peace month 2013

Each January, Northwest Yearly Meeting sponsors Peace Month, where we encourage meetings across the Northwest to focus on an aspect of the Friends peace testimony in their gatherings throughout the month. This year's theme is Conflict Resolution. Anyone is welcome to utilize the resources on the NWYM website during January or at any time of the year. To participate with us, you can download the Daily Reader, with an entry written by a Friend for each day of the month. There are also resources for those leading worship or education gatherings, and some of the resources are available in Spanish.

Enjoy!

my ideal day

If I had my way, this is how I would spend my days:

• 8 hours sleeping
• 1 hour meditation/prayer/Bible reading/journaling
• 1 hour exercising
• 4 hours reading a book/day
• 1 hour writing
• 4 hours working on foreign languages (1 hour for each language)
• 1 hour community service/volunteer work
• 3 hours teaching
• All of my children’s waking hours giving them focused attention, often outside
• 2 hours house cleaning
• 1 hour with Joel
• 2 hours with friends/extended family
• 3 hours preparing food and eating
• 1 hour reading a novel or watching a movie
• 1 hour gardening/weeding

Grand total: 33 hours + all my children’s waking hours

So I ask you, why are there not 40+ hours in the day??? And why is it that I never feel like I can get everything done that I want to?

ecojustice

I've been waiting for a leading for the last several years regarding what aspect of justice I'm called to focus on. It seems like there are so many different issues and so many different nuances of each issue, and to think about living out the Quaker peace testimony is just too huge. As I look at the examples of historical Friends I see that lots of them waited on God for a long time before they got a specific sense of direction. Fox labored with his doubt and questioning of the established church for years before Christ broke through to him in a way he could understand, and once he had that focus he went and shared about it hither and yon. Elizabeth Fry was about my age when she started doing prison ministry. Lucretia Mott was in her 50s when the women's movement began in earnest. (I like to gauge myself by Elizabeth Fry, because she was born 200 years before me! If that's the case, I'll find my "Newgate Prison" next year. I didn't follow her example in childbearing, however--by now I'd have 8 kids! Also, I should have been recorded as a Friends minister last year. Oh well.)

At any rate, I've felt led to focus more and more on ecojustice. I was feeling really drawn that way one day in August while sitting at my kitchen counter, eating breakfast. I flipped through some mail and noticed something about the FWCC World Gathering that happened in Kenya this last April, and I opened it up and read the Kabarak Call for Peace & Ecojustice. It calls Friends "to be patterns and examples in a 21st century campaign for peace and ecojustice, as difficult and decisive as the 18th and 19th century drive to abolish slavery." This is what I really feel called to do.

Earthcare is a justice issue. The way we treat the Earth effects us, all our neighbors and our children to who-knows-how-many generations. Also, the way we use resources matters because it often dictates how and where we engage in conflicts that become violent around the world.

I feel called, like John Woolman, to start making small, individual steps toward living more justly in terms of the way I treat the Earth and its resources. This is not to say, of course, that I'll be the spiritual giant Woolman was, remembered by generations of Friends, but I feel called to start living out what I believe in my own life and see where it takes me/us. I've been reading a bit of Woolman lately because I've been writing a paper on ecojustice and Quakers, and below is a quote that stands out to me. Woolman was talking about whether or not he should get a new hat that is not dyed, so that he's not supporting slavery.

Here I had occasion to consider that things, though small in themselves, being clearly enjoined by Divine authority, become great things to us; and I trusted that the Lord would support me in the trials that might attend singularity, so long as singularity was only for [God's] sake. (John Greenleaf Whittier, ed., John Woolman's Journal, chapter VIII, 1761-1763, paragraph 11)

It may not keep the climate from changing if I ride my bike or if I only use one paper towel to dry my hands, if I buy local food or if I recycle everything I possibly can. What matters is taking small steps of faithfulness as led. What matters is living out God's love in the world in the ways I'm shown. What matters is having the courage to do the things to which I'm called. Whether or not they're effective is up to God.

hunger & my 5yo

Check out my cute kid! He's the 5th one to show up, with the red shirt.

Last week our meeting participated in our city-wide Feed the Need, a food drive for our local food banks. We do this every year. Our pastoral intern, Sarah Klatt Dickerson, asked our kids what they knew about hunger, and this video is the result of her work:




Apparently, I need lessons on faster cooking... =)

pnwqwtc: contemplating grace, part 3

I'm finally getting around to writing out part 3 of what I shared at the Pacific Northwest Quaker Women's Theology Conference in June! I did that part more extemporaneously so I didn't have it written out. See these links for my reflections on the conference, part 1 and part 2 of what I shared (or didn't have time to share but wanted to!) during a plenary session.

In parts 1 and 2 of this talk I focused mainly on grace: what grace is, what it looks like in our everyday lives (particularly mine) and what we can learn about grace from the way it is used in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. To conclude the discussion I wanted to draw in the idea of contemplating grace. What does it mean to contemplate grace? Why would we want to do so? How do we contemplate grace in our particular Quaker setting(s)? What might the effects be if we contemplate grace?

