What I think about Plainness, for now

So, I have been led to adopt Plain dress, at least for now (I have no idea what will happen next year, or even tomorrow for that matter).  I was made aware of The New Plain among Quakers when I randomly came across Quaker Jane’s website (http://www.quakerjane.com).  At the time, I thought it was interesting, and I forwarded the link to my sister, a Religious Studies major.  We both thought the phenomenon was fascinating, intellectually speaking, I suppose.

But then, some time mid-October, I was hit.  It felt like a shove in the back, and it nearly knocked the wind out of me.  Suddenly, Plain dress seemed to possess me, and I spent many hours at my computer, reading Quaker blogs and writings about Plainness, poring over photographs of Plain people (both Quaker and Amish), and looking at catalogs of Plain clothes.  About that time, my computer was stolen from my room, just as my previous one had been only a few months earlier.  This was another forceful blow, and I felt like God was trying to teach me something, but I couldn’t really tell what.  Plain dress seemed to pounce on me, and it held me for a few weeks until I submitted to what was evidently God’s will for me.  In great relief I then set about Plaining my wardrobe.

I removed my watch and belt and began to give away clothes to friends left and right.  I got a grey-blue button-down shirt from Salvation Army and cut off the collar.  I ordered some Amish suspenders on-line, and sewed some buttons onto the waist of my dark blue Levi’s.  I brought out a thrift-shop brown tweed vest I already owned.  I shaved off my moustache and allowed my beard to grow. 

The next stage in what my friend called “the Plain initiative” came when I was able to catch my breath and really consider what Plainness meant to me.  I spent two-days’ wages on a collarless organic hemp shirt that had been made in Romania under strict EU labor standards.  Even the buttons were made from sustainably harvested tagua nut.  I resisted purchasing Amish broadfall trousers (most of which, I found, were polyester) and instead went for an option that was more regionally authentic for this California boy:  suspender pants in the Old West style made out of heavy-duty dark-brown cotton.  I bought a thick grey Irish wool sweater for the cold Northeastern winter.  I continued wearing the same vintage brown coat I had owned for a decade.  No machine-made or sweatshop-produced hat for me:  I ordered a handmade black broad-brimmed hat from a man who uses only historical methods and materials.  I also ordered a handmade Amish straw hat for the summer.  I wanted clothes that adhered to my standards of environmental and social justice.  I also wanted clothes that were sufficiently Plain without being Amish;  I didn’t want to be someone who was simply “in Amish costume.”  I wanted to be someone in Quaker clothing.

So, what does Plain dress mean to me, at this moment?  It seems to me that Plain men are much less identifiable than Plain women, who usually have their cape dresses, bonnets, and/or prayer caps.  When I’m not wearing my hat (and maybe even when I am), I suspect that I am more likely to be seen as someone with an idiosyncratic fashion sense than someone who is religiously Plain.  Therefore, I’m unsure of any witness I may have to the world.  So, for now, Plain dress is largely personal and inward:  it serves as a constant reminder to me to be “Quakerly” in everything I do, even everything I think.  I may write on this later.

In my readings, I have discovered that many Plain Friends find Plainness to be a rejection of fashion;  in fact, that was the way the first generations of Friends conceptualized Plain attire.  However, I have to admit that I was and still am a bit of a fashion junkie.  Many of my friends (as well as my mother) consider me to be their style consultant;  my mother has even admitted to thinking “what would Stephen say?” before making a purchase or stepping out of the house in an ‘experimental’ ensemble.  I do have a handful of fashion magazines on my shelf, as well as various books on clothing:  Fiberarts Design Book Six, How the West Was Worn, Fashionable Clothing from the Early 1960s, The Book of Kimono.  Before going Plain, my wardrobe consisted almost entirely of wonderful vintage pieces in styles that would be familiar to the 1950s and early 60s.  Even then, though, I was consciously making a statement with my clothing.  Purchasing exclusively secondhand clothing was my personal protest against wastefulness and wanton consumerism.  And yet, as I found mainstream fashion to be following in my footsteps, I began to seem more and more like yet another hipster fashionista in industrially produced faux-vintage.  I went along with it, however uncomfortably.

