To Lay it Down

 In the Quaker lexicon is the phrase "to lay it down".   Sometimes we talk about laying down a committee.  Other times we talk about laying down a leading.  Very occasionally we talk about laying down a whole Meeting.  This language is different than the secular notion of ending or terminating a committee or a position, because with all things Quaker it implies that there is discernment and faithfulness involved.   The idea is that that The Holy One both leads us into or gives life to a thing and will in due time lead us out of, or allow for the death of a thing.   As written about in a previous post, we are not to "out run" a leading, to stay at something beyond the time that the Creator intends for us to carry out this activity.  The idea here is that both the beginning and the end are Divinely determined - not just driven by one's own thinking, will or ego.

How then might one discern to lay something down?  If the thing no longer has life or vitality this might be regarded as a sign.   If a new leading or a new direction has arisen to supersede the old path. Sometimes a thing begins to feel heavy and a burden.  Sometimes it seems as if the path forward has nothing but obstacles and difficulties and is "no longer open". Friends sometimes speak of a "door closing" and that when one door closes another may open.

One of the most famous stories about laying something down is the apocryphal story of William Penn speaking to George Fox.  In this story William Penn was, as was the way of men of title wearing a sword.  But he was troubled by this as he sensed it did not fit the Quaker testimony on nonviolence, and so he asks George Fox if he should still be wearing his sword.   Fox is said to have replied: "Wear thoust sword as long as thoust can."  Meaning it is up to you, your conscience will guide you.  This I think speaks loudly about a Quaker sensibility that a time will come when a thing will come clear and nothing else will be possible.

I think Friends would be well served to examine carefully our committee structure and to see if some committees are perhaps ready to be laid down, to not simply assume that because we have already had such a committee for a long time, because it is "traditional" to have that committee that it is still rightly ordered to proceed with it.   Many a Friends Meeting as it shrank in size has struggled to keep and fill all its committees when it would have been better served to pare down the number of committees so there more energy and vitality on each committee.   The sense of stress and over stretchedness maybe in deed a sign of something ready to be laid down.

I once witnessed the nominating committee of the Yearly Meeting come and report that they recommended that they be laid down because they had struggled mightly to fill many committee positions and had not been able to do so.  They felt they had been faithful in their work but that the way was closed and they wished to name it as so.  The crisis this caused on the floor of the yearly meeting led to an ad hoc committee being formed on the spot to address the situation and many Friends stepping forward to fill unfilled positions.   By their faithfulness the energy was shifted and a new way forward was found.   This was profound faithfulness, that ego would not have allowed for.  It points to a profound truth about laying something down: it takes courage.

Quakers are greying terribly, the average age is now in the 70's.  Many Meetings are shrinking terribly and are struggling to have enough members to pay the upkeep of the building.  The truth is...we are now facing, as are many churches all across America, that many of our Meetings will need to be laid down in the next decade.   How can Friends discern to lay down a Meeting?  How could it serve a greater good?  Here are some queries that occur to me:

When is the ownership of a building a burden rather than a support to a worshipping body?

Is our worship still vital with this number?

Are there circumstances we can forsee that might grow this Meeting again?

What other good works could be done with the Building? - as tenants or as recipients of a gift?

If we sold our building what other good works could we empower with the money?

Does it feel energizing or deadening to consider releasing our building?

How would my life be different if I did not attend this Meeting?

Pastoral Care

 For over 300 years Friends have had Ministry and Oversight committees or just Oversight or just Pastoral Care, or Care and Concerns.  Recently Friends have begun to shed the term oversight for its cultural insensitivity.   Really the purpose of the committee however named is to do pastoral care.  But what does that mean in a setting where we have no pastor?  It would seem it means how do we care for each other?

Pastoral Care committees (or substitute other name your Meeting uses) traditionally handle membership applications, weddings, clearness committees of all kinds, the creation of the annual state of the meeting report, etc.  Since the AIDs crisis brought the death and dying of many members who often did not have close family, Meeting has also created Care committees for those in poor health or in some stage of dying and those are typically managed by the Pastoral Care committee (or in some very large Meetings by a seperate Care Committee that manages the care committees.)  Many other churches do have the casserole brigade that brings food in the case of a death or illness....mostly in my experience we don't do this so well.

