What must perish

Last week was ONE of the rare weeks I had no time to blog and I am saying no to shoulds! It was one of the most intense, active weeks I have experienced and something had to go. Not the three-hour second interview or its prep and not the two grants due the day after the exhausting, but good, interview. So, it was the blog.

I missed it and things kept percolating all week. It really is my time to process the deep subjects, questions and concerns floating around my psyche. Then there are times I need to rant, tell a story or express gratitude. I am grateful for the outlet and the dear readers who linger and, often, take time to comment. It acknowledges that what I experience is not isolated ... that we all struggle and amble through life the best we can, attempting to remember there is a greater ONE behind the scenes.

I am currently feeling the need to deal with with Lent, my Quaker Meeting's 200th anniversary and the June 1 closing of the school where my studio has been located for three years. And, I'll take them in that order.

Lent never meant much to me growing up, except that the school cafeteria served up soggy fish on Fridays 'cause the Catholic kids couldn't eat meat, they gave up things like gum and candy, wore ashes on their foreheads and our Methodist Church changed its color scheme to purple. Of course, I understood it as a build-up to Easter.

Last year, the practice became much more personal and meaningful to me mainly because of my new spiritual director, an Episcopal, and because it entranced me, intertwining with the change of season, life-death-life and a very specific rhythm and focus. I haven't been following it so deeply this year, yet it calls to me. I understand it as a time of shedding, reducing, turning inward and seeking Spirit. Meanwhile, my exterior life ha gone haywire with busyness and so much uncertainty.

In the midst, my faith community reached an epic milestone culminating one Sunday week before last. We celebrated with guest speakers, visitors, former members, an old-fashioned carry-in meal and then Quaker author Phil Gulley and Quaker singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer.

I loved how Phil Gully just keeps expanding his circles of understanding and inclusiveness. I was moved in "If the Church were Christian" by the idea of universal salvation; that God's love is available to all. PERIOD. That is what I believe. He advocated that if Christianity, all 39,000 factions, is to survive, we must embrace other faiths and religions with the same idea of universal salvation. Christianity must change to survive. He's right. Life is change and anything stagnant dies.

And Carrie Newcomer's low and folky voice carries her deep wisdom into song. I've heard her described as the Prairie Mystic. She truly is. She sang my favorite, about the brown-gray geodes so common near her home in Bloomington, IND. Dull and dead-looking outside, broken open, beautiful crystals are exposed.

Again, life and death from both author and songwriter/singer.

It was a former minister's words, however, that woke me up. Jim Newby, also an author and now at Church of the Savior in Oklahoma City, talked about the challenge of building redemptive community. I immediately sensed his words were a challenge to my 200-year old church not to rest on our laurels and to take up this way of being. Redemptive community, he said, consists of:

• creating a place where we can expose and deal with our pain;

• nurture deep worship for reaching the living Christ;

• encouraging and supporting one another;

• being sure of ourselves and able to count on each other; and

• practicing unconditional love.

We do one of these well and another half well. The rest are untapped sources.

This week in worship, our minister asked what current truth we speak, as Quakers. It occurred to me that truth is only present when the first motion is love, not when we worship early Friends, social activism, the intellect or the Quaker way of doing things. And that Jim Newby's five points are the perfect road map.

Why must I be the negative Nelly, I wondered after delivering that message. At least four people later said they needed to hear that and it was truth. Wouldn't have mattered; I couldn't NOT have said it. Spirit was pushing me.

A few days later, in my "in" box, this devotional from the Henri Nouwen Society arrived:

"There are many forms of poverty: economic poverty, physical poverty, emotional poverty, mental poverty, and spiritual poverty. As long as we relate primarily to each other's wealth, health, stability, intelligence, and soul strength, we cannot develop true community. Community is not a talent show in which we dazzle the world with our combined gifts. Community is the place where our poverty is acknowledged and accepted, not as something we have to learn to cope with as best as we can but as a true source of new life.

Living community in whatever form - family, parish, twelve-step program, or intentional community - challenges us to come together at the place of our poverty, believing that there we can reveal our richness."

And so, when the e-mail came declaring we had to be out of the building by June 1, I was not surprised. While it tears me up to think this place where such beautiful things have happened will, likely, get torn down itself, I understand God may be making way for new things. Better things. Things we can not possibly imagine.

That wisdom would not have surfaced had I attempted to blog last week -- only now, when Spirit prompted.

• What practices help me avoid the shoulds of life?

• What meaning, if any, does Lent have in my life?

• When do I experience times of retreating, waiting, reducing?

• How do I recognize when Spirit is leading toward a death?

• How do I trust during these times?

blogging

last week

was not in the

stars

did I really just

hear one of the

autistic kids

next door

singing

Twinkle

Twinkle?

clearly, thank you

sweet voice, it

was not

and I rested

any attacks

of the shoulds

because this

is the season

of pulling

away from life

and letting what

must perish die

because we

have the

ultimate

example of

new life

right

before us

living

within

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Life and death in a faith community

After five years, I decided it was time to officially seek membership in my Quaker Meeting. Being named to the burial committee was the clincher. You HAD to be a member to participate on that committee and I very much wanted to be part. So, I wrote a request letter, was assigned an affirming clearness committee for membership and joined with my daughters. We were warmly welcomed one Sunday along with a my friend, Jill, and her daughters. I covet that photo of the six of us.

