Call for the Question

Suppose you walked into a party, and the host said to you: "Folks, there's only one rule for tonight's festivities. You may ask all the questions you want, but the only statements you can make will be in response to a question.  In other words, you may not start conversations with statements about yourself or your observations, unless a question has been put to you.  I will be circulating among you to be certain that you do not digress.  And please, allow a little time to unfold between your responses; don't be afraid to take that moment to allow yourself to digest the question before you respond.  Have fun, and don't be afraid to ask any question."

Ponder this a moment.  Really allow yourself to imagine a past situation you were in, be it a social event or a meeting, and imagine all the characters and how they approach you, and see yourself in the situation, mainly asking questions (queries) and only responding to the ones that are put to you.  Drop your expectations of the event, and allow the situation to unfold.

Isn't this the quaker practice of worship sharing taken to a new limit?  How do your imagine your own behavior might change were you prompted to view all of your interactions from the perspective of worship sharing and to focus on the questions rather than the answers?  Is this the manner in which you go out to greet the world?

These are some of the queries that surfaced as I entered the Visioning Retreat at Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM), even before we began the actual process.  Thanks to the creative genius of Michael Marquardt, we were introduced to a new way to think and work on 8 challenges that the staff of BYM put before us.  We broke into small groups, each one addressing a query, and set upon our task.  

I was surprised to see how uncomfortable we seasoned Friends were with a process that we would view as a part of our core, when it was put into this context.  It tuned me into my own presumptiveness when I come into a situation like this retreat:  that I am already primed with ideas and agendas that I might not even consciously be aware of, and that are certainly not seasoned in the Light.

Michael Marquardt is a professor of Human Resource Development and International Relations at George Washington University and President of the World Institute for Action Learning, the organization that teaches "Action Learning," the process described above. (http://wial.org,     http://www.gwu.edu/~elliott/faculty/marquardt.cfm) He is a Quaker and a member of Herndon Meeting.  To my knowledge, this was his first time bringing his cutting edge process to his own "family" of Friends.  Michael is like so many other Friends over time, who have quietly integrated their own manner of living as a Friend into their business practices.  In this case, Michael has actually taken his translation of a part of our Quaker process into the secular world of business, across continents and around the world.  As one who has often pondered what impact Quakers might have on global decision making, this was very exciting to learn!



It was delightful to be called to accountability to live our own manner so succinctly.  In each group were coaches whose job was to keep the time frame, help with clarity, and hold us to the task of the day:   to consider the query and utilize questions to creatively move through the process of responding to that challenge.  Of course, being Friends and comfortable with queries ourselves we had some questions for Michael too:  "Can we have a period of worship?"  "Can we redefine the question?"  "What happens in the executive world, do people end up taking a vote?"  (Michael assured us that in all of his years working with this method, no one has ever come to a vote.)

I'll have another post on the actual challenges that were put to us to work on, but for now I'll just focus on the process.  While Michael was encouraging us to think outside of the box, I was aware of how much he had done just that in his development of the Action Learning method of problem solving. 

What's fun about an experience like this is the personal awareness it calls us to.  When what may be our usual practices are put into a different box, or called a different name, we may fail to recognize them as our own.  The difficult part of this is how we may struggle with the "new" concept, failing to see where it fits in our own toolbox of constructs.  The titillating part is in being called to look at our own process with new eyes, and see the way that process then reflects back through the rest of our being.


In our group there was a bit of a struggle to decide if we were doing things the "right" way.  We wondered if we should redefine the question as we went along, rather than just living the one we had.  We wanted to inject our own ideas into the mix rather than stay on the task of answering the ensuing questions put to each of us or the group as a whole.  We balked at trusting the process.  Some of us had to put our own agendas aside to be truly present.



To be fair, we were doing a condensed version, scheduled to fit in this 5 hour retreat.  This did put a bit of pressure on us to move at a pace much faster than our usual Quaker amble.  I believe that the whole concept of Action Learning is to move beyond the linear model of thinking into a more circular one, and this is probably a struggle for many of us even in a more accomodating time frame.