But what kind of care do we need?  It has been my observation that many older friends are fiercely self sufficient and while willing to help others would be mortified at receiving "help" from others.  This stands in contradiction to the reports from folks who have served on care committees that talk about it being deeply meaningful, and being spiritually enriched by the opportunity to give.   Are we willing to give the gift of receiving?

I also note that our original pastoral care practices were developed when Friends lived and farmed in the same community, often having many other daily paths of intersection: as neighbors, business owners/patrons, mid-wife, social relations, etc.  So they knew if someone was sick or dying, they knew if someone suffered a financial loss, or lost a job or suffered in various ways.  Now Friends are often spread out, seeing each other only on Sunday and mostly in silence.    How then do we learn of each others spiritual and physical needs?   Some meetings do some version of sharing joys and concerns (that may happen once a month or weekly).   Some meeting take prayer requests (which only some are brave enough to participate in) and some meetings have worship sharing with some kind of frequency which may fill in some details about people's lives...but for the most part we are often in the dark about each others needs which is why we struggle to do pastoral care well.

Recently a F/friend of mine who belongs to two Meetings broke her foot and was in a foot cast and confined to her house with orders to walk as little as possible for two weeks.   She later confided to me that no one from either Meeting had reached out to her or asked what she might need.  This is what I mean about how do we do Pastoral Care?  In other churches the pastor might have checked in on her.

Years ago a member of the Meeting I then belonged to who was a very active member, clerk of various committees over the years, weekly attender, etc began to report her mother was dying.  She was absent flying across the country to be with her mother several times.   We said prayers for her and waited for her return to give her hugs and sympathy. Her mother died.   But she did not return.   We thought she was taking time to grieve.  After about 3 months Pastoral Care called, to discover that she was mad, quite angry with us.   No one had called her during that time, Pastoral care had called once, and she had received no cards or emails.   She felt abandoned and uncared for by her spiritual community and had begun to question what kind of community was it really?   

For me it raised many questions about our assumption that we would do all our pastoral care when we see each other.   What does it mean to be in a spiritual community?

Perfectly Unfinished

 We all live unfinished lives.   With the exception of an older man I know who had recently updated his will, paid all his bills on a certain day and went out for a run, came back feeling “tired” and lay down and never got up again…all of leave a lot of things undone.  A client of mine’s father was a hoarder and when went to a nursing home her siblings and her had to hire a squad of workers with a truck to spend two weeks basically excavating the house and taking everything to the dumb.  (A task made harder by the fact that there were a few valuable objects and documents mixed into the mess.)   My best friends mother, mad after her husbands Aunt died leaving them excuators of her estate in another state (without asking) and the years it took them to handle everything, was determined to not leave this sort of burden to her kids.   Unfortunately, her husband who declined into dementia did not have the capacity to do the same.  So for years after his death she sorted boxes and got rid of things and organized and gave things away.   And yet after her death it took her daughter a good six months to separate out the items for family members and get them to them, have Salvation army take other things, and yes sort….the boxes and boxes of photos before putting the Condo on the market, and there will still be paperwork for another year.  I think somewhere between the man who died at the end of bill day and the hoarder, there is a balance that represents living but being thoughtful of those who will clean up behind us.  (I have to say all three of these people died as they lived.)

There are no finished lives.   A friend of mine is dying in a hospital right now. (post note she died 10/26/21).  She is essentially without family.  There will be no one to clear the stuff out of her apartment.  The landlord will be left to get a squad to haul everything out, and that is with a month unpaid rent as well.  She also had established no medical power of attorney which made things very difficult after she got in the hospital.  Those she was most close to were not allowed updates on her medical status and had to beg the doctors to hear the relevant information we had about her health condition.  The law defaults to next of kin, meaning the hospital found and called a sister she had not spoken to in years and asked her to make final decisions about medical care for my friend.   Reader, if you don’t have a medical power attorney established, stop pretending you will never die and get the paper work done!  We are all after all in a pandemic.

