The Fox, the Fisherman and God's Direction

A client told me a children's story she had recently read.  The story goes like this.  A fox was in the woods and saw a fisherman coming along the path pulling a wagon full of fish.  The fox wanted some and so decided to lie in the road and play dead.  The fisherman came upon the fox and thought him dead and said: "Oh boy, a fine fox fur for me!"  He threw the fox in the wagon and as he walked along he dreamed and delighted.  "Oh", he thought, “it is a beautiful fox, it will bring a nice price at market, and then with the money I can buy more nets and I will catch more.  Then with the more catch I can buy a bigger and better boat, and then with the bigger and better boat I can hire a helper and then I will catch even more!  And then when I have the catch of two..."  Well, pretty soon as his dreams built and built and built he saw himself living in a castle. And all the while as he dreamed, the fox was having a delicious meal of fish in the wagon!

Suddenly he turned and discovered the fox eating away.  He grabbed the fox and shouted in anger:  “You, you are supposed to be dead!"  "Oh," said the fox, "I shall tell my mother, she will be very sad."  "Thief!" cried the fisherman.  "Oh," said the fox, "I have only taken a few fish."  "No," cried the fisherman, "you have stolen my castle!"  

How many of us, like the fisherman, have built our dreams based upon one event or one idea and then felt "our castle stolen" when events do not work out as we had wished?  This is not unlike the Quaker notion of out running a leading - where God gives us a direction, but then we run past the original leading and start planning and elaborating from there our own will and intention.

In my Jan. blog on Gratitude and Expectations I wrote:  "And yet I am aware of how we can become so attached to a dream, or a goal as to have the expectation that life will be a certain way and experience great disappointment or frustration when it is not that way."  I described this very situation of our stolen castle.  Elsewhere I have also written about Santa Claus prayers, the prayers we make for something specific, addressing them to God as if the Creator was a dispenser rather than a source of wisdom, comfort or direction.  All of this brings us back to what early Friends described as the dilemma of remaining low, by which they meant not getting up into our ego or our pride, staying centered and open enough to hear God's will.

As I have confessed on a number of occasions my most common spiritual problem for me is to remember The Guide in times of crisis.  At such times I tend to go into fear and panic and start trying to figure my way out of the crisis completely forgetting that I have a divine source of direction.  Recently I had a different experience with this.  I had had a very bad dispute with my partner: between adrenaline, a misunderstanding, and harsh words, and stomping off, we were very disconnected.  Some prayer in the middle of this disconnect did allow me to reach out and thus created some dialogue between us.  While we were healing from the dispute, some of the fallout remained a question of whether we could carry out other plans we had made, or whether that felt too risky.  We had a good discussion of this, but no conclusion was reached.  I suggested sleeping on it and then suddenly realized what I really needed to do was pray about it.  I'm immensely grateful that this time I could remember the Holy One in the midst of a problem.

The next day at Meeting I asked The Guide to show me clear direction about the question of whether the original plan should be carried out.  First two people who rose gave messages about missed opportunities.  That seemed like it could be an answer...that this would be a missed opportunity if cancelled.  But was I reading into what was said?  Then a third person rose and said before delivering her message:  "I have been sitting with this message trying to decide if it is a message because it is very short, but it feels like I have to say it."  Then she said: "Sometimes strength comes from unexpected places.  Stay open and stay connected."  That seemed very indisputably an answer.  (And I encourage all Quakers here to notice the importance of delivering a message, even when it does not seem to you to make sense; to be faithful as this Friend was.  It can be so important to someone else.)  My partner had had his own unique experience at Meeting which confirmed to him that he should continue with the original plan.

My experience is that pretty amazing things happen when we live in God's Kingdom rather than in castles we build in our own imagination.

