “Robert and Sarah and children,” rather than naming them individually, as another clerk might have done, or the records might be lost to a house fire, as Centre, North Carolina’s, were, or simply lost altogether, as the first half-century of Dover’s were or West Epping’s were in our own lifetime. You might see an erasure, from first cousin to second, or a misspelling – and suddenly, you find yourself sitting with that clerk, somewhere in our history. This becomes something other than quaint, but personal engagement.

LOOKING FOR AN UNCOMMON GROUND

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

If you’re part of a faith community, you can ask this about your own circle: What do we have in common? That is, if we were required to write a “confession of faith” (in my case, for our Quaker meeting), what would we profess? What I’m envisioning is not a listing of what we do together, which our annual State of Society Report too easily becomes, but rather what lies under and behind our actions. I know that some Mennonite congregations from time to time draft what they call a “constitution,” although a corporate “mission statement” may also do here. The idea is to sharpen the focus of what a group already possesses and where it would like to go into the future. It’s a way of acknowledging and enlarging on the strengths and dreams of its members. Think of one retailer’s slogan, “Let’s build something together,” with its unvoiced understanding that they’re talking about people’s homes, rather than their investment portfolios, and maybe you get the picture.

I would hope that what we have in common is something other than similar tastes, income, educational attainment, lifestyles, party affiliation, or the like. Perhaps, in asking the question, we can even come to a clearer understanding of what diversity we, in fact, possess, and the potential it offers us.

Answering the question would, I suspect, be far more difficult than we might originally anticipate. On one hand, answering candidly might actually prove divisive. We’ve seen this as we responded to New England Yearly Meeting’s attempt to revise Faith and Practice for the next generation. On the other, delving into the question might also lead us into a clearer understanding of the core energies at the heart of our worshiping community. I recall Caroline Stephen’s amazement Friends can do anything, considering that Quakers are essentially a body of mystics. We’ve heard others compare trying to get us moving together like “trying to herd cats” or go somewhere with “a wheelbarrow full of frogs.”

What I do know is the difficulty of maintaining a witness – even plainness – apart from a community of faith. Community, with its definition of common unity. In the end, it requires far more than strength in numbers. It’s a matter, I’d say, of strength from our hearts.

*   *   *

Now, for my stab at the statement:

Dover Friends Meeting (Quaker) is a body of individuals and families who together encourage and pursue the New Testament goals of simplicity, equality, honesty, integrity, nonviolence and pacifism, and divine love in daily life. At its organizational core are the weekly hour of open, waiting worship in the presence of the Holy Spirit and the monthly meeting for business, both conducted in accord with the longstanding manner of the Society of Friends.