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.