I am changed. Say the wise chirping newborns. Who have become; and are life-force and energy with bodies, like sweet things. (In response to myself I think: sweet things? As opposed to what other things? We are incapable of thinking outside of dualism. But the truth is not dual.)
But I am still exactly the same. I see that I am growing, and I see that I have thrown off many many different scaly exteriors. But there is always more to throw off. Like a snake; who never ceases her shedding.
But…but…but…but…
If I said that I believed in God would the fighting stop? Would the angry, hurt and fearful hearts inside each of us put down their swords, having been cast into blindness by foolhardy and swift realization?
A friend said recently that there is the ridiculous,the beautiful and then there is pain. This is as close as I think I will ever come to answering a question such as God.
In the richness, in the composite darkness, in the cheesiness, in the simplicity of the best kind of raucous laughter, in the beauty that is so deep and so everywhere: why, oh why, do we think we need to believe in anything at all? There is so much meaning in life without even words, friends. Without even words. Haha!
It would be useful for us to learn to see suffering, mistakes and hardship just as what they are. It would be useful for us to figure out how to alleviate suffering without creating more of it in turn. It would be useful for us, also, to let go.
If I have a religion, letting go is it.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
How to Worship Like a Contemporary Liberal Quaker
I read this at a noon service here at Harvard Divinity School:
The silence is like the song. In the song we are joined because our situated vulnerabilities, those parts of us that we keep mostly secret, bloom from within as melody. We return to what we basically are, and we do this together, in harmony.
In the silence we are wiped of our trappings, spiritually naked before each other. No performance, no distractions. In this collective nakedness, like in the song, the most basic essence of our beings shows. Like struggling newborns, we are so vulnerable in this place that it can get scary. And we wait, desperately sometimes, for something to happen. So there is a sense of urgency in our worship. Yet, we exist in this place together.
Thus, with this tradition of Quakerism, we seek in the silence to be joined together in a spirit of compassion.
In this room, there is no laity per se. Nor are there any ministers, per se. It’s just us, together, sharing in our everlasting brokenness.
In the joining you might receive a message.
Sometimes the message is meant for only you, so you don’t need to say it aloud. Other times the message is meant for others, for the group gathered here worshiping.
In the latter case, please stand and share the message as you are led. You speak only to improve upon our silence—to speak with compassion to our joined vulnerability, desperation and urgency. We are gathered here in communion, always in silence, whether or not it is polka-dotted with words.
Please be mindful to leave time for the silence to emerge (or re-emerge) between messages.
Meeting will end with the shaking of hands.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
One Kind of Beauty Becomes Another
The window is open, and I can hear a soft drumming in the faceted peaks of the covers that surround me. I am sprawled onto my mattress, a slumbering lioness. My heart beats with such determination that the pillows that have rented space somewhere other than under my head, now pressing against my chest, vibrate. The pillows are vibrating beneath me, and so is the mattress. I turn my head toward the window and ask my self aloud, “What is that drumming?” As my dream state fades I realize it is coming from the ipod on my desk that has played songs all night long. It happens to be playing a cover of 32 Flavors by Ani Difranco. The cover is by Alana Davis. Check it.
I reach for my phone and unplug it. It has apparently malfunctioned. No new emails, no new reminders or texts (impossible). Confirming my intuition, the background has changed over night. A wonderful painting by an ex-boyfriend, which I had thought was lodged within my phone’s memory banks no longer, evokes a mood I hadn’t recalled for many months. Oh what has the universe in store for me today? I am reminded of him now. I turn toward the window again and glance at the hiding Bostonian skyline. She peaks over the other buildings, filtered by the still bare (though budding) trees. One kind of beauty becomes another.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
A Letter to Chuck Fager About His Blog and the Recent Budget Conflicts in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
Chuck Fager:
I read your Wikipedia page, and I saw that you studied at Harvard Divinity School too! Nice. That's where I am studying now.
I also read one of your books called Un-Friendly Persuasion. It's fun to match the writing style of that book to the style of writing in this blog.
I hope you are well.
I am writing, otherwise, to express some concern.
My fervent hope is that in the coming days/weeks/months Philadelphia Yearly Meeting will be able to work out the current budget crisis with frank expression and discernment.
Some Friends mistakenly interpret the peace testimony to mean that we are to avoid conflicts at all costs. In human interaction conflicts are unavoidable. We often times conflate "fighting" with "conflict" to suggest that when there is a conflict it is thereby necessary to split up into sides to see who wins. Conflicts do not have to be born out in this way. They can happen under the toe of other types of discourse, in which emotional expression may still be allowed (like yelling because you're angry or crying because you're sad), with a goal in mind, however, to remain ONE TEAM.
