Living in the God Space

It is very tumultuous times in the US.  We are facing the most important election in our history.  One that will determine if we stop being a democracy and become an oligarchy instead.  It is very unclear what will happen, and this is happening in the midst of a global pandemic uncontrolled in the US due to lack of leadership.

I feel like I have been distracted from my professional life as a psychotherapist, distracted from my clients.  So today in Meeting I was praying for my clients.  For me what this meant was to hold each of them one by one in my attention and imagine them whole.  There were some clear themes that emerged of what seemed need to be and feel whole:  To know that one is loveable and loved, to be able to lay down the injuries of that past to come fully into the present, to be able to self sooth and come into the peace of our universe, to be able to set boundaries so no harm comes and to be able to not have to try to hard, to relax into the universe as it is.

This made me think of quote (misattributed to Nelson Mandela but actually from Marianne Williamson) that has long been on my bulletin board:

"You're a child of God.  Your playing small doesn't serve the world.  There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insurece.around you.  We were born to manifest the gory of God that is with us; it's in everyone.  As we let our Light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

That quote for me is about living into the bigness of who are as a Child of God.  Who we really are before and after injury.

Recently when Trump was admitted to the hospital for Covid, I noticed a wonderful space opened up for me.  It is was not the space created by rejoicing in his illness or potential death, but it was a space in which I was able to imagine for the first time in a long time my country not controlled or diminished or manipulated by him.  It was a space where he is no longer President and no longer can create havoc.  There was much relief and peace and possibility in that space. What I quickly came to realize was that whether he left the hospital, alive or dead, that it was I who was in charge of that space. It was a space I could choose to stay in and or to dwell with, or I could in fear return to a universe controlled by Trump.

This makes me think of the words in the Peace Testimony: "We utterly deny outward strife and tumult.  We live in the Life and Power that takes away the occasion for all wars".   Think of that it is a space, an energy that is not war, the opposite of war, a place without outward strife and tumult.   And we live into that space.  It too is a choice as one could live in the space where there is war and tumult.

I am not talking here about some Pollyanna world where we close our eyes and do not see or feel war, or Trump, or the injuries my clients have suffered.  I am simply saying that in the God space there is another set of possibilities.  Ones with more wholeness, more peace, more possibilities for growth, healing and justice.

To Elder

 Quakers have this funny practice called Eldering.  Even the name of it is antiquated.  It comes from a time when someone very respected was called an Elder.  However, from early on in Quakerism because of the value on equalatrism it was recognized that young people and women could be elders.  (Rather unheard to in the 1600s).  This was because it was a mark of being mature in the Spirit.   The person was a spiritual elder, someone who lived a grounded, spirit inspired life.  They understood Quaker practice and the underlying beliefs that went with Quaker practice.

There were many roles that Elders played.  They sat on the facing bench and held the Meeting in the Light, thereby deepening the worship.  They acted as anchors and mentors for Friends engaging in new ministry.  They often would accompany a Friend who was in traveling ministry to help them stay true to their Light and not overshoot their leading. They would speak with and nurture those who were newly giving ministry in Friends Meeting, encouraging the development of faithful ministry.

But the practice of eldering is something slightly different.  It was/is the modern day equivalent of "calling in" ( the opposite of calling someone out which is often with anger and criticism.)  It was to speak to someone who was seen to be morally straying, or lost, or beyond their light, or behaving inappropriately and to lovingly call them back into the Light.  A powerful example of this was when John Woolman would travel and meet with Quakers who were owning slaves and he would speak to them or the moral wrong they were doing TO THEIR OWN SOUL, and plead with them to sell their slaves.   This is not to say that he did not believe in abolition or have great concern for the well being of the slaves.  But since he saw slavery as a sin, he reasoned that to own a slave was a sin that corrupted and damaged the soul of the slave owner just as much as the enslaved person.

That was the power of eldering but it also got its self a bad name in the middle years of Quakerism when it became a sort of rigid litmus test of moral conformity with people being "written out of Meeting" by Meeting elders for such sins as singing, dancing, wearing lace or marrying outside of the faith.  The over correction for this was Friends largely have turned their back on this practice.  I regard this as too bad because from my point of view we are sadly lacking true eldering in modern Meetings.  We both lack Friends who are really grounded in Quaker practice, we lack mentoring for younger friends in everything from clerking to giving faith ministry....but most importantly we lack a real accountability when things go estray.

