Benedicimus te

This year I went to the Christmas carol service at Harvard (college towns! I love 'em!) The church, as usual, was packed enough that latecomers had to sit on the floor. People come mostly to hear the excellent choir and organ, but also for the pleasure of singing through some of the carols. It's the only place I've been that expects you to sight-read Latin on "Adeste Fidelis", though they do give you a choice of German or English on "Silent Night." It's a legit church service with gospel readings and prayers, but I don't have a good sense of how many of us come for a musical more than a religious experience. Sometimes I worry that I ought to find some more secular outlet for my harmony-singing urges, but I've had no luck.

We are now in the midst of family Christmas with twenty or so of Jeff's and my family. It's a solid week of cooking, eating, board games, singing, exchanging gifts, playing music, napping, and walking around the neighborhood. Pretty much my ideal way to spend a week. I know at least three people who wandered into Thomforde gatherings and stayed for days.

At night we light the menorah. My understanding of the Hebrew words we sing is vague at best. I know they feel warm and close. I'm grateful to whatever has preserved my father-in-law and his ancestors, grateful for Jeff singing beside me.

Last night we all went to see Revels, a stage show of traditional Christmas music and dance. Revels is aimed at a more secular crowd, and is generally very good at making folk culture accessible to people who aren't normally part of that scene.

Revels also includes a good bit of participatory singing, which I always approve of. There's no sensory experience that instantly conveys "you're among friends" to me like lots of people singing in harmony. Revels ends with a stately version of the Sussex Mummers' Carol, complete with Ralph Vaughan Williams' soaring descant.

God bless your house, your children too
Your cattle and your store
The Lord increase you day by day
And send you more and more,
And send you more and more.

And I decided it doesn't much matter what the words mean. We don't have cattle, and many of us don't believe in God. It is enough to stand in a warm building surrounded by a thousand other voices, singing a blessing onto each other.

Good things

Today in church the topic was the Magnificat, also known as the Canticle of Mary. I was thinking about one part, which we used to sing in children's choir:

He hath filled the hungry with good things
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Today I realized that my mental image of the "good things" is the food page from The Little Engine that Could.

"Some of the cars were filled with all sorts of good things for boys and girls to eat — big golden oranges, red-cheeked apples, bottles of creamy milk for their breakfasts, fresh spinach for their dinners, peppermint drops, and lollypops for after-meal treats."

To me, the combination of words and images invoke all that is wholesome and tasty. Fill me up!

Sober

As a social worker, I have to write things like "Patient is not motivated to maintain sobriety." That word, sobriety, sounds to me like people in gray clothes sitting in uncomfortable chairs. I'm not motivated to "maintain sobriety", so why should my clients be?

As a child in the Episcopal church, I disliked the part in the Book of Common Prayer about living "a godly, righteous, and sober life." I guess "sober" was supposed to mean "not too crazy." Quakers used to be big into sobriety, and the opposite was "gay", "vain", or "immoderate". The 1806 Book of Discipline from Philadelphia advised "that a watchful care be exercised over our youth, to prevent their going to stage-plays, horse-races, music, dancing, or any such vain sports and pastimes." "The sipping and tippling of drams and strong drink", though poetically phrased, was also frowned on. And if any Quaker should "fall into this evil practice, giving or taking strong liquors at vendues, or countenance or promote any noisy gatherings, they should be speedily dealt with as disorderly persons." This speedy dealing-with probably amounted to a concerned talking-to by some people in gray clothes, after which you would be kicked out of meeting if you didn't change your ways.

We're still using the nineteenth-century rhetoric that equates alcohol with frivolity. By the 1920s our culture worshipped frivolity, and what had everyone been taught about it? That it goes hand in hand with alcohol. If you want to be "gay" or "immoderate" (i.e. to have fun), drinking is the way to do it.