Climate Change, Duality and The Triune Truth

I have been doing Climate Change organizing for 7 years.  It is hard work because it is a depressing subject that most people wish to avoid.  It very easily evokes in people feelings of good versus evil, and a great deal of discouragement about the ability of David to beat Goliath.  However, in my spiritual life I have come to regard duality as a false consciousness, so this creates an interesting tension for me.  Neale Donald Walsch writes very interestingly about the falseness of duality and how there is always a third possibility.  I quote:

"This Triune Reality is God's signature.  It is the divine pattern.  The three-in-one is everywhere found in the realms of the sublime.  You cannot escape it in matters dealing with time and space, God and consciousness, or any of the subtle relationships.  One the other hand, you will NOT find the Triune Truth in any of life's gross relationships. 
   The Triune Truth is recognized in life's subtle relationships by everyone dealing with such relationships.  Some of your religionists have described the Triune Truth as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Some of your psychiatrists use the terms superconscious, conscious and subconscious.  Some of your spiritualists say mind, body, and spirit.  Some of your scientists see energy, matter, ether.  Some of your philosophers say a thing is not true for you until it is true in thought, word, and deed.  When discussing time, you speak of three times only: past, present, future.  Similarly, there are three moments in your perception - before, now and after.  In terms of spatial relationships whether considering the points in the universe, or various points in your own room you recognize here, there, and the space in between.
   In matters of gross relationships, you recognize no "in-between".  That is because gross relationships are always dyads, whereas relationships of the higher realm are invariably triads.  Hence, there is left-right, up-down, big-small, fast-slow, hot- cold, and greatest dyad ever created: male-female.  There are no in-betweens in these dyads.  A thing is either one thing or the other, or some greater or lesser version in relationship to one of these polarities.
   Within the realm of gross relationships, nothing conceptualized can exist without a conceptualization of its opposite.  Most of your day-to-day experience is foundationed in this reality.
   Within the realm of sublime relationships nothing which exists has an opposite.  All is One, and everything progresses from one to other in a never-ending circle."
Conversations with God: Book 1  p.30-31

What Walsch writes is so helpful to me because of my own spiritual path.  I feel I have come to earth to work on issues of violence and injustice.  Yet in both, it is so easy to quickly get caught up in good versus evil sorts of ways of thinking which I have come to see actually perpetuate "enemy think" and the continuation of the spiral of violence and injustice.  So it has become clear to me that part of the path forward is to step out of duality, and yet I find that in many of the things I feel most passionately sort of pull me towards some sort of right wrong thinking.

This past week I went to a "dialogue about climate change".  Obviously this is a topic which brings strong feelings: fear, despair, grief, anger, etc.  It is not a dispassionate subject.  After showing a very depressing TED talk we were divided into groups of three and asked first to share our feelings about the statement: “Things are getting worse”, then about the statement “Things are getting better”, and finally about the statement: “Things are perfect as they are, or things are as they are”.  During the first part you could hear  words like destruction, grandchildren, politicians, species loss, etc. whirling around; it was somber in deed in the room.  This was the "easy" part.  I think for many of us the second part was most challenging - how to be with it without feeling like we were going into denial or whitewashing what is happening.  For myself I can both notice various solutions and initiatives people are taking that are indeed hopeful - and yet I know if we do not get the political will quickly to implement these things they are all pointless.  From a cyncial point of view I can say "Well Gaia is healing herself; she is throwing off the leaches that suck her dry and poison her.  She will live in the much longer span of the planet even if all human and mammal life perishes." 

My first gut reaction upon hearing the word perfect anywhere around climate change was “bullshit”.  But when I just sat with the sentence, I found it was a huge change in perspective.  It was like a lens that moved me out looking at the earth as big marble and at our past, current, and future time.  From this perspective I could notice we are each individually learning lessons both personal and collective.  We are playing roles both personal and collective in the fate of the earth.  It took me back out into the mystery...into all that we do not know.  A man burned himself in the Middle East and it spawned the Arab Spring.  Who could have predicted that?  Humans have accidentally discovered all kinds of technologies and all kinds of love and all kinds of ways of organizing ourselves.  In the face of crisis they have suddenly behaved differently.  Who are we to know what the experience or the meaning will be of a global crisis shared for the first time in history by every person on the earth.  And honestly we have no choice but to live into the mystery.

