Look what I squeegee-ed up

The Palestinian mopping method is to dump soapy water all over the floor, then squeegee it out the door. It works quite well, though turns into rather a scramble if your floors are slanted away from the door.

When I made my first tentative in this activity on Thursday, most of the water gathered under the radiator on the other side of the room, and when I went to remove it, I commented that the wad of paper that lay, now soaked, under the radiator, looked like a Pendle Hill pamphlet, one of the Quaker mini-books written by Friends in residence at Pendle Hill, the Quaker worship and study center in Pennsylvania.

Lo and behold, it was a PH pamphlet.

Fittingly, the pamphlet is called "The Testimony of Integrity" and who knows how long it dwelt under the radiator. So impressed was I by its own integrity that after having initially tossed the partially dissolved booklet, I fished it out of the trash and dried it on the kitchen window sill.

Wilmer A. Cooper begins his pamphlet with a story of a woman who, feeling as though the wellspring of Quaker inspiration dwindled to a trickle, sought a refreshed energy for teaching in George Fox's home town.

Sitting in the church where young George worshipped with his family on First Days (the Quaker phrase for Sundays) this teacher "saw in her mind's eye the boy George Fox." She envisioned that he was puzzled by his neighbors' piety while in Meeting, and relative depravity during the week.

"He saw that there must be a correspondence between one's faith, between what one professed on the Sabbath, and what one does during the daily work week."

Fox recognized the inconsistency, dubbed it wrong, and went on to make integrity a central part of the faith community he founded, the Friends.

In the texts we're reading in my classes this week young boys face questions of "good and bad" which are anything but black and white.

Jonas, the The Giver, learns that choices have been painstakingly removed from his community's life. Everyone is colorblind for instance. When he sees color for the first time, he is angry that such diversity has been withheld. "If everything's the same, then there aren't any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things! I blue tunic, or a red one?"

The real question for Jonas is whether he enlighten his friends and family to their own bland existence.

In James Joyce's story "The Sisters," the narrator, a  young boy, considers the recently-dead priest who was rather a mentor for him. He dreams of the "heavy grey face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. But the grey face still followed me. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me. It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle."

Is this a good guy? Can someone give us the heebeejeebees and still be a good influence, or an intellectually safe acquaintance? I'm encouraging my students to allow texts, events, relationships, characters, to be hard to categorize and characterize. It makes them harder to write about, but more realistic.

We'll look at heaps of characters this year who aren't as golden-good as Fox, but have redeeming even heroic, characteristics.

Can't wait. 

Refuges for the language-less

If you ever find yourself in a foreign country where you don't speak the language, let me suggest two activities that make you feel utterly part of something that crosses conventions and reaches souls: silent worship, and spinning.

The Ramallah Friends Meeting (newsletter) is housed in a beautiful meeting house on the main street of downtown Ramallah. Eleven Friends or attenders gathered for worship this Sunday. The unprogrammed hour heard hymns and ministry; that Sibelius tune Finlandia, turned into "This is my Song" pulls particularly at the heart here (video)

This is my song, O God of all the nations,

a song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;

but other hearts in other lands are beating

with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

I met the legendary Jean, who seems to be the Margaret Wentworth of Ramallah Friends, and she led us all to felafel and hummus- a great way to make more (F)riends.

THEN, last night I felt ready for a nap despite my healthy 8 hours, so I decided getting my blood flowing might do me good. I bought a membership to SOLO Gym, and arrived just as a Spinning class was getting under sweaty way. Oh my gosh. So much fun. 

I cannot say for sure which language the instructor was speaking, but it didn't matter, because the music was so loud no one seemed to be counting on the actual instructions. It's fairly basic, in a class where there's only one action. Well, two-- the woman next to me swatted my elbow at one point and pointed to her own legs, which, like everyone else's were peddling backward at that point. I guffawed (another conveniently universal behavior) and slowed and reversed my whirring steed. 