Actually, let me rephrase my earlier statement:  I am, I suppose, more of a clothing junkie.  That is, I don’t necessarily care for the whims of the fashion illuminati or the changeable currents of mainstream attire;  although I sometimes find those whims and currents interesting, what I do care for—actually, what I have a great passion for—are simply the aesthetics and sensations of clothing.  I love the visual and textural beauty of textiles, and I love the cloth-encased shapes of the human body.  I couldn’t deny myself these pleasures and still claim a joy of authenticity in my Plain dress.  So in my Plainness I have opted for the simple, the natural, the beautiful, and the pure:  my clothes are hemp, linen, cotton, and wool, and they are mostly hand-loomed, hand-knit, hand-formed, or vintage.  When I wear my shirt and sweater, for example, I can look at the luscious juxtaposition of fine linen and thick knotted wool at my wrist—both undyed—and revel in the beauty of the raw materials as God created them and the skilled hands of the artisans who molded those materials into their present forms.

So, I derive great aesthetic—even sensual—pleasure from my Plain clothes.  I am not ashamed of this fact.  This has been a wonderful, unexpected result of “the Plain initiative.”  The pleasure I get is based on their simplicity, a simplicity that allows the hand of God and the hand of the artisan to be radiantly apparent.  It is also the simplicity of quietness, for the earth tones and undyed fabrics are quiet and true.  After many years splashing about wildly in a sea of “how do I look?  how do I look?” I have returned to centeredness, to a core experience of fabric against skin, to what I really need out of clothes:  warmth and modesty, yes, but also a simple and naive quiet beauty.  The beauty of pure wool, of soft hemp, of honest forms and gentle hues.  These are things so effortless and true in their thing-ness that everything else seems gaudy and frenzied by comparison.

Can I, imprisoned, body-bound, touch
The starry robe of God, and from my soul,
My tiny Part, reach forth to his great Whole,
And spread my Little to the infinite Much,
When Truth forever slips from out my clutch,
And what I take indeed, I do but dole
In cupfuls from a rimless ocean-bowl
That holds a million million such?
And yet, some Thing that moves among the stars,
And holds the cosmos in a web of law,
Moves too in me: a hunger, a quick thaw
Of soul that liquefies the ancient bars,
As I, a member of creation, sing
The burning oneness binding everything.

--Kenneth E. Boulding

Towards a new Christian environmentalism?

When I was in high school, I got a “do not disturb” door-knob sign thingy from an interfaith environmentalist conference.  On it was a charming illustration of several smiling animals sitting on top of a little earth floating in space.  Below the image was this line from 1 Timothy 6:20:  “guard what has been entrusted to your care.”

That made sense then.  But now, something troubles me about the whole rhetoric of stewardship that characterizes the Christian environmental movement.  Don’t get me wrong:  I love the fact that the faith community is finally stepping up to the plate when it comes to environmental issues.  But I think that stewardship isn’t really the best way to be thinking about it.

Some of the most beautiful and edgy teachings of Jesus have to do with compassion, equality, and humbleness.  To me, the rhetoric of stewardship is actually a rhetoric of dominance, hierarchy, and submission, all of which are quite contrary to what has been revealed to us about the Peaceable Kin-dom.  I see it as the modern equivalent of the “White Man’s Burden:”  we were put on this earth to care for the poor unfortunate beings who are lower than us on the food chain. 

I realize that Genesis has clearly stipulated that man should "rule" and "subdue" the natural world.  I can't argue with that fact.  However, I do know that the Living God continues to speak to us today, and these new revelations say otherwise.  I have seen no evidence that the other living beings on this planet and the delicate soil, air, and water that sustain us are supposed to submit to our dominance. The rhetoric of stewardship—guarding what has been entrusted to our care—makes us ignore the obvious evidence:  we humans are not, actually, the Lords of Earth.  We are not its parents or its caretakers, although we have unfortunately become its destroyers.  The fact of the matter is that creation would get along fine without our meddling and our pretenses to greatness. 

I mean, who are we to lord it over the earth?  We who are broken, confused, selfish, delusional, detached?  I think that we need to shift our attention away from notions of stewardship and begin to focus instead on healing and restoration.  It seems to me that healing ourselves goes hand in hand with healing the whole.  This might be where we can begin to find a new rhetoric for Christian environmentalism.