The result is that some people have forgotten how to have fun without drinking. Last Christmas when Jeff's boisterous Quaker family was gathered, a cousin's boyfriend marvelled that we seemed to be having such a good time with minimal drinking. He had never seen a family do that before.

When I dispatch my clients to a "sober house", I hope it won't be so very sober there. I hope they'll stay away from alcohol, but maybe there will be a little frivolity and even some noisy gatherings.

On suffering

My social work internship this year is in a psych hospital. Today I heard a patient explain her view on suffering.

"My angels think suffering is something holy, but I don't think so. Like Christians hang a cross with a dead Jesus on it over their beds. That's sacred to them, but I think it's creepy. I don't think Jesus had to die at thirty-two. I think he should have stayed alive and raised his daughter. Did you know he had a daughter? It was on the History Channel."

She echoed almost perfectly the words of Spanish poet Antonio Machado:

¡Cantar de la tierra mía,
que echa flores
al Jesús de la agonía,
y es la fe de mis mayores!
¡Oh, no eres tú mi cantar!
¡No puedo cantar, ni quiero,
a ese Jesús del madero,
sino al que anduvo en el mar!

Song of my homeland,
that throws flowers
to the agonized Jesus
and is the faith of my ancestors!
Oh, you are not my song!
I cannot sing, don't want to
to this Jesus on the cross,
but to him who walked on the sea!

Secular Sunday school

I'm teaching one of the Sunday school classes¹ for my Quaker meeting for a few months. As an agnostic, I wasn't really sure how to come up with lessons that were appropriately Quakerly but didn't require me pretending to believe anything I don't.

The first month has gone pretty well. We focused on John Woolman, a Quaker abolitionist of the 18th century, long before it was popular. I read his journal once, and what struck me that this hero of social justice was not a happy guy. I thought being that far ahead of your time required a disregard for social convention, but he actually did care what his peers thought. Telling his slaveowning friends that their way of life was reprehensible made him really embarrassed.

I thought the topic of "Doing what you think is right, even when it's unpopular or embarrassing" was totally apt for eleven-year-olds. They're starting to be embarrassed about nearly everything, so they might as well practice. We did some role-plays of John Woolman and his friends, and then some of modern schoolchildren dealing with a bully. We talked about how authority will not always step in to solve things, either by outlawing slavery or by making other kids stop being mean, and sometimes you have to take action yourself.

The kids were fairly interested, the old Quakers were happy I was teaching them Woolman, and I was happy I didn't have to mention God. I thought I'd write up the idea, since it might be useful to other teachers in a similar quandary. You could do the same with an admirable person from just about any faith tradition.

1. Technically "First Day school", since early Quakers weren't okay with pagan names for days of the week or months of the year. This leads to strangely numeric sentences like "The next business meeting is on the third First Day of Ninth Month."

This sorry scheme of things

Bible-centered folks often start explanations with, “The Bible tells us…” The quotations which follow this phrase sometimes address the topic directly, but more often there’s a lot of inference involved. The Bible gives a lot of specific injunctions about what to eat and how to build an ark of the covenant, but very little about bioethics.

What would a religious document look like, I wonder, that actually told people how to live? If an all-seeing God intended the document to be a guideline for people not just in 600 BC, but for all ages, what would that instruction manual contain?

It could be a lot shorter and less repetitive, for one thing. The hygiene rules could focus more on hand-washing. I hope the moral rules would still include some version of the golden rule, which is useful enough to appear in most major world religions. I hope it would emphasize kindness.

On the poetic side, Biblical prayer could also use some improvement. The words Jesus specifically tells people to use are now known as the Lord’s Prayer. Unfortunately, it’s not a very good prayer. It doesn’t have any particular theme, and gives the impression of being a mishmash of phrases from Jewish prayers. The only bit of poetry in it (thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory) doesn’t appear in any original text and was tacked on later. The Muslim and Jewish daily prayers are also pretty convoluted and not especially good poetry. My understanding is that in both cases they’re quotations from religious documents that somebody decided would be good to recite every day, not cases where the document says “God told us to recite this text every day.”