While waiting in the gathered Meeting, and while spinning in a what felt like a throbbing black box theater, barriers with the Palestinians around me fell away, despite my pitiful Arabic vocabulary. The day in my week with the least conversation was also my most integrated. "Let your words be few, my Friends."

The 100 year old piano (really! Jean said!) that no longer works functions "but gives history."

In the beginning

In the beginning there were no conventions. How did we write when there was nothing else to write about? I’m tempted to ask my literature students to buck the traditional English Literature model of constantly seeking connections to other works of literature, words of other thinkers, allusions to other works. I want them to write their own creation stories. Beginnings are important, and how we start our own “In the beginning” tells our readers a lot about our state of mind. 

The Giver, the summer reading for my tenth grade English class, starts like this:

“It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas thought. Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen. Frightened was the way he had felt a year ago when an unidentified aircraft had overflown the community twice.”

Not even four lines in, and frightened has been used three times. Sickening, terrible, unidentified, all set a tone decidedly different from the reassuring “And God saw that it was good” of Genesis 1:10. 

Here’s my creation story, of my world as it was born on Tuesday.

The sensation was gratitude to be following someone. As a baby, in transition, in the womb, I had been on my own, not necessarily prepared with the language skills (read or speak Arabic), or physical strength (heave 58 pound suitcase) to do what I had to do. But like a baby who somehow makes it to the delivery room, I passed through the arrivals doors into Ben Gurion. I hemmed and hawed, wandered aimlessly, contemplated the ATM, and finally approached someone to ask to use a cell phone to call my nowhere-to-be-seen driver Bassam. Later, when I Bassam took my suitcase, I felt my first instinct- relief to be led. 

***

Reading literature, listening to the news, going to the theater, one is struck by how much our cultural dialogue stands upon repetition and recurrence. 

“What canst thou say?” said George Fox. We know what the priests and preachers are saying. What canst thou say, that’s new?

Mark Twain took the Bible stories into his own hands, tossed out convention, assumed the voice of Adam, and said “Monday: This new creature with the long hair is a good deal in the way. It is always hanging around and following me about. I don’t like this. I’m not used to company, I wish it would stay with the other animals.” 

I like this because Adam wrote about what he felt, not in relation to how others felt, or how society told him he should feel (there was no society). This week I’ll ask my students to do the same. 

At Home on Friends Street

Ha, this keyboard types from right to left!
Well, just wanted to note a change in this unity - I have taken a job at the Ramallah Friends School for this school year, and I arrived in Ramallah today.
I met and went out to dinner with Olivia, Will, Trystan and Bethany, (Trystan and Bethany are in the photo) and am feeling so grateful to be surrounded by neighbors in a new neighborhood

Quaker Process Part 2: No veto

There were some funny stories at Quaker Studies this past weekend, about Quaker meetings for business in which one member simply refuses to stand down and accept that the meeting move forward with a certain action.

In one case, a meeting was discussing the meeting's investments in South African companies during Apartheid. One member felt extremely strongly about the issue and refused to join the rest of the meeting when all others had reached clarity. The business item remained open for 10 years, until the single member changed his mind and joined the rest of the meeting in unity. By then Apartheid had ended, so the issue was rather moot...

What to do in Quaker meeting for worship for business when dissent arises? Writing on Quaker business practices, Eden Grace writes,

individuals do not hold a power of veto, and should be ready to recognize the validity of corporate leadings and to submit to them if conscience allows, being recorded in the minutes as "standing aside".

When they are not willing to stand aside... what happens? Well, they can be overridden, or at least they have been at Durham in the past. That is huge, compared to a scenario where one voice can derail an otherwise united committee.

Consider the power of veto today. The president can veto any bill brought to his desk. Certain members of the UN Security Council can veto international military or aid campaigns. Last week Somini Sengupta wrote in the New York Times about why the U.N. can't solve the world's problems. 