It was a breath of fresh air in what could have been an arduous process.  As we laughed and wrangled our way through, the time passed incredibly quickly.  I noticed no yawning or dozing.  Some of the ideas that rose to the surface were solutions we are used to hearing, but many were new observations or calls for a different approach.  


As I left the retreat, feeling energized, my mind whirling, I wondered what the continuation of the process will look like.  Will the new thoughts or out of the box ideas be raised to the top, so that they can be heard?  Will the spirit of ongoing revelation continue as we strive to bring vision to reality?  Will there be the opportunity for further use of this process to move us from suggestion to implementation?  Will the staid be able to move aside for the creative new?


I have no answers, only more questions.

Of Dream Catchers and Drum Groups

This entry comes from a conversation I had with my 21 year old daughter this morning, about the wonderful facebook group, Quaker Hippie Children. If you haven't seen it, it's worth signing on to facebook just to read it. If you're in your 50s or 60s and raised children you will be rolling on the floor with laughter.

My kids didn't have the experience of Quaker Camp. I wish they had, and I'm thankful for the experience of Young Friends and Junior Young Friends, which gave my children the sense they were part of a larger community (and that they were not the only one with weird hippie parents!).

Our conversation this morning was about the sensibility that we take into the world as a result of our being Friends. Such a simple word, with such simple implications. We treat others as friends. We greet strangers as friends. We even treat rude people who are obviously having a bad day, as friends. If there is something like Light or that of God in everyone, even if they don't know it, we strive in our family to treat them like Friends. Sometimes it is a real stretch, but it is the benchmark we strive to reach.

I'm very proud to have raised a child with this awareness at such a young adult age. She teaches children how to ride horses, and she is ever aware that no one ever learned to enjoy riding a horse by being yelled at. Some people may think they have, but she tells me that the horse taught them, not the screaming teacher. She is a gentle soul. She is teaching me, that even in the crotchetyness of old age, I do not have the right to let God or myself down by treating another in a manner less than as a friend.

Children are so clear on these things. Once, when our Meeting was having a major conflict that threatened to split the meeting, the children wrote us a note from their business meeting that said something like, "We wish the adults would stop making such a big deal out of things they think are affecting us. We're the ones involved, and we feel perfectly safe." Wow. Clear enough? I'm beginning to think that as adults we need to seek clarity because our initial direct channel with God has been covered with layers and layers of acculturation.

So when I happened on this little facebook group, "Quaker Hippie Children" http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=2423821013&ref=ts
I couldn't help but smile, then laugh, then shed a tear. All the things that I thought were so important to impart to my child were there. You know you're a Quaker Hippie kid if (among other things):
*your threshold for weirdness, quirkiness, and everything avant-garde seems to be much, much higher than that of anyone around you

*you have a hippie bumper sticker present anywhere in your life

*you attend Quaker meeting (although not required; there are many of us who are QHCs at heart, but aren't actually Quaker...)

*you have ever been asked to use an "I" statement to describe your feelings

*you avoided bringing home your more mainstream friends for fear of subjecting them to your parents

*you have never been allowed to play with anything resembling a weapon

*you use eco-friendly products in your home

*you compost

*you remember attending protests from a very young age

*at least half the people you know are vegetarian (or vegan!)

*you know at least one person who doesn't eat eggs, dairy, wheat, refined sugars, or anything grown further than 50 miles from home

And my daughter's personal favorite :
*as a young girl, you read New Moon magazine and dreamed about becoming a woman (womyn?)

There are many more, along with references to the many songs, like Baby Beluga and This Land is Your Land, that we sang on car rides, and the essential Quaker games like Wink! Then our own quirky family things, like making dream catchers, drumming in the woods, putting on our "restaurant manners" like an invisible t-shirt, and stringing together as many idioms in a sentence as we could.