If one were trying to pick a prayer for everybody to recite, what would it be? Something like the Prayer of St. Francis would be my pick. I like that it hints at actions we can take.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy . . .

It would be nice if this really were St. Francis’s prayer passed down over seven centuries. But its earliest appearance is in 1912, and it wasn’t connected with St. Francis until 1936. Maybe I just like it because it’s in a modern style, and in a few hundred years it will seem terribly dated.

Actually, maybe daily meditation would be a more sensible, and less time-sensitive, thing to prescribe in a religious instruction manual.

In the words of Omar Khayyam (or more accurately, FitzGerald riffing on Khayyam):

Ah, Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

Reason vs. religion

I've been reading a lot of Less Wrong (a site that tries to educate people on rationalism) lately. They love to hate on religion there.

Today in church I was thinking about why I was there. There are many decisions, like what to do with money and how to teach science in schools, that I think people should make rationally. But there are other decisions, like what to with your Sunday morning, that I think people should make without too much tizzy about what would maximize utility.

I think anti-theism people ignore some useful functions of religion. I like church for one of the same reasons I like social work: it gives people space to think and talk about important things. There are very few spaces where we are invited to do that. It's good to ask ourselves periodically, "Am I treating my loved ones well?" "Is the way I live my life consistent with my values?" "Am I focusing on what's really important?"

I don't think religiosity has much of an effect on most people's daily lives. Most people seem to act like they want to act, and then pick and choose from their religious traditions to explain it. But I think religion sometimes gives us tools to become better people. In social work school we're certainly taught to ask about people's spiritual life and play up any strengths that offers them.

When we pause for silent grace before dinner, many times I've refrained from a bitter comment by remembering the Christian meal blessing: Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest. Not because I actually believe in Jesus as the incarnation of love, but because I can imagine what it would be like to believe that. For me, it's less effective to think "I should be kind" than to imagine the god of love actually sitting at my table. And if that kind of imagination helps me be a kinder person, what's wrong with it? The need to take everything absolutely literally, and to rail against any thought that is not literally true, seems strangely inflexible to me.

I also think church broadens my view of who "us" is. I like that the liturgy includes praying for people with mental illness, homeless people, people getting divorces, people who are sick, people who lost their jobs. Society's usual method is to power on and pretend these problems don't exist. I like that in church we can acknowledge these as things that happen to people we know, people who are us. My defense mechanism is to pretend that I can somehow avoid any of these problems by living my life properly. The prayers remind me of reality: bad things happen to good people. Our response should not be to ignore it, but to stick together and help get each other through those bad things.

Lastly, group singing. And potlucks. Rationalists, how good are your potlucks? (There was a meetup in Cambridge this evening at a restaurant, but I didn't go because I don't consider most restaurants a rational use of money. Also, I thought you might be jerks.)

More on covering up . . .

...but on a different theme from yesterday's.

Today I learned that a small number of Jewish women in Israel have started wearing the burka. A conservative Jewish dress code normally encompasses long sleeves, skirts, and hair coverings for women, and this sect is taking it farther by adding a face covering. Faced with Jewish women who dress like Muslim women, other Israelis are freaking out. People harass them on the streets and call them "Taliban women." One news story breathlessly reports that even little girls can be seen "walking around outdoors in full body coverage." A member of Israel's legislative body proposed banning the burka for both Jews and Muslims.

Isn't it interesting that when women draw attention to themselves, so many people can't handle it?

Fables

The division between religion and mythology seems fairly clear to adults - one is believed by people currently alive, and the other was believed by people not currently alive. To children it's less clear.