When we returned to the whole group the woman next to me commented that the first two questions were the polarity, but that the third question took us out of the duality.  In fact I see the third question is what Walsch calls the Triune Truth: there is the getting worse (or the Great Unraveling as Joanna Macy calls it), and the getting better (Or the Great Turning as both she and David Korten call it), and then there is things as they are (which Joanna might call non-linear time).  As long as we deal with the political issues before us in the language of "gross relationships" (as Walsch calls it) rather than the sublime which transcends polarity then we continue to beat our head against a reality in which we just take turns playing bad guys and good guys.  I think many of our answers will be found in the third space.

An example of this has to do with good guys and bad guys.  When we believe in a world of gross relationships then we are duty bound to fight the bad guys often engaging as President Obama has in actions that create bad karma for oneself and enrage others who then arise against us as the “bad guy” and the circle continues.  Whether you believe in reincarnation and your own string of past lives, or simply in your ancestors and know enough of their stories to know: you will then observe that each of us is enmeshed in centuries of being both oppressor and oppressed, powerless and powerful, kind and cruel, and that we contain within us all of these experiences and possibilities.  Part of the heart of non-violence is to call out to that other set of possibilities that exist within the person currently acting as oppressor or “wrong doer”.  We can really only do this however, as we drop the righteousness of wielder of Good and meet the other on the plane of the Triunal Truth…where we are all one and share the same fate.  I think as we face climate change this way of approaching the issue will become increasingly necessary.

Rippling Rings

We toss a stone in a creek and the rings go out from stone. The first ones as they reach some other object, then beginning a new backwash of rings.  The first rings we can follow, but as smaller ones still eminent from the stone and as they begin to interact with the backwash rings a third motion begins, and it becomes impossible to keep track of all that is set in motion from the one stone we drop in water.

This is not unlike the effects we have in the world.  One reason I will always appreciate the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" is because it so profoundly makes this point.  George Bailey thinks his life has come to nothing because he has not realized his dreams and is currently overcome with problems.  But he is shown that events that he had completely forgotten from his childhood had kept a good man out of prison, and also by saving his brother saved a whole carrier ship of US soldiers during the war.  This is not to begin to account the qualitative better town he has contributed to because people own their own homes rather than living it debt, etc.  Each of us lives this way, setting in motion a chain of circles and loosing complete track of how they interact with other forces and how they impact others.  If our intentions are good they let loose a positive motion in the world.  When our actions are filled with anger and fear they set loose yet another set of energies that reverberate through our world.

I think our words are particularly powerful in this rippling way.  Have you ever had the experience of someone coming back to you days or even years later to let you know they really thought about something you said, that the words really moved them?  I have.  But the most interesting example of this was that after I was divorced and feeling rather down, I received a post card from someone who had taken my workshop literally YEARS before.  The person said "just wanted to drop you a note to let you know how life changing my workshop with you was.  Thanks".  This was a ring that had gone out further than I could see it, and then came back to touch me at a moment I needed it!

Several years ago my Meeting had a worship sharing on "memorable messages".  We just shared messages that we had had heard in Meeting for worship at some point in our life which had touched us deeply enough to still be holding the message.  Think about it - this does not even come from us, but from our faithfulness.  The message is from God, but someone has to be faithful enough to the quaking to get up and deliver it, and because they do it is held for decades in someone else's mind!  And I have to say the sharing of them was a "covered worship" for it went deep.  In how many other ways can we make deep waves in the world by being faithful?

I invite readers to post here the messages you remember still.  Let the rings wash out far.