To remain one team: to get connected in our collective expression of needs and then work as a community of people to get those needs met. So concretely "working as one team" involves a few steps: 1) starting with love and reminding everyone that we are all PEOPLE with our own imperfections, and then 2) everyone expresses emotion (so people cry, yell, and say things that maybe they don't mean but that express an existential state rather than an intellectual position), then 3) everyone says what they are needing (support for our young people, deliberate discernment, our environmental problems to be addressed, etc), and then 4) everyone gets together to figure out how to get all the needs met that are on the table, which will likely involve some pretty creative strategies. The strategies get more creative as the number of people present increases. And the bigger the team (the less fractured it is within this detrimental conception we have of "battle" or "sides") the more people there are to think.
Suggesting that a battle is going on within the yearly meeting means that, unless you are writing satirically (which I gather could very well be the case), you have fallen pray to the same conflation that other friends tend to make between "conflict" and "fighting." To live out the peace testimony does not mean that we avoid conflicts, it means we avoid fighting. It also means that we don't need to fight in order to solve conflicts.
Wrestling through a conflict doesn't preclude emotional expression, it precludes ever once thinking of everyone as anything other than humans who are all on the same side with each other.
In the United States Congress, politicians fight. In our current democratic structure, we fight. We fight with petitions, protests, and with buttons pinned to our lapels and sweaters. This might be how Young Adult Friends will engage in dialogue, but in doing so they may very well have missed the difference between liberal Quaker discourse and that of the surrounding Western world. In Quaker discourse, the point is to wrestle together as one team, to trust in the guidance of the Spirit in this struggling, and to go in and out of dialogue with love always as the first motion. The point is never to win, to get one’s way, or to hold a particular position. The point is to go about a process similar to the one I outline above.
It is unclear to me whether the petitions and the planned button-wearing have escaped the bounds of Quaker discourse. And I can see why any group of Friends might decide to escape such bounds, because we have often misconstrued the intent of Quaker process. It has also seemed as if these budget proposals were being rushed towards approval—something Philadelphia Yearly Meeting officials have sometimes done in their haste to meet the demands of their roles and their perceived constituencies. If the general secretary and clerk of the yearly meeting seemed to be acting hastily and without inclusion of voices and the life of the Spirit, and thus out of the bounds of Quaker discourse, it is understandable why other Friends might feel the need also to act outside the bounds of Quaker discourse.
Yet the intent of Quaker process was never to stifle voices, to slow down progress, or to silence a transient minority. Although Quaker process has sometimes turned out this way because for many years we have avoided facing each other out of a fear of conflict. When you never actually face each other (something we have a hard time doing), then of course you won’t get much done! And when you frame the conflict in the way that YOU have, Chuck Fager, I can understand why people would be afraid of conflicts. We are afraid of committing the same mistakes we did more than a century ago—the mistakes that caused so many of our splits. I am not saying that splits are innately negative, but the manner in which they came about in our history is not the manner in which we have intended to act towards one another.
Let us not forget that we are ONE community, with ONE set of needs, all of which can be met more easily if we first acknowledge the humanity in one another, then move to whatever grieving must be done, and then to figuring out what all the needs are, and finally to developing strategies that meet them. In the midst of this, at each juncture of course, we need to remain attentive to Spirit and to the life of the meeting community that caries us.
I invite your response. I encourage you to post this letter on your blog.
Sincerely,
Zachary T. Dutton
Member of Wilmington Monthly Meeting (of PYM)
I read your Wikipedia page, and I saw that you studied at Harvard Divinity School too! Nice. That's where I am studying now.
I also read one of your books called Un-Friendly Persuasion. It's fun to match the writing style of that book to the style of writing in this blog.
I hope you are well.
I am writing, otherwise, to express some concern.
My fervent hope is that in the coming days/weeks/months Philadelphia Yearly Meeting will be able to work out the current budget crisis with frank expression and discernment.
Some Friends mistakenly interpret the peace testimony to mean that we are to avoid conflicts at all costs. In human interaction conflicts are unavoidable. We often times conflate "fighting" with "conflict" to suggest that when there is a conflict it is thereby necessary to split up into sides to see who wins. Conflicts do not have to be born out in this way. They can happen under the toe of other types of discourse, in which emotional expression may still be allowed (like yelling because you're angry or crying because you're sad), with a goal in mind, however, to remain ONE TEAM.
To remain one team: to get connected in our collective expression of needs and then work as a community of people to get those needs met. So concretely "working as one team" involves a few steps: 1) starting with love and reminding everyone that we are all PEOPLE with our own imperfections, and then 2) everyone expresses emotion (so people cry, yell, and say things that maybe they don't mean but that express an existential state rather than an intellectual position), then 3) everyone says what they are needing (support for our young people, deliberate discernment, our environmental problems to be addressed, etc), and then 4) everyone gets together to figure out how to get all the needs met that are on the table, which will likely involve some pretty creative strategies. The strategies get more creative as the number of people present increases. And the bigger the team (the less fractured it is within this detrimental conception we have of "battle" or "sides") the more people there are to think.