I'm sitting with two eight-year-olds, one Irish Catholic, one Haitian Catholic. They are discussing bee-stings.
"It's like that fable," says Ryan.
"Yeah", says Paul. "That we read in class." I ask them about it.
"Zeus didn't want the bees to sting people over and over, so he made the bees die after one sting."
"But it's not all true," Paul adds. I ask which part isn't true. "The part about the bees."
"But the part about Zeus is true," Ryan asserts.
Paul agrees. "Zeus is watching us right now." He looks upwards and waves. "Hi, Zeus."
"But Zeus doesn't have a stinger," Ryan says.
"No. He's really busy. I bet he has a lot of papers on his table."
"But they didn't have papers then, they had scrolls."

Comfort and joy

On the day after Christmas, my cousin invited me to a local evangelical church. I went with her, since I had never been to one. My cousin is the only serious Christian in that branch of the family, and this was a seriously Christian place. (Praise music - whoa.)

I found the whole experience unsettling, and I finally realized what it was: there were no extras. Christmas was mentioned in the sermon, but other than that it might have been any Sunday of the year. There was no Christmas music. No decorations. The scriptural reading wasn't even about the slaughter of the Holy Innocents (that traditional day-after-Christmas downer). It was just 90 minutes of praising Jesus, with coffee afterwards.

I'm not a believer, but I crave religion. The church has developed a lot of pageantry over the years, and I love it. The saints, angels, and a cast of other characters. The seasons of the church calendar, patterning the year. The music. The sensual stimulation: architecture, the taste of the bread and wine, the scent of candles and incense (depending on how high church you get). The sense of drama: the crack of the wafer held above the priest's head for all to see, or the extinguishing of candles to leave the congregation in total darkness at Tenebrae. It's satisfying in the way Greek myth and fairy tales are satisfying. Folk traditions stay around because people crave them. Revels has figured this out.

Why, I wondered, is this stuff so important to me? And then I remembered stereotype threat: women and racial minorities do better on tests if they hear or write affirmations about themselves before the test, and worse if they're told that their group does poorly at such tests. It's subconscious - you don't need to believe what you're told in order for it to affect your performance. Just hearing it is enough.

I used to attend Quaker meeting with a woman who started many of her messages with, "The story I tell myself is . . ." She could acknowledge her religious beliefs as stories, yet still find them deeply meaningful. Even though I don't literally believe what I'm told, it helps me to hear the stories. Tradition says that the universe is ordered. It says our actions are meaningful. It says there is someone looking out for us. Some part of me needs to hear that, touch that, taste that.

Process

In December, Jeff and I observe both Advent and Chanukah. In short, we set things on fire a lot. On the windowsill, there's the menorah. On the coffee table, there's the Advent wreath.

What strikes me about both of these is how process-oriented they are. When you see a picture of a menorah, it's always the eighth night will all the candles blazing. But it spends most of the week partially lit, building up to the finale. An Advent wreath, likewise, is in a perpetually lopsided state. On the first Sunday of Advent, you burn one candle. Next Sunday, two, until it's Christmas Eve and all four (or five, depending on how you do it*) are lit. At any time, some of the candles have been burnt more than others. They are different heights, even when they're all lit.

Now, we say, I want it now. But both of these seasons are not about instant gratification. They're about duration.





*Yes, I know my candles aren't pink and purple, nor are they properly in a wreath. But this is how my Danish host mother did it, and it sure is easier to find white candles.

Another world

After reading a post on a feminist blog about the Biblical womanhood movement, I had to learn more about it. I've spent the last few days immersed.

There are several main components. There's the modesty piece, about how you should dress, sit, and stand. There's the work piece, about how you should work at home or in a family business because no human but your husband or father should be your boss. There's the courtship piece, about why dating will ruin you for marriage. There's the fertility piece, about why you should have as many babies as possible. And there's the stay-at-home daughter phenomenon, which holds that home and not college is the right place for young women until marriage.

There's backlash, obviously. Commenters on feministe.com said things like, "Disgusting . . . I’m beginning to think I ought to go vandalize a church." Within Christianity, there are some more thoughtful and compassionate responses.