Friends to a large degree have drifted into an American Liberalism - a desire to be open and accepting to everyone - to a point that often surrenders having an actual defined set of beliefs or boundaries.  While Friends drift towards a more codified set of testimonies, calling them "SPICES", we oddly do not stand up for these truths that we have found.   If Friends exhibit conspicuous and unsustainable possessions we do not even lovingly discuss Simplicity with them.   When male Friends exhibit learned male privilege in our gatherings, we either sigh and turn away or attack with a Feminist critique, but we do not lovingly labor with them over how and why to change that behavior.  It is rare that anyone talks about how us pacifists are all paying for war. We accept many behaviors in our committees and our business meeting which are frankly secular behaviors from our work places that are not part of Quaker Faith and Practice.  (see also previous post on eldering and conflict: http://thefriendlyseeker.blogspot.com/2019/10/it-may-not-surprise-you-to-hear-me-say_30.html)

"Quakers behaving badly" is a phrase that brings a slight chuckle and smile to most long time Friends faces.  Yes we know about Friends being behaving badly -we have seen it many times.   This ranges from Friends who speak too often and too long.  Friends who "mansplain" Quakerism (and other subjects) to the rest of us.  Friends who rant and lecture about politics to the rest of us.  Friends who talk about the news in Meeting for worship and who have never given a spirit filled message in their life. (Is this NPR or is this God?)  Alignating young people and people of color with unconscious ageism and or racism.   Letting fear about changing from "the way we have always done it" get in the way of considering what new Light might show us.   Over editing minutes, hung up on Grammar rather than finding what Spirit is trying to say through us.  Being attached to forms over the purpose they were intended to serve. Friends who have tantrums in business or committee meetings, who we silently allow to do this to everyone else. Refusing to talk about critical issues because we are uncomfortable with conflict and have forgotten that Light is available on all subjects.    Unable to identify what we believe because we are practicing acceptance of all to the point where there is no Spiritual Center.  I could go on, and feel free to add some of your own in comments below.

But the bottom line is we will continue to have Friends who are behaving badly until we again have Elders who can lovingly share Quaker practice and belief with those Friends behaving badly and loving show them another, Quakerly set of possibilities.

Covid is still teaching

When the pandemic first started I felt fairly clear about its connection to spirit - it seemed it had come to teach us to slow down, to connect again to the earth - and so with that I felt a certain peace about it.  (See past 6 posts).  But as the pandemic continues on, and on, and on, and on with no apparent end in sight, I like so many grow weary.   I am sad that we cannot learn better and prevent so many deaths.  I grieve for all the people who have lost loved ones, and how have lost jobs.  I'm saddened for the young people who graduate without graduations, or cannot start schools or careers or even hold a marriage ceremony.

As I start to notice that it is about impossible to start anything or even complete anything for that matter, I begin to puzzle at Spirits intention for the length of this?  Have we not slowed down enough?   My daughter wrote an amazing poem about the 6 feet of distance, and the 6 degrees of separation and the ways in which these two things teach us that we are all intricately connected to each other.   https://www.facebook.com/sara.grendon/videos/3637330776281070

As I complained to a Friend about the endless of this experience she replied: apparently we are not done learning.  And I realized she is right.  If we are suppose to learn that everyone on the planet is intimately connected to all other lives - tethered in a web of life to which we all depend and to which we all impact....then we have not yet learned it.   The masks are not to protect ourselves but to protect others and yet we cannot yet embrace that we have a sacred responsibility to each other to protect each other.  Some people are still working on the chapter of believing that science is truth - still struggling how to know that this experience is true.  But for the vast majority that believe it true we still have yet to learn how to honor our connection to each other.

So I guess we shall be held neither moving forward or backwards till we can learn that we are all connected.

Spirit Message for the Pandemic

I have previously on a different blog written about a prayer practice I have of offering up a question in prayer and then opening various spiritually meaningful books and receiving their answer.   A while back I did this asking God:  What would you have me know about this pandemic?  The answers below speak to me of viewing the pandemic as a spiritual event, of examining how we live in the world, understanding the dying which is happening more now, as part of a cycle of life and death that is part of the human experience, how to face our own potential mortality and that of those we love.

Below are the messages I received:
From the Book Emmanuel II: "As you learn to perceive with an open heart, what seems to be taking place on the physical plane of your world, it becomes time to speak.  What? Anything your heart tells you.  To whom?  Anyone who will listen.  The moment you speak from love and not from fear, you assume the mantle of leadership..your responsibility is to hear your own hear.  this is a schoolroom for learning how to love what appears to be absolutely unloveable."