There are no perfect lives.   A client of mine has struggled for years with a sort of perfectionism that keeps her stuck.  Afraid to choose anything for fear of making a wrong choice, or passing up a right choice she remains firmly affixed to the fence unable to make choices that would move her forward.  She is a potter and recently as we worked on the perfectionism in the rest of her life she had the insight that in pottery she knows she had to be experimental or she would do nothing.  That it is all “practice” and that sometimes she likes the piece enough to keep it and others are composted and she begins again.   She realized she has to live life this way.   That she has to be able to be experimental, make mistakes and start again. She said: “Nothing is perfect.  Nothing is done.  Safely never finished”.   It is true there is safety in being unfinished because if we had to live our lives with everything just so, everything ready to be in its final state. …we could not live.

Live a perfectly unfinished life.   I have told me daughter that when I die the box of college papers I could not part with, the file drawers of old campaigns I worked on and finacial papers, and old journals can go straight to recycle.  I have shown her where the one file is that has important legal paper work in it and where all the passwords to my computer stuff can be found.  I have told her to take what possessions of mine she wants and give away or dispose of the rest.  But I hope that whatever laundry is undone, dishes undone, projects or paperwork, that the expression of love, and the acts of kindness and the fight for justice has been done in a perfectly unfinished way!  I hope that I will feel that over all I have spent the hours of my life on the things that matter most.  

Living with Uncertainty and other teachings of Corona

 Our country is getting more and more polarized over the Coronavirus.  I was amused when Donald Trump's press secretary first spoke of alternative facts.  What an oxymoron.  But now like living into a science fiction movie, there are people on both sides of the divide furious with the other side for doing what they regard to be life threatening or life worth living threatening behaviors. There is no way for them to even discuss the "facts" of the issue because they have different news sources and literally different facts.  In my clinical practice I listen to families that are being torn apart by these differences, and literally to people moving to other states, so they can either live where people are vaccinated, or live where they do not have to wear masks.

My last blog about the virus I said "well clearly Corona is not done teaching us.  We are still being held still in order to learn."  But I was getting pretty tired and board myself with that.   It was easy to just feel like "I wish those other people would hurry up and learn so we can get out of purgatory."  That is never a good position when you stop noticing what you might need to be learning.

Recently while talking to one of my clients - I noticed that all of us, both sides are grasping desperately for certainty, for normalcy.  One side grasp for an end through vaccination and herd immunity, the other grasps to maintain a freedom of choice and the normalcy that comes with that.  It occurred to me that through out time humans have looked for and made up explanations for the scary and unexplained thing in their time.  Ancient people explained earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes as the God's were angry with the people.  A previous generation believed the earth was flat because that was what they could see and the idea it was round felt like we could "fall off".  In a pandemic gone by people not knowing about germs and how they spread believed that whole towns fell ill because witches communed with the Devil.  There is a long list of things that without understanding the science, people made up explanations for.   Actually part of how our brains are literally wired is to fill in missing pieces of info to make sense.  If you print a word without a vowel most people will substitute it and not even know they did.

We don't want uncertainty.  It is uncomfortable; it feels scary.  We feel better with an explanation even if it is as horrible as one of our neighbors is a witch who has turned the whole town over to the Devil.

What arises for me out of this - especially if Corona is here as our spiritual teacher, is how do we learn to live with uncertainty?   It seems to me it requires quite a bit of faith, a belief in a Supreme being who is weighing in for good.  It means learning how to live inside the Serenity prayer.  It means having to surrender the desire for certainty and big T truths.  It means embracing the mystical which is the unknown and trusting being on a journey.  It means not turning away from the suffering which is part of the unknown experience we are having.  It means having to learn to respond with compassion and find hope from within.

Love, Lover, Beloved

 I have a friend who is Sufi.   She tells me that Sufi's frequently talk about God as Love, Lover and Beloved.   This is interesting to me.  Certainly Christianity talks about God as a force of Love, and certainly a sense of Beloved.  But the idea of God as Lover seemed new.