"The problem is not that the major powers don't care [about what's happening in Ukraine, Palestine, and Syria]. It is that they care too much. Russia and the United States have a great deal at stake in each conflict, and the rules of diplomacy enable them, as well as the other three permanent members - Britain, China and France - to veto any security Council action."

This path behind Castelton State College where NEYM sessions were held provided much needed interludes between business sessions

The article goes on to state that the U.S. has vetoed 14 draft resolutions, most regarding the Israeli Palestinian conflict; Russia has vetoed 11 concerning allied governments like Syria's. 

A Quaker meeting for business might not be the only place one waits 10 years for a shift to occur-- a shift that comes too late to be of help. 

Our Sunday School class discussed this week the difference between a normal meeting for business, in which our interests and opinions are the source of the opinions that form the discussion, and a Quaker meeting for business, in which the members listen to discern God's will for the corporate body, rather than trying to hash out a compromise between the human interests at the table. 

We used a helpful handout written by Susan Smith, where she writes that for early Friends, "the basic assumption was that God would lead into unity those who truly submitted themselves to God's will... Friends believed that people who seek and follow God's will for a given situation are automatically brought into unity with each other, because God does not offer contradictory instructions for the same situation." 

I was frustrated by the worshipful-verging-on-lethargic atmosphere at some of the NEYM business meetings, but hearing that even the high-stakes, official U.N. talks get stymied with their own tools reminded me that group decisions are never easy. If our first goal is to promote peace with the way we live, Quaker process is worth our attention and study because it focuses as much on listening as on speaking- on seeking to align with a larger will as with trying to align others with one's individual will. 

Vastly better way to do business? Perhaps not. 
Vastly less efficient? Perhaps not. 
Worth a try? Yes.

Quaker process, part 1: a role for humor?

"Friends, we're grateful to be gathered." So said the clerk at the start of the last session of business at Yearly Meeting. Having presided over some testy meetings and sought the sense of the meeting all week, with a broken shoulder to boot, her gratitude made her seem angelic.

And in fact, Quaker process as it is written fairly demands divinity. The level of acceptance, self-restraint, patience in listening, and obedience to the sense of the work of individual committees and the clerk, are superhuman. Sometimes our human nature bursts onto the scene, in a frustrated outburst, or a [comparatively] aggressive "That Friend speaks MY mind!" during a discussion. In our attempts to be perfectly measured and holy, ever flooded by divine Love and acutely aware of that of God in those we disagree with, we strained our human nature until it snapped.

How holy are we expected to be? Is there a room for humor, which would likely diffuse some of that pent up human-ness?

Humor at business sessions:
1. Tomatoes on the lectern: Starting on Sunday, someone put a tomato on the corner of the lectern that all reports and keynotes are given from. If an explanation was given, I missed it. Two mornings later, there were three more, smaller tomatoes lined up across the lectern. Again no explanation. During Wednesday night's business session, which witnessed the most controversy, a Friend from Cambridge Meeting jumped on stage between speakers and put a tiny cherry tomato at the end of the line. Laughter clapped across the auditorium, which moments before (and moments after) was heavy with disagreement. Such harmless irreverence was likely, though not certainly, appreciated by all.

2. Elaborate introductions: If I stood to speak in a "meeting for worship for business", (the Quaker name for business meetings) I would preclude my statement with, "Mimi Marstaller, Durham Friends Meeting." By Wednesday night Friends were getting punchy.
"D---- W-----,  Portsmouth Meeting, New Hampshire, on the border of Maine, next to the Atlantic Ocean."
"H-------- E---------, Worcester Meeting, Worcester Mass. Which is the second largest city in New England."
Titters rose from the audience, then a Friend said
"R-------- Z----------, South Stockton Meeting. The first time I came to Yearly Meeting I had no idea where any of the Meetings were located. Can we please not make fun of it?"