As Friends, we're part of the contemplative, mystical tradition. We believe that when we spend time intentionally in contemplation, we come into direct contact with God/the Divine/Something Other. When we do this together, something powerful can happen to us internally that moves us to external action. This is basically what we talked about when we discussed the meaning of the Hebrew term hesed. We're so filled with joy at the unmerited grace we receive that it overflows into loving, just action in the world. Hopefully this occurs in our times of individual contemplation as well as corporate contemplation, as we "live in the Life and Power that takes away the occasion for all wars."We're comfortable with the idea of contemplation, but we don't generally talk much about "grace," or spend much time intentionally contemplating grace in our meetings for worship. We do sometimes talk about "holding others in the Light," which perhaps is a way of contemplating grace: we're entrusting our loved ones (or enemies) to the God of grace, desiring for God's grace to infuse others and heal them physically, spiritually, emotionally and in all other ways.

There's a really interesting body of research emerging from several different fronts on "the power of positive thinking," as we might put it in layman's terms, or mindfulness meditation, compassion or loving-kindness meditation, or the lack of these. Many researchers have studied the effects of personal meditation on our brains and behavior and on the world around us from plants to water to ecosystems. There are also studies on the lack of silence and its effects on the planet, ecosystems, plants and human behavior, and the effect of thinking negative and/or violent thoughts toward water.

My favorite study is by Masuro Emoto on frozen water crystals. Now, Masuro Emoto is called a "doctor," but I'm not sure what he's a doctor in, and I'm pretty sure it's not in a scientific field. Some are skeptical of his research methods. That being said, he did some really interesting work. He took macro photos of frozen water crystals from various locations to show the differences between water from different places and different conditions (polluted or spring water). Then he took water from the same source and had different music playing as it slowly froze. Then he had water from the same source frozen with people thinking different thoughts at it, ranging from, "Love" to "Thank you" to "I want to kill you." The results he presented were amazing (see examples here or go to this website). He also took samples of water from a body of water before and after some Buddhist monks prayed over it, and found that the polluted form had reorganized into a more beautiful and symmetrical form after the prayer. Now, remember that our bodies are between 50-70% water, and the Earth as a whole is over 70% water. So when we "hold each other in the Light," when we spend time in contemplation thinking love and wholeness toward one another, we might actually be changing the physical make-up of the water molecules (and probably other molecules) in their body.

There's also a lot of fascinating research on mindfulness meditation. You've probably heard about research on the brain images (fMRIs) of monks as they're meditating (here's a link to a BBC article). This research shows that the brain of a person who practices meditation reorganizes itself in helpful ways that focus attention, and focus it in positive ways. Even normal people who practice meditation on a smaller scale are able to be more compassionate, loving, optimistic, etc. than control groups. This helped people with their relationships with significant others and children. It seems that children whose parents practice compassion meditation actually start to have better behavior--even when the children are not themselves involved in meditating! Part of this is, apparently, that the parents are treating them better and are less stressed and so forth, and perhaps part of it is the parents' loving-kindness toward the child actually changing the way the children function physically or chemically. (Check out this website from UCLA, the Mindful Awareness Research Center, to read up on research and to find mindfulness meditation resources.)

So I wonder if the act of contemplation, in the spiritual sense, actually makes us more able to enact grace in the world? It allows us to give ourselves grace, or to accept grace from God. It also allows us to give grace to others--to our children and significant others, and to wish grace on the rest of the world in a way that actually restores balance. I wonder if God has truly given us that power in this interconnected world in which we live? Perhaps we can't singly be the ones to change the entire world for good, but we can be one spark of Light emanating wave upon wave of Grace into the world around us as we contemplate the goodness of the Grace we're receiving. In this way we enact hesed, and we're able to give freely of the grace we've received because of the joy of the experience of oneness and centeredness that we experience when we contemplate Grace itself.

Perhaps this is the secret of our witness as Friends. I hope Friends of all stripes will remained focused on both contemplation and grace, taking the time and space to contemplate and allowing ourselves the joy and freedom that comes from receiving and giving grace to those (animate and inanimate) around us.

update: friendly water for the world training

I realized I didn't put the link for if you want to help us get to this training for making biosand water filters! Here's the link to our online fundraiser. We're really excited about this opportunity, but trying to decide whether our family is healthy enough for a trip up to northern Washington. Pray/hold us in the Light that we'll all remain healthy enough for this to be a good choice! Otherwise we have to wait until next summer. In case you didn't read my last post, the organization is called Friendly Water for the World. You can read my last post if you want more info.

friendly water for the world training

Lately, Joel and I have been feeling led to live out our belief in creation care, eco-justice and sustainability in more practical and active ways. We've been hearing for a couple years about the work of some Friends in our Yearly Meeting who are training people the world over to make biosand water filters, which are relatively cheap and simple-to-make water filters that can help families and communities have easy access to clean water. Their organization is called Friendly Water for the World. They're doing a training in the Northwest in about a week and a half, and we're going to go to it! We don't know exactly how we'll end up using the training, but we have several ideas, so we'll see how the training goes and what comes of it.

If you're interested in helping us get to the training, it costs $329/person to cover the space, food, supplies, etc., so we'd love to have you partner with us in this endeavor. If you could even contribute $5-$10 we'd be eternally grateful!