In my 20's I grappled with questions of "what Gender is God?" and tried on what was the experience of tuning into Goddess.  While this did seem to tap into slightly different aspects of the Divine, in the end I came down on the feeling that the Divine is genderless or as we would say now nonbinary.  During that time I was working out what to call God.  In a particular episode I heard the words of the Cris  Williamson song: Song of the Soul.   This is a song which had played in the background of my life without my putting particular attention on it.   So I would hear this part:

Love of my life
I am crying
I am not dying
I am dancing
Dancing along in the madness
There is no sadness
Only a song of the soul

And we'll sing this song
Why don't you sing along?

and in my minds eye I thought it was a song about a human lover:  "love of my life"   But suddenly one day as I listened more closely I caught the first line:

Open mine eyes
That I may see
Glimpses of truth
Thou hast for me
Open mine eyes
Illumine me
Spirit divine

and I could finally see that this was a song about Spirit Divine - but also about God as Lover, as Partner, and in a dramatic turn then all of the names I had played with as the right name for "God" played in my head to the beautiful melody of this song, Song of the Soul, profoundly making the point that all of them are names for God.

So as my Sufi friend tells me that they think of God as Lover, I realize this does open a new energy for me around the Holy One.  Many of the Christian descriptions of God are of a parental God or "Lord" a sort of powerful ruler.  While Jesus calls god Aba, there is not God as Mother (Only Mother Mary) and there is certainly not words or frames for god as partner, friend or lover.  This is a kind of intimacy that Christianity does not suggest.  It is however an exciting set of possibilities.  It suggests a more tender approach from God, and a much closer in relationship - not a God that is "in the Sky" or otherwise far away but one that is right there at ones side.  And put next to the word Beloved, it also suggests a sort of reciprocal loving and adoration.  I think I will be living into this idea for a while.

Your Services are no Longer Needed

 Recently I spoke to a f/Friend of mine who I had not seen in over a year.  She is in her later 70's and she has been clerk of our midsized meeting for the last 12 years.  But recently the nominating committee told her that "because she is so busy that they wanted her to have a break" by which they meant that they were not renewing her nomination as clerk.  They offered her no other role either.

There are several things wrong with this picture.  One is that she was allowed to serve for 12 years as clerk to begin with.  That reflects either poor nominating practice or an absence of other leadership and a too convenient reliance on those who will continue serving.  It makes sense that if other leaders finally came along or someone finally named the bad practice of over reliance on some Friends that they finally addressed it.  But what else is wrong with this picture is how it was addressed.  Friends, it is not Quaker plain speech to project onto someone, to tell them they are too busy, when they themselves have not made that complaint.  (Yes she had complained about busyness in a way that each of us do when pressed for time....but not in the way that we do when we state I have too much on my plate.  I need relief.)  It seems fundamentally inappropriate to decide for someone that they are too busy.   It might be a very good question to ask.   Or in the case of people who really do try to do too much and do it poorly it wound be Quaker honesty to say "We see that when you are doing, x, y, z and A and B that you are making mistakes.  We are having trouble with some of the mistakes.  We feel like this won't work unless you are willing to release some things which things are you willing to release.  And to involve the person in solving how things will become manageable again.  The final thing wrong is that her position was taken away without giving her any other role which seems to imply that she suddenly has no value or role to play in her beloved Meeting.

When Friends have served long terms because of unusual circumstances where nothing else is possible it should be established clearly by the nominating committee:  "we normally only have two 2 year terms for clerk.  Because the incoming clerk's partner was diagnosed with cancer we are asking you to do one more term.  We regret having to over extend your term and we will replace you at the end of this term."  The nominating committee, the person in question and the Meeting should avoid idea that there is any position that only one person can do.  That is pride and incorrect.   Someone with no experience will do it differently and perhaps less well but this maybe divinely ordered growth on their part, or a much needed chance for the Meeting to experience change.  But if someone has been needed in an extra term it is good to have it set up with the expectation that the term will end so it can be celebrated when it ends!   Leadership is always an act of love and sweat and we need to celebrate each other for what we give to our Meetings.  When a nominating committee if being indirect and not genuine in their communication about end of term, the person is left to wonder did they screw up, did people not see their labor, and ultimately where they unappreciated which certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  I strongly suspect that they were so worried about hurting her feelings by telling her they did not want her to be clerk any more that they made up this story they were taking care of her.   The thing is they were not so it actually did hurt her feelings because she was left to wonder all the question above and if she had done something wrong.  