But I was surprised at how much I found to like. While I'm not a fan of the denim jumper look, I share the distaste for skanky clothes. I don't want men or women relegated to anyplace based on their gender, but I cheer the revival of homemaking and homesteading. This family's 1200-square-foot house with twelve residents? Awesome. And I have to admire the courage of people who live a profoundly counter-cultural lifestyle.

The movement is all about the family. This article on how daughters can treat their fathers better made me do a double-take - don't we normally advise parents on how to treat their children? Filial piety is totally out of style. And while a lot of the writing around daughters makes me want to gag, these people are on to something. Look for the good in each other. Communicate. Try to function as a unit instead of everyone striking out on their own. Give more than you take, and don't be "thing-hungry". (I can imagine that would be very important to men who are the sole wage-earners in large families).

Despite the stereotype of evangelical Christians as ignorant hicks, it's such a text-based culture. Take this argument by an eighteen-year-old homeschooled blogger. She goes through several texts, analyzes them and their historical contexts, finds flaws in her prior beliefs, and comes to a new conclusion. How many teenagers do that kind of thing without any arm-twisting?

Granted, sometimes the textual analysis goes horribly wrong. Please, please, do not use The Taming of the Shrew as your model for marriage.

Cops and the soldiers, they nailed him in the air

I've seen those "Jesus was homeless" teeshirts. But I didn't realize the connection (though not the slogan) had been made about 60 years earlier. I just heard Woody Guthrie's rewrite of the outlaw ballad "Jesse James," rewritten as "Jesus Christ."

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land
Hard-working man and brave
He said to the rich, "Give your goods to the poor."
So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

The major problem with the song is that not much rhymes with "Judas Iscariot".

Jeff and I were reading a list of the Jewish mitzvot, which are 613 things that you're supposed to do. They range from the very sensible:
472. Not to move a boundary marker to steal someone's property
565. Judges must not accept bribes
592. Not to curse your father and mother
605. Prepare latrines outside the camps

To the outdated:
49. Not to pass your children through the fire to Molech
165. Not to refrain from marrying a third generation Edomite convert

To the bizarre:
185. Not to eat non-kosher maggots
309. Not to anoint with anointing oil
448. The metzora must not shave signs of impurity in his hair

To the distressing:
33. To burn a city that has turned to idol worship
38. Not to cease hating the idolater
514. Canaanite slaves must work forever unless injured in one of their limbs
596. Destroy the seven Canaanite nations
597. Not to let any of them remain alive (unless they're your slave forever, I guess?)
598. Wipe out the descendants of Amalek

I was curious about this Amalek. Here's God speaking in 1 Sam. 15:3: "Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey."

If there's anybody who has a chip on their shoulders about genocide, it's the Jews. Rightly so. How does anybody deal with an Old Testament God? How do you reconcile "Kill both man and woman, and infant" with "Never again"?

How do you condemn "Drive the Jews into the sea" but not "Those in the front will be driven into the Dead Sea, and those at the rear into the Mediterranean. The stench of their rotting bodies will rise over the land"? (Joel 2:20)

The real story

My favorite part of Quaker meeting is women's group. There was at one time a men's group as well, but it fizzled. Women's group is going strong for any woman who wants to spend 90 minutes listening and talking.

The time is divided between the number of people who show up, and you each get a turn to speak about whatever is going on in your life. If you want, other people give you feedback.

I'm usually the youngest at 24, and I believe the oldest is in her seventies. It means that whatever stage you, your job, your children, your relationship, or your parents are going through, there's probably someone else who's been through it before.

"I'm addicted to computer games."

"I'm doing great."

"Oh shit, my daughter isn't like I thought she was going to be."

"Sometimes you want to say, 'Do you have to chew like that?'"

"I'm fine as long as I get my 30 mg of Celexa a day."

"If it helps, eleven was the hardest year with my daughter. I would have sold her for a nickel."