Suggesting that a battle is going on within the yearly meeting means that, unless you are writing satirically (which I gather could very well be the case), you have fallen pray to the same conflation that other friends tend to make between "conflict" and "fighting." To live out the peace testimony does not mean that we avoid conflicts, it means we avoid fighting. It also means that we don't need to fight in order to solve conflicts.
Wrestling through a conflict doesn't preclude emotional expression, it precludes ever once thinking of everyone as anything other than humans who are all on the same side with each other.
In the United States Congress, politicians fight. In our current democratic structure, we fight. We fight with petitions, protests, and with buttons pinned to our lapels and sweaters. This might be how Young Adult Friends will engage in dialogue, but in doing so they may very well have missed the difference between liberal Quaker discourse and that of the surrounding Western world. In Quaker discourse, the point is to wrestle together as one team, to trust in the guidance of the Spirit in this struggling, and to go in and out of dialogue with love always as the first motion. The point is never to win, to get one’s way, or to hold a particular position. The point is to go about a process similar to the one I outline above.
It is unclear to me whether the petitions and the planned button-wearing have escaped the bounds of Quaker discourse. And I can see why any group of Friends might decide to escape such bounds, because we have often misconstrued the intent of Quaker process. It has also seemed as if these budget proposals were being rushed towards approval—something Philadelphia Yearly Meeting officials have sometimes done in their haste to meet the demands of their roles and their perceived constituencies. If the general secretary and clerk of the yearly meeting seemed to be acting hastily and without inclusion of voices and the life of the Spirit, and thus out of the bounds of Quaker discourse, it is understandable why other Friends might feel the need also to act outside the bounds of Quaker discourse.
Yet the intent of Quaker process was never to stifle voices, to slow down progress, or to silence a transient minority. Although Quaker process has sometimes turned out this way because for many years we have avoided facing each other out of a fear of conflict. When you never actually face each other (something we have a hard time doing), then of course you won’t get much done! And when you frame the conflict in the way that YOU have, Chuck Fager, I can understand why people would be afraid of conflicts. We are afraid of committing the same mistakes we did more than a century ago—the mistakes that caused so many of our splits. I am not saying that splits are innately negative, but the manner in which they came about in our history is not the manner in which we have intended to act towards one another.
Let us not forget that we are ONE community, with ONE set of needs, all of which can be met more easily if we first acknowledge the humanity in one another, then move to whatever grieving must be done, and then to figuring out what all the needs are, and finally to developing strategies that meet them. In the midst of this, at each juncture of course, we need to remain attentive to Spirit and to the life of the meeting community that caries us.
I invite your response. I encourage you to post this letter on your blog.
Sincerely,
Zachary T. Dutton
Member of Wilmington Monthly Meeting (of PYM)
Sunday, April 3, 2011
The Simple Depth (like a well)
She is taking off her skin, a frantic crabwise reptilian repetition. One breath at a time, she rips apart the scaly exterior. Sometimes only one small piece ebbs aside, revealing the promise of something shiny, clean and free.
Turning the clock to her own century—with her own fleeting will—she faces her death with simple fascination.
Climbing through, and wading in, and flailing about. She seeks the tattered detritus of her worn-out heart. To hold it all tight. And to hold it out with the same words newly spoken: “This is all I got.” She seeks paper-thin healing that will never come. And the clarity that always runs.
She is running; running and running. Tears sway along her cheeks. Fastened to the horizon, her bright beautiful eyes scream with determined sacrifice. She pulls at her chest, forcing off her breast the second to last piece of what had once been. With every effort releasing what she wanted to become, what she wanted to believe.
She has changed her fixation. It is now upon the simple depth like a well: of hands held, lips kissing, collectives crying, gifts given, and time taken.
And then, in a quick succession, she fails to take another step. The moving stops, and she trips, and the very last scale on her chin scrapes away as she hits the fierce ground. And she stands up again, nonplussed. The stillness in the air encapsulates her like… humidity. Like lightning it takes her breath to a new place, opens her fiery spirit to unknown tears. She weeps now, for the torrid animal inside her—caged and raddled. She weeps for years of loss, of sickness, of change.
Then the wind arrives again, quieting her primal moaning. Quieting, slowly. Quieting, quieting, quieting, quieting, quieting…
Then the wind takes her. And she stands again.
She is taking off her skin, a frantic crabwise reptilian repetition. One breath at a time, she rips apart the scaly exterior. Sometimes only one small piece ebbs aside, revealing the promise of something shiny, clean and free.
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