Haven’t we realized that all things on earth are ecologically connected as though everything were one, big, living, breathing organism?  Modern science has shown us this.  Centuries ago, John revealed something similar:  all of creation is united by the thrumming logos of the Creator that undervibrates all things and ignites them with breath and motion and pure being-ness.  When we really take all this to heart, then, environmentalism becomes not a collection of acts We perform for Others but a way of living that emerges naturally from a realization of the kinship of all created things, as animated by the Creator.  If Paul has called the church the body of Christ, then, would it be too far off to call the Earth the body of God? 

Now, I don’t want to take the next step and make the simplistic claim that by abusing the earth we are abusing God.  What I do want to say is that I have found all my fellow creatures to be my brothers and sisters, to be those very beings that Jesus commanded us to love as ourselves.  If we extend to the rest of the natural world that radical love that dissolves arbitrary borders and boundaries, we find an unsettling assignment, one that far transcends any notion of stewardship or even the green guilt-tripping of secular environmentalism.  God—once again—challenges us to work for the compassionate relief of the suffering of all created things, human or not.  As in many areas, we have disrupted a delicate balance.  How can we work to create and restore the balanced wholeness of the Peaceable Kin-dom here on our suffering earth?  What am I personally willing to do to make it happen?

May the Peace of Christ disturb you

Today, my friend signed off a Merry Christmas e-mail with "May the Peace of Christ Disturb You."  The other day, over steaming bowls of pho, we had talked about the need for crash helmets and not church hats when encountering God.  And so I began to think.

We know from experience that Christ has come to teach his people himself, today, and also every day.  He is here in our midst now, God-With-Us.  Quakers traditionally don't celebrate Christmas because it distracts us from the sublime truth that Christ is continuously born within us, and so every day should be his birthday.  But as I reflect upon the liturgical Christmas scripture readings, I think that we often need that time in the year when we pause to really listen to Isaiah, whose words are still red-hot after all these centuries:  the people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light.  Those who walked in a land of deep darkness:  on them light has shined.

Light disturbs darkness.  In darkness, we are able to hide all our secrets, all our faults, all the things we don't want to face.   It is that monolithic edifice we know as the ego that casts this shadow, and boy do we love to hide in that luxurious darkness!  But light brings truth, it illuminates every corner, every crevice and crack.  It is uncomfortable to come face to face with the things we have been trying to hide.

The Inner Light is that inner presence that disturbs us.  God-With-Us is also God-Within-Us, and he constantly challenges us to create the Peaceable Kin-dom every day, every minute.  This is an unsettling task, yet it is a task that we as Quakers--in fact, we as Christians--are called to do.  I find that God does not operate--nor does he ask us to operate--the way the world expects.  Where the world expects pettiness, selfishness, hardness, tribalism, and wastefulness God calls us to sow love and compassion, to remain receptive and real, and to live with simplicity, integrity, and honesty.  Of course this is not easy, and that is partly why I suspect that God has called me to Plain dress.  It's a personal reminder that I am supposed to walk in the Way of God, not the way of man.  It's tremendously humbling to have such a constant and visible reminder of how often I fail.  But recognition of my failures is also tremendously empowering.  Here at Christmas I am reminded that God has chosen to funnel himself into the humblest of substances, and that by doing so, he makes in us a New Creation.  As promised, he removes our hearts of stone and gives us hearts of flesh, hearts that are living and vulnerable, that move and pulse and overflow with the streams of life.  When we finally give in and come out of our hiding and become humble and supple and open and liberated we can really taste true joy.  I think that the joyous, receptive, and free make up the population of the Peaceable Kin-dom.  Christ has come to show us--to teach us--all of this.

I've come to think that the Peace of Christ is not a gift but a teaching.  Christ has come to teach us his peace, he has come to show us both the what and the how.  The Peace of Christ disturbs us because his peace is a teaching that calls for our participation.  We have to actively co-create the Peaceable Kin-dom, and what's more, we have to co-create his peace right here on earth, in our own lifetimes.  This peace is not the peace of the world, which stems from compromise, diplomacy, and fine words.  The Peace of Christ stems from love and compassion, it flows from and produces those wonderful and sublime fruits of the spirit:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.  This will disturb us, this will shake us up.  This is not usually the way we worldly folk operate.  But we know that Christ loves to shake things up, to overturn tables and hierarchies, to touch the untouchable and love the unloveable and forgive the unforgivable.  I also must allow myself to be disturbed enough to disturb.  And so, brothers and sisters, this Christmas, may the Peace of Christ disturb you.