From Thomas Kelly in a Testament of Devotion  There is an experience of the Eternal breaking into time, which transforms all life into a miracle of faith and action.  Unspeakable, profound, and full of glory as an inward experience, it is the root of concern for all creation, the true ground of social endeavor. This inward Life and the the outward concern are truly one whole and were it possible, ought to be described simultaneously.

The Prophet by Kilbran  The section of Freedom
"You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care or your nights without a want and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.

The Book of Emmanuel I: the door that unlocks the soul into incarnation can fufill many purposes; teaching others ass well as self.  When a life is designed to serve both ends then the cause and the call are magnificent.  At those times, the higher wisdom can say "And this is necessary now". ....Can a soul learn from a type of fear so pervasive that there is no space for understanding?  The soul can learn.  Perhaps the human being cannot.

Wayne Dyer The Power of Intention:
With self as a focal point, you sustain the illusion that you are your body, which is a completely seperate entity from all others.  This sense of separateness leads you to compete rather than cooperate.  Ultimately its a "no-match" with Spirit, and becomes a huge obstacle to your connection to the power of Source. 

Michael Singer The Untethered Soul.
This is how negative cycles happen.  You actually take a piece of your stuff, which is nothing but deeply seated disturbance from your past, and you implant it in the heart of those around you. ...This is how people ruin relationships and destroy their lives.   Do you doubt that a single blockage getting hit in your heart could case a fall that lasts a lifetime?  I has been known to happen...when a block gets hit, its a good thing.  It's time to open up internally and release the block energy.

If you fall along the way, just get up and forget it.  Use the lessons to strengthen your resolve.  Let go right then.  Do not rationalize, blame, or try to figure it out.  Don't do anything.  Just let go immediately, and allow the energy to go back to the highest center of consciousness it can achieve.

I sent you a warning....

Have you heard the joke about the man who is in a flood and he is on the roof of his house and he prays for God to save him?  First a log goes by, then a boat, then a helicopter.  Each time he says no he is waiting for God to save him.  When he finally drowns he angrily confronts God and God says to him:  “What did you want?  I sent you a log, a boat and a helicopter and you turned them all down!

I feel in this pandemic situation that God is saying; “Well I have been trying to warn you.”

In 2011 I sent a draught so severe to the Southwest that the Churches prayed for rain as the cattle died.

I sent you innumerable hurricane’s: Sandy, Katrina, Harvey, and Dorian...over 410 billion in damage. I sent Mathew to destroy Haiti and Maria to destroy Puerto Rico…and all you did was turn your gaze away.

I sent you record flooding last year devastating your breadbasket

Last year I sent 6,782 separate fires to California alone burning over 2 Trillion dollars worth of homes.

And when that did not get your attention, I burned a whole continent of Australia, over 100 billions worth.

But still you said:  “Too bad for those people”.

  

So now I have sent you Corona – a problem so global that no one can ignore it, so deadly that no one can minimize it.  I have brought you to a halt, I have joined you at the hip….and now do I have your attention?

I, Lynn, need to be clear, I do not believe in an Old Testament God who is vengeful and all powerful and goes around smiting people.  I believe in a Mother Earth, a Universe that is intelligent and an eco-system of which humans are but one player in an intricately and yes divinely woven interdependent and quite perfect system.  But due to a reductionist error in both how our brains process and in how the great theologies of the world have worked, we have seen ourselves as separate from and above or in charge of nature, and it has lead to catastrophically bad choices.

For that reason I want to learn the lessons Corona is trying to teach us.

The first one, just incredible gratitude for all that I am so privileged to have: my health, still a job, food to eat, and a roof over my head that I own that will be mine even after other hard times go by.

I want to learn to slow down and be still and hear what the earth is telling us, that it is sick, very, very sick and needing our help.  Global emissions are already down 5%

I want to notice the way it tells us all our fates are linked as one.

I want to notice God’s cry to care for the least of these among us in this time of suffering.

I want to take up the demand for a jubilee year – for the forgiveness of all debt, to let us start from square zero to rebuild, not for some amongst us to start from square negative 10.

I want out of the destruction before us to rise up like the phoenix to build a new society, one based upon justice and humanity out of the rubble of the disaster we have wrought with policies that have made it worse.

Who Am I?