Borrowed from Cincinnati Friends Meeting website

I took my time seeking membership because I felt truly called to this community. My mother had suggested I would like the simplicity of the worship, my then year-and-a-half-year old awoke one morning proclaiming "Mommy, I know Jesus" and relief from a car accident sent me to Cincinnati Friends Meeting. I was eased in by my childhood Methodist minister, who was serving as interim. When the pianist played "'Tis a Gift to be Simple," there was no question I was home.

Papa Paul sealed the deal when I noticed his "Cincinnati Mortuary School" polo and we struck up a conversation around the funeral industry. He was my first friend within the Friends and we'd bonded over death.

Within a year and I half I was introduced to spiritual nurture (formation) and helping lead small groups, which I lovingly tended for 12 years. My daughter and I were embraced; I was encouraged to keep in her worship, even the morning the minister rhetorically asked "What would you do?" reading a passage about Noah and my daughter began singing "Rain, rain go away." I was aghast; they were charmed.

I was so comfortable that I didn't feel I needed a committee to tell me I belonged. Not, at least, until I felt the urge to serve on the burial committee and membership was a qualification. So, I braced for an inquisition and, quite contrarily, was affirmed in my faith and community.

Ten years later and I am still on the burial committee. We don't meet regularly, though several years ago orchestrated a walking tour of Spring Grove Cemetery and our Quaker section. Rarely, I'll handle a plot selection for pre-need. This week, I was called on to help with minimal arrangements at need. Though I didn't understand that during the first conversation.

Barbara, always nurturing me and both of my daughters, left a phone message saying it was an emergency. I called right away to learn she needed help navigating the cemetery office labyrinth. I assumed she was preparing for her husband's eventual need as he had been declining. I was able to get the ball rolling from home and before I walked out the door for the studio that morning.

Spring Grove sent a pleasant response remarking that Barbara and her daughter would be in at noon. Hum, I thought, guess Barb is really serious about getting this done. Last time we spoke, she'd said Ed was slowly deteriorating.

I had not seen Ed in a long time, Maybe not since a Friend's funeral a few years ago. He'd struggled with dementia for decades, long before anyone knew how to treat Alzheimer's. Barbara, a skilled and well-educated nurse, had been his caretaker. But I so remember how eloquently he gave vocal ministry in my earlier days at the Meeting. His voice was rich and sweet, with a resonance that made you know Spirit was using his gift. While I can't remember specifically anything he said (which is true of most vocal ministry, especially my own), I  knew that he spoke truth. He was such a gentle soul, always inquiring about my girls.

Barbara called me back and we chatted some more, She was grateful for the way in which the cemetery personal had treated her and her daughter. Mostly, she wanted to alert me to a potential problem in our section of Spring Grove, which arose when she was debating how many spaces to reserve for her family. "Well, it's not like you need them soon," I casually and thoughtlessly commented. "No, not til next week," she responded. "Hold it, Barbara, am I missing something. How IS Ed?" Turns out he had died early that morning.

Barbara never ceases to amaze me in all that she does, the many and scattered people she cares for, how she picks herself back up and musters unlimited time and energy for others ... in addition to Ed. It must be her deep faith that carries her. She's a fountain.

When I asked if she minded talking about how he died, she said no. Being a nurse, she is very practical. She said he'd been restless and saying "help me, help me," so she went over and told him she had done all that she could and it was God's turn. "Ask God for peace." she'd advised. With that he'd settled down and eventually took his last breath.

I think it's a beautiful story and one of the reasons I feel honored to serve on the burial committee, even though my contribution is minimal. One last little testament.

When we'd held the walking tour, which was fabulous thanks to a well-informed and lively docent, Ruby arrived with her husband and sister-in-law in tow. She'd fibbed a little to get her spouse to ride down from Wilmington because she was bent on reserving their family spaces. As I sat in the room with the trio, I had a flash forward of when those spaces would be utilized and was so grateful for that one moment to help connect them.

I've never minded funerals, walking close up at the visitation and directly expressing condolences to survivors. I have always had a sense of calm, peacefulness and that Spirit was extra close to mourners.

I enjoyed connecting with funeral directors when I was employed at Batesville Casket Company in marketing. They were such a caring and dedicated group, so respectful of the living and dead. My favorite work there, however, was with noted thanatologist Dr. Alan Wolfelt, who runs the Center for Life and Loss Transition in Ft. Collins, CO. He taught me so much about grief and why ritual and knowing what to do when we don't know what to do is so important. I miscarried during this time, so the wisdom became personal.

Death is a part of life, one modern culture isolates. For it is the survivors who already feel isolated and need tending.

• What are my feelings around death?
• What are my experiences of death?
• Where have I witnessed God in the process?
• What gifts have I tapped in times like these?
• How do I comfort others?

my Meeting
gave me life
and freedom to
explore my
spirituality

decide who
God is to me,
and experience
the Christ energy

so why is that
the chance to
serve it by
dealing with
death finally
prompted
me to make
what I felt
official?

interesting
where God
places us and
what she puts
in our hearts
when


BTW: If you have any interest in Quakerism and happen to be in Cincinnati, my Meeting (church) is hosting a series of sessions for safely exploring Quakerism. The first is next week, Tuesday, Oct. 7 at 7 p.m., 8075 Keller Rd., Cincinnati, OH  45243. The topic is faith and local action and I'll be talking about my journey with Artsy Fartsy Saturdays. More info at www.cincinnatifriends.org

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