A Carolingian Dialogue

...

Pepin:  What are the heavens?

Alcuin:  A spinning sphere, a vast summit.

Pepin:  What is light?

Alcuin:  The visage of all things.

Pepin:  What is the day?

Alcuin:  The impetus to work.

Pepin:  What is the sun?

Alcuin:  The light of the world, the adornment of the heavens, the grace of nature, the splendor of the day, the dispenser of hours.

Pepin:  What is the moon?

Alcuin:  The eye of night, the bringer of dew, the foreteller of storms.

Pepin:  What are stars?

Alcuin:  A painting of the heavens, guides for sailors, ornaments of the night.

Pepin:  What is rain?

Alcuin:  A reservoir of the earth, the begetter of crops.

Pepin:  What are clouds?

Alcuin:  Night in the day, work for the eyes.

Pepin:  What is wind?

Alcuin:  A disorder of the air, changeableness of water, dryness of land.

Pepin:  What is the earth?

Alcuin:  The mother of growing things, nurse of the living, the pantry of life, she who consumes all things.

...

As I walked to meeting this morning, sleet began to fall.  It made the sidewalk crunch with each step.  I had 15 minutes to get to meeting, which meant that I had to walk at a very brisk and determined pace.  But I passed an oak tree along the way that stopped me dead in my tracks.  The leaves were large, lobed, and late-autumn-crisp.  They hung from the branches like so many fish scales, or papery hands.  As I passed, I heard the sleet hitting the leaves and tumbling down, making the entire tree ring.  It was a sound I had never encountered before:  feathery, sibilant, shimmering.

As I sat silently in meeting, I was suddenly slapped with a feeling of disconnectedness.  I felt profoundly disconnected from everyone else in the room.  I felt alone and alien, as if I were in a room full of meditating atheists in this liberal college town.  Quakerism's reluctance to exclude anyone suddenly weighed in heavily on me, and I somehow felt the cloud of diluting universalism suck all spiritual vitality from the meeting.  I felt for the first time like I wanted to run away, like I was being pulled into a Godless void.

And then I heard it.  I heard the sound of rising wind, and the sound of sleet falling onto the trees outside.  The meeting's sounds of breathing and shifting seats and rustling clothes expanded into the liquescent sounds of air and ice and leaves.

I was being pulled into something, I'm sure.  But not a Godless void;  far from it.  It was a space where God was wholly and elementally present, and my sudden discontents melted away.  I could feel that my fellow sitters and I were all worshippers, all listeners.  A woman stood to remind us that the beginning of the Advent season tells us the joy of waiting.  I shifted my hands so my palms faced up.  These words passed through my head again and again:  "Be still and know that I am God."  

My good friend once skipped meeting to spend First Day morning in the woods.  To her, the trees are just as full of God's presence as any Quaker meetinghouse.  Today, I heard God remind me of his presence, and his voice sounded like breathing and wind and shuddering leaves.

The 'secular prayer' I will say tonight

Brothers, sisters,

Let's pause for a moment and give in to gratitude.

For the air, the water, and the soil

That have birthed the food that now sits radiant before us.

May it nourish us.

When we look at each other,

We see joy, love, communion.

Let's give thanks for that.

May all beings on this globe

Have such gratitude, joy, love, and communion 

As we have now.

Friends, let's make that happen.

So be it; let's eat.

Holding someone in the Light

My boss just left for the day, for the Thanksgiving break. Just ten minutes after she left, I received a call for her; it was her brother in Cape Verde. The sound of a woman's voice in ritual mourning was loud in the background. I transferred him to another woman in the department to give him my boss's cell phone number. One minute later, the phone rang and the voice on the other line was distraught. "Stephen, my dad just died." Then she hung up.

I sat here at my desk unable to move. Then I went into the back room to sit in silence for a few moments and try my best to hold her in the Light.

I had heard people at meeting asking for Friends to "hold so-and-so in the Light." I never knew what to do, and trusted that those around me knew exactly what to do. But now it's my turn, and I'm not sure what it means. At first, I imagined her sitting before me, surrounded by warm, radiant light. I imagined my hands spreading the light around her as she sat, around her head, her shoulders, her arms. I saw myself sitting there with her, somewhat at a distance, but my arms were long. Then I saw the source of that light. It was God--or the way he chose to show himself to me at that moment. He was a young man sitting with us, with no perceivable expression on his face. But he was spilling forth light, and it was coming from him in waves and eddies. I was taking my hands and pushing it as if I were pushing water. I was splashing her with light, and I could sense nothing but this perfect, timeless, permeating warmth. Love, God's kind of love, maybe?