Gratitude and Expectations

I have been thinking about Gratitude.  I remember a f/Friend of mine who sent out a Christmas letter in which she invited us all to play the "thanksgiving game".  She said it is easy and gave examples that she is thankful that she can see so she can read, that she is grateful that she can walk so she can go places.  She is slowly loosing her eyesight and had polio as a child and so it makes sense that she is grateful for such things.  As an able bodied person it , unfortunately, never occurs to me to be thankful for such things.  I have an expectation that I will see and walk and because I have that expectation I take it for granted.  In fact I sometimes struggle to find what to be grateful for, focusing on problems and feeling sorry for myself about those things.  My expectations often cause me problems as I get upset by things which are not as I thought they would be.

Right now I have a lot of gratitude- in fact I feel a little like someone who has won the lottery and keeps expecting someone to come knock on their door and ask for the check back because it is all "a big mistake".  I have been thinking about how expectations, like goals and dreams are generally a good thing and help us aim for things and collectively move forward in life.  And yet I am aware of how we can become so attached to a dream, or a goal as to have the expectation that life will be a certain way and experience great disappointment or frustration when it is not that way.  So I have sat in the silence of Meeting trying to reconcile those two things - the good of our dreams and the problems of our expectations.

I thought about the old saying:  "I will do X tomorrow, God willing and the Creek don't rise".  One thing about that saying is it makes the assumption that all or our intentions are subject to God's will.  It occurs to me that the problem with expectations, dreams or goals is not having them, but when we do not subject them to The Divine Author, but rather see our lives as separate from God wholly of our own making.  Among other things this does separate us from the source of our blessings.  When we are not busy being our own Creator, it is easier to notice all the many small and large blessings and goodness of the Creator.

Is There a God?

I was 12 years old and I was sitting on a bench in Meeting for Worship and I was wondering: "Is there a God?"  This seemed like an important question to which it was not clear how one could get an answer to this question.  As I sat there I looked at a purple Iris outside the window with a huge dew drop on the petal.  The sun was hitting it refracting a rainbow within the dew drop.  I rejoiced in the beauty and majesty of all this!

I reflected upon what we had just been studying in biology: about how flowers reproduce, about how light is refracted, about how water evaporates and goes up in the air and is held in clouds and then is released in rain, and the whole rather perfect cycle of nature there, and in reproduction of plants, and of birth and death and rebirth of plants and animals, etc.  "It is all perfect", I thought.  And suddenly I knew; I knew there is a God.  Because I realized nothing could accidentally or randomly occur that was this perfect.  I saw there was an intelligence in the universe.  I felt an energy that could be turned to for guidance and wisdom.

As I got older I would contend with questions like: Why does God allow suffering? What does God want me to do and how do I know?  How do I pray?  And what is the correct name of God?  But for then, for 12, it was just good to know there is a God.

When I was much older I had a long argument with a friend who identifies himself as an Atheist.  I told him that while I could understand someone being Agnostic, not knowing if there is a God that I did not know how he could claim to know conclusively that there is not a God when others say they have experienced God directly.  He made various arguments and asked me several times to what my experience of God was.  I described it and he said he had not had that experience. I acknowledged that but said I still did not think he could dismiss others experience. 

He did acknowledge that there is a principle of intelligence within the Universe, but then said crossly that he did not understand why I was calling that God.  I said that I did not understand why he would refuse to call it God.  He talked over and over again about the evils of the church throughout history.  I acknowledged that the organized churches have done many evil things and that that is the doing of humans while hiding behind the cloak of the church.  I said that you could not throw God out with the churches.  He eventually said that if I was calling the Mind of the Universe God that he agreed that it existed, but found it unnecessary to call it God.

We were young then.  I have not asked him where he turns for comfort when the world looks dark?  Or where he finds strengthen when he has to do the hard things? Or what helps him to find connection to all people around him even the crappy ones?  But these are reasons why I have discovered there is a God not just a Mind of the Universe.