Who am I? is an exercise in the Alternatives to Violence Project three day workshops on non-violence.  In the exercise, on 10 tiny slips of paper one lists all of the "identities" that one identifies with.   Eg: Mother, therapist, Quaker, woman, activist, etc.    Then one places them in order of importance with least important on the bottom.  Then you are invited to turn the pile over taking the least important one and "throw it away" - feeling into what it would be like to no longer have that identity.  Then you throw away the next one, sensing into that.....and so it continues.  The instructor manual warns to leave people with 3 identities and only suggest they could release the final 3 if it felt right to do that.

This is an exercise I did dozens and dozens of times in my time as an AVP facilitator.  As the pandemic swept in bringing the ban on travel to and from Europe, and stay in place recommendations and then orders....as events cancelled ranging at first from long distance travel and conferences to events over 100, and eventually....EVERYTHING, I found myself in a life size game of Who am I.
First releasing my vacation trip, then the conference for 180 people I had planned for months for the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, then a workshop to be given in Portland, and then Friends General Conference and the workshop I was to give there.  Later even more painfully I would surrender the local Earthday parade: Procession of the Species, and FolkLife - a Memorial Day weekend of fun I have attended every year for 32 years without fail.

I was sort of surprised how easily the identities/expectations fell, although some were harder than others.  But there was simply a feeling of falling into a new world, an alternative reality in which none of those things existed and where nothing involving human contact existed.  In the liminal space which I had entered where everything and anything (both bad, unexpected and even good in a new way) seemed possible - these old identifies seemed almost irrelevant.

Since then I have listened to a number of people who have service identities who have been unable to serve in their accustomed ways because of stay at home orders, talk about how hard it feels to not be able to help, but even more strange how lost they feel without that role (identity).  As it so happens I believe that it is deep in our DNA in response to crisis to help others - this after all from our first tribal time was how we survived.  And it is the thing I most detest about this crisis - that its very nature forces us to go against the instinct to help.   However, when serving other people goes from being an impulse to an identity - one which one is profoundly uncomfortable with, than perhaps something else is actually happening.  Many people are also having to release the identify of "busy" which for many is also a defining identity and find new experiences of how to be connected to other people - both the ones under their roof and the ones they cannot see in person.   We are being forced to find other ways of both entertaining and exercising ourselves - ways more simple and perhaps basic to original human existence.

Some people talk about when things go back to normal.   I hope they don't; I hope we will learn some things from this gigantic game of Who Am I.   As was always the case with Who Am I there is the opportunity as you throw away external identities to find, or notice again, ones own more core spiritual identify and to discover the eternal nature of the soul that is always with us underneath the external wrapping.   To know more deeply who we really are.

Cyber Worship and Traveling Among Friends

I have spent years doing political organizing over Zoom, but when I have even suggested doing a committee meeting over Zoom friends have been very resistant.   Now however in this brave new world of pandemic crisis has forced us to do something that even with liking Zoom I did not think would be a good idea: have worship on zoom.   And Friends are surprised that it is working pretty well.

The first week my Meeting did this we were visited by someone who grew up in the Meeting who was from Italy (and in the midst of a very scary time for Italy).   The Meeting also supports a project in Uganda to support Gay, Lesbian and Transgendered people in a country that will kill them for the "Offense".   We were able to be joined from a woman from Uganda from that project.

This got me thinking.   This week I joined the Meeting I was a member of for 25 years before moving here.  Next week I will try to join the Meeting I grew up in, even though that will be a two hour time difference.....and waking up for 8am worship is a bit daunting.  My travels never take me back there anymore and so it feels like a gift this sort of possibility. I'm pretty sure I cannot get myself together to visit my favorite Eastcoast Meeting because that would mean starting worship at 7am my time. But just this idea that one can suddenly freely - without expense, travel or time - visit almost any Meeting....is actually quite awe inspiring.

Both last week and this week worshiping with different groups I noted that people who have health issues that makes it too hard for them to come to Meeting normally were joining us, as was also true of a Friend who lives far from any Meeting and sometimes travels an hour to be able to worship with us.

My Meeting also held a "community dialogue" which was a time for all to share about how they were coping. It went on for two hours with 25 people and was really lovely and rich.   My former Meeting was discussing how to use the "chat room" function of Zoom to have "Committee Sunday".  (Frankly in most Meetings where committees meet at seperate times- it is easier and each committee just gets its own link for its time.)  They were bravely considering if they could try Meeting for Worship for Business.

I will still always favor in person worship.   It's just part of how I feel about people.  But I am going to ask FGC if they can start offering online worship that runs every hour on Sunday across the US time zones AFTER the pandemic, so that those isolated or health challenged Friends always have a place to worship.

What a funny silver lining from a pandemic.