When I was growing up, my mother always taught my sister and me to heal ourselves of any sickness. We almost never took medication, and even then only for the most serious fevers on school nights. Instead, we would use home remedies like lemon juice and cold water baths, and we would use visualization. We would visualize this white light around any targeted area of our bodies--sore throats, inflamed sinuses, upset stomachs. We would make the light purge any impurities and be able to heal ourselves with sheer force of will. I still do this, and let me tell you, I get sick a lot more now that I've been plunged into the wildly vacillating climate of the Northeast.

So, is that what it is, holding someone in the light? Purging someone of any impurities, restoring balance, wholeness, peace? If so, it is much more potent than what is often implied by "praying for someone." By holding someone in the light, we aren't asking God for something. We are entering into a three-person communion with God, and taking part in the manifestation of compassion. We are actively and humbly taking in our hands the tool that God has given us to heal each other, and ourselves: love. I think that this is our greatest gift and constant obligation.

This morning, I woke up to discover two things: one, the sky was full of rain and the streets were washed black as the day they were born. Two, there was a medium-sized brown spider on the window frame, right next to my face. In a panic (there are few things I loathe more than spiders in proximity to my body), I swept it into a small ceramic cup and flung open the window to my fire escape. I leaned out to deposit the spider as far away from myself as possible.

I keep a large and beautiful branch on my fire escape, in willful defiance of fire code. Just yesterday it had been grey and dry. Today, the rain had moistened the branch, and the lichen and mosses that freckle its surface had revivified. They were green, supple, vibrant.

A Little Explanation

I love our new world.  Because I'm a medievalist--that is, a doctoral student in medieval history--I always get comments alluding to the fact that I was born in the wrong century.  So what if I talk about "walking to the market" and use candles and would rather sing with other people than listen to the radio?  I don't, in fact, wish to have been born in the Middle Ages, or any other century for that matter.  I can imagine no better time to live in than the present.  It seems that we are now in the process of deep collective reflection, and that we are standing on the edge of vast shifts in the way we live our lives and relate to other people and the Earth.  I see this blog as a place to add little bits to our collective reflection.  "The earth of humankind," wrote Hildegard von Bingen, "contains all moistness, all verdancy, all germinating power."  The mustard seeds have been planted.  The Kingdom of Heaven (what some have beautifully called the "Kin-dom of Heaven") is at hand.

As a Christian, a Quaker, I am called to integrity, honesty, and openness.  I am called to truth.  I have not been faithful to this testimony.  I have been afraid to engage in the forbidden God-talk.  I have hesitated to voice my thoughts on anarchy, compassion, and love for the Earth and all created things.  I have edited and censured the things I say.  I have sometimes even lied.  I have been afraid of what other people might think.  But I am not ready to embrace complete openness right now.  I suppose this blog is a confessional for me, a place where I can openly write of the things on my mind without making the commitment to speak of these things in realtime, face-to-face.  Here, I will be honest and true.

At the present moment, God has called me to the traditional Quaker witness of Plain dress.  I don't really know why (I suppose I'll make a post of it soon enough).  All I know is that it has come to be a sort of religious habit for me.  Certainly, it probably makes some kind of outer witness, but what it says to other people I have yet to ascertain.  But it has definitely had its effect on me.  When I put on the plain collarless shirt, the suspenders, the vest, I am reminded that I am a Quaker--in the world but not of it--and that I need to keep in the Light and be faithful to the truth, my truth.  At meeting several months ago, the sounds of the children at First Day School wafted through the floorboards and disturbed our silence.  I was led to stand and speak:  I admitted that I had often felt the push to speak during meeting, but for some reason had always tried to suppress it.  I supposed that it might be fear of disrupting the silence or saying something 'wrong.'  But I know that God is not afraid of shaking things up;  in fact, he asked us very explicitly to be like little children.  The children who openly speak their minds with perfect clarity and honesty and freedom.  The children who were now rupturing our peaceful decorum with high-pitched shouts of joy.