A Matter of Convenience

A commercial crackles over the radio...it is presenting the idea that a man proposes over the phone and then his cell phone cuts out so he does not get his intends response, thus destroying the engagement.  The commercial makes clear that life will only be good if one has the right cell phone service.  In fact a myriad of ads tell Americans on a daily basis that our lives will only be good and "right" if we have convenience, if it is easy.  The message line over and over again is our lives are supposed to be easy.

Right now the globe requires of all people living in first world countries that we live less energy intensive lives which means less convenient lives.  Several years ago my family peace group decided as a group that we needed to stop using plastic bags in stores because they are made of petroleum.  This meant needing to own and bring to the store our own bags.  Now that sounds SO simple right?  Wrong.  I discovered keeping them in the car was easy, but time and time again I would get in the store to realize I left them in the car.  If I was not all the way in the checkout line I would make myself go back out and get them which eventually ingrained habit. 

But I was amazed how hard I found the habit to make.  I realized I had been RAISED to never have to prepare for going to the store - to just have what I needed there.  It is the same with using real products over paper plates, cups, plastic silverware and paper napkins or paper towels.  All these things waste resources and can easily be replaced with real items....All it requires is preplanning and the willingness to clean the items afterwards.

My favorite example of this engrained American way of thinking is a friend of mine decided she was going to start a campaign to get people to bring their own mugs to coffee shops.  She went to her favorite coffee shop to ask them something about how much the cups cost them and while she was there ordered a coffee. She then looked down and realized she was drinking out of a paper cup that the coffee she had just ordered was put in!

In a support group I later joined to look at Climate Change issues a friend joked:   "Hi my name is Rick and I'm a carbon addict"  at first we laughed at this 12-step parody.  But very quickly we began to realize it is NO joke!  We are addicted and it actually requires focused attention and support to change the life time American habit of believing we are entitled to convenience.  In that group I struggled to reduce my driving by riding a bike more.  (I have mainly failed.)  It is so hard for me to decide that it is ok to spend more time getting around because it is so much quicker and thus convenient to dash somewhere in my car.  Opps I forgot an ingredient for dinner and now it is half cooked and almost dinner time; just jump in the car and go get that ingredient.  A 10 block drive each direction for a can of one item.   We do this sort of thing all the time, doe it really make sense? Do I want the planet melted for a quick can of beans, or for the right to throw away my napkin?

Several years after my peace group decided to switch to carrying our own bags,  (I now have a nylon one folded up the size of a wallet in my purse at all times) my city first had a referendum to abolish plastic bags.  The petroleum industry actually spent X number of  dollars to defeat the referendum claiming it disadvantaged the poor.  A few years later the city council, not to be as easily bought, passed a law outlawing plastic bags after July lst.

The second week of July I encountered an old woman running through the parking lot back to the check out line with her plastic bags in hand:  “Not yet a habit” she cheerfully called out.  I asked the cashier how this was going.  He said: “Some people are fine and some are really mad”. At Christmas I got to witness a grown man having a tantrum in the store because the cashier could not give him a bag.  American addiction to convenience is not always pretty!  What will we have to feel if life is not always easy?

Most recently my sweetheart has challenged me to look at being completely vegetarian.  I was completely vegetarian for 10 years and partially vegetarian for some two decades more.  I added fish back in as a matter of convenience.  I was driving three times a week along a hwy where I had to purchase my dinner and it was littered with only fast food restaurants.  After a year of bean burritos three times a week I could not look at one without feeling slightly sick, so I added fish back in.  For years and years I ate meat only outside of my home in restaurants because it was hard (read inconvenient) to find restaurants with vegetarian options.  (In foreign cities it often requires careful internet research ahead of time.)  However eating no meat is the carbon equivalent to going from a gas guzzler to a Prius. I must once again look at this peculiar American obsession and feeling of entitlement to convenience. Eating no meat is the greatest reduction in carbon most Americans could make.  Since I have been in the business for the last few years of encouraging Americans to reduce their carbon foot print, it certainly makes my witness more integral.  So for New Years I will eat a ceremonious last fish and then stop eating all meat.