3. Clowning around: After a tense discussion on Thursday morning of the Legacy Fund, which had been a topic of controversy the night before, General Secretary Noah Baker Merrill took to the tomato-laden lectern to report on the attendance numbers for NEYM this year. He donned a clown's nose, and Ben Guerraldi, Cambridge Meeting, stood behind him, stuck his arms under Noah's, and gesticulated wildly through the whole presentation. It was the only time all week when I bent over laughing. And I generally love to take things way too seriously. This video captures a moment of their presentation; I do not exaggerate when I say that it brought the meeting back to life.

Yes, it is easy to bring humor into happy discussions (attendance and financial vitals for the conference were up this year). I don't suggest bringing humor into the deepest, most divided discussions. But by all means, bring on the humorous interludes. The tomatoes and Ben and Noah's clowning will remain some of my strongest and best NEYM memories. 

Quakers and Entrepreneurs, first cousins

Children sitting in Quaker worship, or those new to Quaker meeting, might wonder "How long do you have to sit in the silence in order to hear God?"


This week at New England Yearly Meeting, a gathering of about 700 Friends in Vermont, there are many opportunities to sit in silence. There's the half hour of silent worship from 6:30-7:00 am, which for the past two mornings has been held outside and offered views of mist-wrapped hills. That silence is designed to stoke the coals of the Spirit.
There's the minute of silence observed at the end of workshops, like the scant minute at the end of an impassioned presentation and discussion on the situation in Gaza. That kind of silence is designed to toss water on flaring embers of the human spirit, and to remind us why we sit in silence together.


We do not, after all, gather in Quaker fellowship to listen to each other. As Susan Smith points out in this piece on Quaker Process, we gather to discern God's will for our group. At the Quaker meeting for worship for business this morning, we met with the intention of hearing God's message to our corporate body, not what He had to say to each of us individually.


Writes Smith:


"Friends believed that people who seek and follow God’s will for a given situation are automatically brought into unity with each other, because God does not offer contradictory instructions for the same situation."


But how long does all this listening take? What if the right course of action doesn't spring into the group conscious, and continues not to? There are, in fact, items which have been on the agenda of the Yearly Meeting for years.


I submit that Quakers might take a page from both Romans and from the entrepreneur's handbook. It's actually kind of the same page.


Romans 12:2 says (ESV)
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.


This could be paraphrased as "Disregard the status quo- think outside the box, and tinker until you find the right path, the path that God made for you." This is basically how entrepreneurs behave, though God might not be foremost in their thoughts. What is foremost in their thoughts is listening- trying to discern a need around them that is not being met.

Today David Brooks writes about James Mwangi, a Kenyan entrepreneur who started Equity Bank, offering savings accounts to poor Kenyans. The bank met a need, but for the first several years it struggled, losing money each year. But things changed, Kenyans began earning more money, and today the bank holds nearly half Kenya's bank accounts.

Mwangi must have had an inkling that a bank was a good idea. But he didn't know it would work well, and in fact it didn't for a long time. But he rolled up his sleeves, and began "testing" in order to "discern" what was the right path to follow in his goal to create a successful business and provide a valuable service.

Quakers should be similarly willing to jump into the game before we know whether something will be a shoe in. Let's not let our hair turn gray while we wait for God to make his entire will clear. Let's act on the first step, then tinker with the live project as we go.

Where should Quakers roll up our sleeves?
-by writing a replacement for the FUM personnel policy which honors gay and lesbian Friends. It may not be perfect, but it will continue the conversation.
-publish goals regarding church planting in cities, giving each Monthly Meeting a charge to start a Worship Group in a nearby town, since today's seekers are looking for a faith community based in town, not in countryside.
-Try a completely new budget plan which involves less charitable giving, in order to balance the budget, and commits Friends to a year of turning that energy inward to strengthen Meetings themselves: let those who want to lead take a role in adult education. Lead Faith and Practice study groups. Have retreats at the Meetinghouse, in tents in the backyard, rather than flying off to Cuba or England for an exciting tour of Quaker history. We can just as well test the will of God by examining and rearranging our own backyards as by examining the yards of distant neighbors.