So what does this all have to do with me? It is a lightbulb, a snap on the side of the head, a reminder, of the awareness I carried with me when my adult children were wee babes; the gift their presence gave to me of wanting to keep their awareness tuned to the Light, in whatever forms I thought would "stick." Singing songs, making up crazy rhymes, praying silly prayers, eating whole wheat, talking to animals, going to demonstrations and being peaceful -- these are just a few of the ways Spirit spoke to us all. And every day was a gift of something new seen through a child's eyes.

I'm thankful that I can so easily call this state of being up, with a simple conversation. I'm even more grateful that my daughter so readily remembers. She's in a time where she doesn't really think she believes in God or praying or worship. But she definitely knows she's a Quaker, and she is happy to be one. She credits being raised Quaker with her own awareness of others, her peacefulness, and her joy of animals. When she was a mid-teen, and I was trying to impress on her the need to attend meeting for worship, she stopped me in my tracks one morning, when I went to get her from the barn, where she was tending her beloved horses: "There's more God right here in this barn, right this moment," she said, "than there is for me in that Meeting." I have to admit I couldn't think of an argument. I felt the truth she spoke.

For me, in those days, I was very busy contemplating, drumming, visualizing, and seeking contact with the Light in whatever way I could. I had the sense that I had to be tuned in as acutely as I could be, due to the responsibility of raising these children in the manner God would want me to. I hope the children benefited, but I know I did. I didn't worry about how theologically correct these things were in my own young adulthood, I simply followed my heart.

Over the years, as others, I have become busier and busier in my life. I find I have to set aside time for quiet contemplation, and often, no sooner is it done, than I am off to the rest of my life, the quiet calm swept away with the tide of the day. I'm not happy about this, and I don't really know how I evolved here. I've recently recommitted my life to the ministry God leads to me, and I can see already how this is the crux of some of my difficulties and unclearness.

I had a week at Baltimore Yearly Meeting's Annual Sessions, where each day I felt more and more refreshed and renewed in the Spirit. The first couple days home, I was basking in the halo of the Light I'd bathed in daily there. Gradually that halo grew dull, and by the end of a week, I was pretty much back to the daily rush. With the exception that I now carry with me this awareness. This morning I woke up and rushed off without even pausing for that quiet time. Thank goodness for children...I got on facebook and there was my daughter to remind me of the gifts God gives us in the smallest of moments.

We all have access to that Light. It doesn't take an hour of worship, it takes a moment of turning inward. That is the simplest gift we have to give to the world.

The Oasis of Community

It has been so long since I posted that I almost deleted this blog and started another. But there is something to the process that needs to be preserved. Having just come through a period in my life where I felt barren, like there was a desert inside, and no water to nourish my spirit, I trudged off to Baltimore Yearly Meeting Annual Sessions. I had the sense of a dying person approaching an oasis, hopeful against hope, yet doubting, as if that oasis might be just another mirage. Thankfully, it was the real thing. (BYM has never failed to refresh and renew me in all the years I have attended.) I was grateful I planned on attending the pre-sessions retreat, as it was like being plunged into a spring, and I emerged refreshed, already with a growing sense of clarity.

The Business of our Lives: The Transformation of Faith into Practice, was the focus of Annual Sessions this year. So the retreat promised us that "we will be exploring how our faith and testimonies can lead us to fulfill our role as representatives of God on earth. We will look at where we are now on our life/faith journey; where we are to go on our journey, and how to get there." I would say that the retreat more taught us the process that we could use to do this work. Most of the focus was on the deep listening that one can offer another in discerning their leading. I found this most helpful, and was also pleasantly surprised when one of my small group members stepped outside this format to say, "Well do you have a care/clearness committee?" and offered other tidbits about her own process that shed light on my own path.