 "How inconvenient."  Good thing Al Gore named it an inconvenient truth that our planet is melting.  Which thing is ultimately more inconvenient?

Holy Obedience?

Recently in a lesson on Quakerism, Friends in my Meeting reacted with surprise to the fact that in 1660 Charles the II released some 700 Quakers from prison and in 1661 4,000 were arrested as the 5th Monarchy uprising was suppressed.  My guess is if we knew the total population of England and the total number of Quakers at the time this indeed would be a significant proportion of both populations.  We know early Friends were imprisoned for refusing to doff their hats and for simply practicing their religion, but it is hard to comprehend how deeply a part of early Quaker experience this was!

Certainly over the centuries Quakers have also gone to jail/prison for the suffragette movement (some being force fed), for refusing conscription in any number of wars, and for various individual acts of non-violence.  But basically at this point in our history it is fairly rare; in fact most Meetings no longer have funds for suffering: the funds Meetings traditionally set aside to help provide for the individual and their family who were suffering for conscience sake, who were carrying forth the Quaker witness.

It is not that there are not things happening that contradict our basic testimonies: 50-60% of our taxes going to war and preparations for war (not to mention interest on war), the refusal to marry Gays & Lesbians in most states violates our testimony on equality, the basic American lifestyle violates our testimony on simplicity, all kinds of human rights violations take place inside American corporations everyday, and many would say we have a new testimony on the environment which every one of us lives in violation of every day.  So how do we square our love of Friendly heroes like John Woolman who traveled the country appealing to Friends to release their slaves with those of us who burn carbon to do our work for us at the cost of  a livable planet for our children?  How do we square our love of Lucrettia Mott's work in prisons and behalf of the poor, with the current blight of racism that fills our prisons with the new workings of Jim Crow disenfranchising and imprisoning more black men than there were slaves in the South?

Our testimonies are testimonies and not creeds because we say that truth is known experimentally, that these are testimonies to what we know to be true so far.  Are we still listening?  Some would say that we are not doing more because of a lack of creativity to create effect campaigns on these issues.  Others would say it is a result of a graying Quaker populations (but what comes first the chicken or the egg?  Are youth attracted to a group that does not lead the way?),  Some would say we have sat in American luxury too long and become complacent and lost our courage.   I would say "Are we still listening to the still small voice within on these issues?

Recently, I went to the opening night of the "Do the Math" tour by Bill McKibben and 350.org.  This organization that has sounded the alarm on climate change for over a decade is now calling people nationally to divest from all fossil fuel companies, and to commit civil disobedience as needed at their stockholder meetings.  We have already experience 1 degree of warming and are on our way quickly to 2 degrees.  The horrors of two degrees are were we get sea rise from the melting of Greenland, and droughts and crop failure and species extinction.  The fossil fuel companies have 5x the amount of fuel still under the earth than can be burned and not take us to 2 degree warming and beyond.  The idea is to put pressure on them to change their business plan to alternative energies or risk loosing their profits. 

This will require thousands and thousands to take a stand with their pensions and their investments and thousands more to be arrested.  In the dark theater Bill McKibben asked people who had already been arrested opposing the Exel pipeline to stand, and then he asked who would be willing to "consider" being arrested in Texas in the Spring at the Texaco stockholder meeting, and who would be willing to consider being arrested in the spring in San Francisco at the Chevron meeting, and slowly more and more people stood until at last he said who would be willing to read his email about the campaign and 2400 people were standing.   You could not be there and avoid the internal question:  "What are you willing to do to stop the madness?"  This is a question that I think all Quakers need to be sitting with in the silence and asking themselves?  What does The Creator require of us at this critical moment in the history of Creation?  Are we still listening to that "life and power" that can move us at great personal cost into the path of righteousness?