"I married my wild oat."

It's such a relief to be able to speak the truth and hear other people's truths. I talk to lots of people every day, do many exchanges of "How are you?" with no real answers. You can't answer "How are you?" with "I'm trying to decide if I should apply to grad school," or "I just read the most amazing poem," or "Fighting back tears, thanks."

How could we do this more widely? How could we make spaces where people can talk about what is really going on with them? I think psychotherapy has its place, but I want something different from that.

There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?

I'm in charge of the Quaker meeting's Christmas pageant again. Last year someone decided the kids were going to do a mummer's play (traditional English pub play done at Christmastime, in which Saint George fights with a dragon, is slain, and gets raised from the dead). She then failed to show up for the rest of December, leaving me holding the reins. After that I figured I could do it a second year.

The kids first suggested doing the mummer's play again, mostly because they liked the dragon. Then they changed their minds and settled on doing the nativity story from the viewpoint of the animals present, provided they could pick the animals. Currently we have a camel, three dogs, a monkey, a snake, a colony of ants, and . . . a dragon. The good news is we have another month to figure out what the dragon was doing there.

Knock and it shall be opened?

The New England branch of Quakers is rewriting its book Faith and Practice. This month we were asked to provide feedback for a chapter on worship, starting with this:

Any willing person may come into communion with the Divine without special
ritual, at any time, in any place, under any external circumstance. All that is
required is desire, humility, and a willingness to wait for the Teacher who is
beyond time to come and teach in the present moment. The heart of the life of
the Religious Society of Friends is the communal meeting for worship. It is here
that we have the opportunity to experience the Sacred Presence in a way that
draws us into community and informs our lives, both as individuals and as a
religious body. Vital worship depends far more on a deeply felt longing for God
than on any particular practice.

Upon hearing these words read in business meeting last week, I felt grief at how much they differed from my experience.

In the seven years I’ve attended Friends’ meetings, I’ve never sensed the divine (either in or out of meeting). No meeting for worship has ever felt “gathered” to me. Maybe seven years isn’t long enough, or maybe I’m doing something wrong. I’ve certainly spent a good portion of worship time distracted, but I understand this happens to the best of Quakers.

From what I have heard people of faith say about their spiritual lives, I believe that they are genuinely experiencing something deep and powerful. I don’t think they’re making it up. But I have never tasted it.

During my year at Pendle Hill I described this situation to two Friends. One, from an evangelical meeting in Kenya, answered that I needed to pray harder. The other, from a liberal meeting in California, told me I was so in touch with the universal divine that I wasn’t even sensing it as a separate entity. Neither answer felt particularly helpful to me.

This is the truth I understand: there is no guarantee I will ever experience the divine. Maybe God has me written into her calendar for next Tuesday, and if I am paying attention then I will finally sense her. Maybe it will happen in a few decades. But maybe never.

I don’t expect Quakerism to bend over backwards to include nontheists like me. After all, as this chapter points out, worship is the heart of Quakerism. But it’s painful to hear my experience denied. Perhaps the intended meaning of this paragraph is “nothing outward is required to experience God - no clergy, no special ritual.” But that doesn’t mean that it will definitely happen. Some of us knock at that door and never make it inside.

Beginnings and ends

Today we went to the memorial service for a man from our Quaker meeting. It was my first Quaker memorial service, only a few months after my first Quaker wedding (mine). A Quaker memorial is much like a Quaker wedding: people gather in silent worship, with people standing to speak as they are moved.

His wife was sitting on the bench in front of me, her river of brown hair hanging in front of me. It seemed so unfair that Bill should be dead before his wife's hair has even turned gray. She sat on that bench in the beautiful old Cambridge meetinghouse twenty-some years ago at their wedding.

Quaker wedding seem especially intergenerational to me. Before you can get married under the care of a Quaker meeting, you meet with a clearness committee made up of experienced married people. It's pre-marital counseling in group form - their purpose is basically to ask, "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Bill and his wife were on my clearness committee last fall. Together we talked about the various struggles Jeff and I were likely to have - money, children, how we function socially.