I don't know if it's the fact I missed last years Sessions, or if it was that the agenda was truly so varied , or if my ears were just opened, but the week that followed offered me more nourishment and opportunity to learn than I can remember. I experienced it as though my spirit had entered paradise! What some might call the "work" of people's lives, I came to see as that which also fed them. The fulfillment of those involved in work in Africa, in the African Great Lakes Initiative, Friends Theological Institute, and Hlekweni Friends Rural Service was infectious. Workshops as diverse as Sabbath Economics, as basic as the Practice of Living Simply, helped me renew my faith in the Quaker process. Singing, worship, dining -- fellowship with Friends -- was the real food that my soul craved!

Our clerk, Howard Fullerton, is becoming simultaneously more amusing and adroit as each season passes. Business sessions were refreshing and succinct. Was it my imagination, or was every presenter cognizant of the listeners, striving to be not just informative but engaging? Even the memorial for our older Friends who have passed from this place this year, was like plunging into a refreshing pool. My thirst was quenched.

Out of this came crystal clear clarity. I cannot continue to live a life divided between my Quaker Life and my "other" life. Much like the parable of George Fox and William Penn, where Fox challenges Penn to wear his sword as long as he can, I feel that I can no longer wear the outside world's values and lifestyle. When I fall back into that lifestyle, it is only a matter of time before I feel empty, depressed and like life has no meaning.

This may sound extreme to some, but it is the way I experience it. It has become heavier to carry the burden of not listening to one's calling than it is to follow it. Somewhere inside I always have known it would come to this. The God of my understanding is loving, persistent, and never gives up on a soul. At the workshop on prayer by Daniel Snyder, I heard God called "the infinite, divine lover of your soul." In this week of spiritual retreat and renewal, I came to truly understand this. I can only hope to model an approximation of this love, and to someday pay forward the gift I was given this week. I am blessed to be a member of such an oasis of community in this difficult world.

To everything a season

Probably the best and the worst aspects of blogging are the way it reminds you if you have or haven't been paying attention to your spiritual life.

Lately I've been caught up in the physical aspects of my life. As a landscape designer and installer, it's the time of year when things have to be put to bed, the last bulbs have to be planted, and generally there's a flurry of activity as one feels the chill set more and more into the air each day. At times like this, when I could probably use to be more centered, I arise from bed, mind already racing and rush off to work. Often it is mid-morning before things settle down enough that I mutter a quick "Thank you for this day." At the end of the day, I return, tired and worn out, and fall into bed.

After a few days like this, my mental and spiritual state begins to frazzle, and I am reminded that I need to return to my daily spiritual practices. At least it is only a few days. Used to be that months or weeks would go by, and it would be only when my life was falling apart around me that I would be reminded from deep inside of what it is that gives me my balance, that eternal source of all.

I've been thinking of the text, "To everything there is a season..." The other day, as one of my kids was watching a kids TV show, I heard the Dad of the family say, "That means God is always with you, through hard times and good." I've been raised in my early life as a congregationalist, where the passage was taught as, "God has a reason for that happening, whether you know it or see it now, or not." That was a peaceful thing in my teen years, but I outgrew it as I outgrew that community. It certainly makes more sense to me that God is always with me, through every season.

I've been focusing on accepting myself more, just as I believe the Eternal accepts me, through all the phases of my life. Not what others think, not what the community I am a part of thinks as a whole, but what I believe is the way God made me. I have always had my own rhythms and paces of life (don't we all), but I've spent a lot of time in life fighting against them. It was eye-opening to me when I began to study oriental herbology and my sensei pointed out to me that the philosphy of oriental medicine is to flow with the seasons. It was then that I began to see that I did have my own cycles, and began to listen to them.

Now I feel myself finishing the harvest, preparing for the long winter's nap. In my case, that means slowing the pace, going inward, preparing some indoor projects to feed my mind and body, and resting up before the spring's activity. I'm going to try and focus on renewing my spiritual practices, like yoga, writing, and prayer. I'm going to try and resist filling the days so full as I do in the summer, when the sun and the gardens edge me on. This seems like the season for more listening for me.