This is one of the many reasons why it is good Quaker practice to have terms for committee service (even if different for some positions) and to have a limit on how many consecutive terms a person can serve.   Our Meetings have many positions so certainly a person has other places to serve.  It is thinking too narrowly about any/all of us to think we have only one or even two places we can well serve the Meeting.  It is possible to set up situations where people who have not served on a committee come on under someone's leadership and learn by serving with them and then leader rotates off and the newer member is ready to step up.  This is also good practice to create the conditions to grow leadership.  

But what, I can hear someone saying, if there really is not enough people to serve?   Well that is a crisis best faced rather than papered over by having some people lead forever.  It both burns out people and it creates a failure to face the cross roads the group is at.  I recall one year at my Yearly Meeting the nominating committee came to the session and reported that after a whole year of "begging" people to serve and still having 17 unfilled positions they were laying themselves down and asking the Yearly Meeting to face the real issue - that we had a committee structure too big for who we now were.  I thought it an inspired move.  (The sitting clerk handled it very badly.)  If we name that we don't have enough people then it does give us the opportunity to look at how do we need to simplify and at what point do we even have to lay a Meeting down/

Simultaneous to this my F/friend is also a founding member of a Quaker organization for whom she has played many leadership roles over decades.  In that situation, it has sometimes been the case that her involvement made others feel they could not match her enthusiasm or commitment, so hang back from really fully engaging themselves. Being aware of that, and the fact that she will not live forever, she has herself tried to step back again, so there is space for others to learn rules and take leadership.  But when someone who had agreed to be clerk of that organization abruptly withdrew they turned back to my f/Friend and asked her to step back in, only to later rather abruptly remove her when they felt they had found a replacement.  It seems to me that this again fails to see her as a person rather than a needed function or skill set.  

This is where the nominating committee needs to sit down in a very honest conversation with her about what does succession and right use of her gifts look like?   To say (which she knows but as if the person does not) "You have played an essential role in this organization.  We would be no where if but for you....and you will not live forever.  How can you help us plan for the time when you will no longer be here?   What do you see needs to be passed on and how?  What role do you want to play as those shoes are filled?"(There is a reason why there are "emertis" roles in institutions.  They are a chance to retain institutional knowledge and wisdom while it is still here with us.)   It is also I think incumbent on a group like this to find a way to publicly celebrate the role of a founder and not just let them diminish away.  Or worse yet have things taken away from them one by one "your services no longer needed" until they feel a pariah to their own organization.

No ones service should become an institution.  No one is irreplaceable.  On the other hand no one who has served their Quaker Meeting or institution should feel like they are used and thrown away, a disposable in a throw away culture.  Our culture needs to be one that celebrates people and has a right place for everyone and knows how to celebrate gifts given.

 

Pagan Quaker

 Recently in my worship group I gave a message about how in novel about stopping climate change the author imagines them creating a new religion which will save the earth but jokes it is really an old religion Paganism.  It is about loving the earth.   

To my surprise after that about 4 other messages were given (in our already quite small group) about people never believing in the "Old white bearded dude in the sky, but in Mother Earth", about talking to trees, or being able to center in nature and find spirit there.   Later we did a worship sharing with the simple query How is nature spiritual for you?  I noted for me that the bigness of nature; the ocean, the mountain, the forest, all have this majesty and eternal quality to them that brings me back to the Divine Mother.  Others spoke about the beauty as the thing that brought them in harmony.  The second query was how can we come more deeply into relationship with the earth?   Many of us acknowledged that this one is harder to answer.   So much has been done by existing paradigms to seperate us from the earth.  We have so many blind spots.   But it seems important.  In fact critical at this moment on earth.

The person who created the queries notes that she had looked in Faith and Practice and also at Quaker Earth Care Witness queries.  But she had not been able to find ones she liked.  She had not been able to find them because the ones she found still had a sort of how can we care for or have stewardship over the earth.  She sensed that it is still a separateness paradigm or worse yet a human over earth view point.  She could not find queries that acknowledged the inherent spiritualness of the earth or asked us to be "in relationship" with the earth as Native spirituality so clearly does, or as the science of eco systems does.

What would it mean to be a Quaker Pagan?  To come back into relationship with the earth - to sit under the silence of a tree and hear its message?

                                    Crescent Lake, WA