I was also remembering the novel I Take Thee, Serenity, a novel about two college students deciding to have a Quaker wedding. The author, Daisy Newman, had been a member of Cambridge Meeting, where we were today. Upstairs I found two illustrations from the book hanging on the wall. The book is pretty terrible as a story about young people - the author was clearly not as with it as she thought. But the book really shines when describing the old Quakers the young couple gets to know. As the pair is exploring the idea of marriage, they watch a husband care for his wife who has suffered a stroke. As community deals with the illness and eventual death of this character, the young pair sees what they are in for. To marry when they are young and impassioned means to care for each other when they are old and dying. The book is about the full cycle of marriage, not just the exciting beginning.

Today Bill's niece, a young woman round with pregnancy, rose and spoke about her uncle's legacy. She realized that her baby would never know this man, so it would be up to her to teach the child about the qualities she loved in him. His gentleness, his patience with difficult people, his humor. It seemed very right that in this hall where Bill's marriage started, we should be talking about how to continue him after his death. That's a kind of immortality I can believe in.

Dwelling on grace

I was reading about how meditation can change people's brains. There's some evidence that people who spend lots of time meditating, like Buddhist monks, have brains that actually function differently from those of non-meditating people. Particular parts of the brain grow far more active. I do believe that focusing on something makes it grow bigger in your life - I've seen myself dwell on small problems until they become medium or large problems. But I love the idea that you can actually change how your brain works by practice.

My attempts at meditation have not been very satisfying. I fall asleep, make lists, or get up and do something else. Most Sunday mornings in silent Quaker meeting for worship I start by trying to focus my mind, but I don't last more than a few minutes. The only meditation technique I ever learned was counting breaths until you reach ten and then starting over. I often do this for part of meeting, but I've never experienced anything that made me want to keep doing it. I don't feel refreshed or relaxed.

So today in meeting I tried something different. At Pendle Hill I was introduced to centering prayer, which is focusing on a single holy word and letting all other thoughts go. The method had more or less existed for a long time, but was popularized in the 1970s by Catholic monks who wanted a way to draw in people familiar with Eastern religion. I picked the word "grace".

People talked about grace a lot at Pendle Hill. I remember a woman standing up in meeting and saying with wonder in her voice, "I was thinking about oil spills. And then I thought, what about a grace spill? A spill of grace?" I imagined it flowing and pooling over land and water, coating animal and people like petroleum on seagulls. I think it was the most potent thing I ever heard in meeting. But I realized I didn't have a solid definition of the word.

Christianity defines grace basically as "Gifts from God that we don't deserve." I don't believe in God, but I do see lots of undeserved gifts flowing around, pooling and spilling.

I see grace in my mother-in-law all the time. I try to do chores before she gets to them, but I keep finding some way she's cheerfully done something for me - my laundry hung up, the crumbs I left on the counter wiped up. I tried to talk her out of it, feeling I was accumulating debt to her. But she's not keeping track.

Actually, grace seems a main requirement of parenting. When I see people dealing patiently with their fussy children or surly teenagers, I'm impressed with what they're able to give when they don't seem to be receiving much.

And Jeff's grace pools around me every day. He's steady when I'm fragile, generous when I'm needy, loving when I'm prickly.

I'm not sure if what I was doing in meeting was what the monks had in mind, or if it was reshaping my brain. But I hope that by dwelling on grace, it will come to dwell more in me.

Not so much rest

I'm playing with the idea of sabbath. Not because I think someone else wants me to do it, but because I really like the idea of devoting one day a week to rest and family.

So far it goes like this: Saturday I go to the store anyway, thinking "Really the sabbath is tomorrow." Sunday I do the laundry and tell myself, "Really the sabbath was yesterday. Maybe I'll do it next week."