Stephen Colbert Brings Back Liturgical Dance
Published by Ruby April 13th, 2007 in Silly. 59 CommentsAt the Second Life Meeting today:
Published by Ruby March 31st, 2007 in Friends and Second Life. 8 CommentsHere we are, as several of us do most Seventh-Day mornings (evenings, for European/African Friends), at the Second Life Meeting. There are usually around fifteen of us, sometimes more, sometimes less; but not too many more-or-less, usually. Some of us look the same week after week (like me), and some of us change our clothes/hair/skin color on a regular basis. Some of our avatars are definitely human. Others are not. In fact, there’s a real possibility that we’ll have a raccoon attending next week. 
I won’t be attending next weekend, since I’ll be out of town with my family. Chances are, I’ll miss it a bit.
I am seriously considering going to this year’s FGC Gathering. We can probably afford it, and I’d only be about 30 miles from Sean’s parents. In fact, perhaps we can link the Gathering with a family visit.
Are any of you good folks out there planning to go? It will be my first time, of course.
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
– Thomas Merton
More information and videos here.
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In other news: I am currently reading The Autobiography of George Fox on my PDA, and Thomas Hamm’s The Quakers in America. I finished Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost’s The Quakers via Questia.com this last week, and enjoyed it thoroughly. I especially liked being able to read it online, and make notes on Questia for myself. Since I’m attending an online Meeting, it seems appropriate that many of my sources for information on Friends should be found through websites.
I seem to have given birth to a fine young cold. I’ve always wanted to sound like the Queen Mary coming into port, or a flock of irritated geese, and now my dream has come true. 
With all the hacking and coughing I was doing this morning during Meeting for Worship on Second Life, it was easy to see the upside of online Meetings. Not only was I not disrupting others with my spectacular feats of upper respiratory mucous elimination—I was also Keeping My Germs to Myself. However, it was somewhat hard to “center down,” although I’m still quite glad I had the opportunity to sit with the Meeting.
Afterwards we had our first Meeting for Business, and despite a few bumps in the road of online communication (which are inevitable), it seemed to go rather well. I really want to commend everybody on what must have been an “old-made-new” experience for seasoned Friends, and for allowing me to be a part of it.
I will be helping out our Meeting by greeting folks as they come in for worship, and trying to impart a sense of welcome and peace to newcomers (even though I’m a newcomer myself). I’ll also keep track of our informational “notecards”, and work with Friends on creating a library/bibliography. I feel both humbled and grateful that I’ve been given this chance to be useful to a Meeting that, for all that it’s done in a “virtual world”, is still very real and edifying for me.
In other news: am I the only person in the United States who isn’t Irish on St. Patrick’s Day? *laugh*
I know that it’s not uncommon to long for childhood again. I think, for many of us with adult responsibilities and commitments, it must all seem so easy at times.
However, right now my oldest daughter (age three) can’t find this tiny plastic pony that is her current favorite toy, and this disappointment has her nearly-hysterical with crying over its (hopefully temporary) loss. She truly can’t grasp that we’ll likely find it tomorrow. To her, it’s gone forever.
From this side, childhood doesn’t seem like such easy going.
UPDATE 3/11: The pony was found at a friend’s house, so all is again right with Her World.
From the Second Life Meeting today:
Published by Ruby March 10th, 2007 in Friends and Second Life. 4 Comments“The Humble, Meek, Merciful, Just, Pious and Devout Souls, are everywhere of one religion; and when Death has taken off the Mask, they will know one another, though the divers Liveries they wear here make them Strangers.” –William Penn
Meeting on Second Life this morning (evening for our European Friends) was rich with blessings and lessons. I need to muse on some of them for awhile, but I will say that I truly felt the Light of Christ among all of us scattered across the globe. Thanks to all of you who were part of that.
If you would like to join us, our Meeting gathers on Saturdays at 10:00 am Pacific Time, and lasts for about 45 minutes, after which we have a sharing of joys and sorrows, as well as announcements. You can join and download/create your avatar at:
http://www.secondlife.com
After you’ve become acquainted with how SL works, simply do a search for “Quaker” and teleport to us. The Meeting House has “Peace” banners at each entrance, so it’s easy to spot.
Our next Meeting will also include our very first Meeting for Business, which should be rather interesting to experience in an online environment. All Friends and Seekers, regardless of affiliation, are welcome.
I would especially like to thank Bromo Ivory for clerking for us the last few meetings. He has managed to keep things running pretty smoothly, and his humor and kindness are evident and appreciated.
This is a strange Lent for me. Strange because this year, I am deliberately not observing it.
In previous years, I have observed by refraining from eating animal products, by praying the Daily Office, and contemplating upon Christ’s 40 days in the desert. Some years, I have done the Stations of the Cross every Friday, and spent time keeping vigil in front of the Blessed Sacrament. For all that I am (was?) a very progressive Catholic, I am (was?) very traditional in my praxis.
But not this year. I decided two months ago to take a mindful and deliberate step away from Catholicism for a year, and to immerse myself in the beliefs and customs of the Religious Society of Friends. I felt (and still feel) strongly led (by God?) to do this, and after a great deal of meditation and prayer (and a few bouts of tears), I am doing so.
I do not know why somebody as bound up in the rhythms and observances of the liturgical year as I am, feels so strongly moved to give them up, but there’s a lesson to be had here, somewhere. Perhaps I will return to Catholicism, but to be truthful, right now I simply don’t know. I am honestly “stepping out in faith”, possibly for the first conscious time in my adult life, and I have no idea where this path leads. I do know that, despite my love of the Catholic Church and its rites and cultures, I also feel very much “at home” among Friends. More so, in some ways, than I ever have before. There is something here that reaches deep, and feels both completely natural, yet strange and new.
It’s an odd analogy, but it reminds me of my first pregnancy. I hadn’t experienced those feelings and changes before. There was a sense of “alienness” to it, but also of a deep joy and “rightness”, knowing that my body and that of my growing daughter were doing what they needed to, completely free from my conscious will. I gave myself over to nature and the will of God. And now, it’s as if I’m gestating a new way of seeing and thinking. Maybe even of being.
Holy Spirit, guide me.
Currently reading (or about to read):
The Quakers, by Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost (via Questia.com). Excellent book. I highly recommend it.
The Quakers in America, by Thomas D. Hamm.
Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter, by Traci C. West.
No Cross, No Crown, by William Penn.
The Quaker Reader, edited by Jessamyn West.
Holy Silence: The Gift of Quaker Spirituality, by J. Brent Bill.
Without Apology: The Heroes, the Heritage, and the Hope of Liberal Quakerism, by Chuck Fager.
Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise.
From Sojourners’ Daily Verse:
Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for [God] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
- Luke 6:31-35
As a person who grew up needing more dental care than the average child, I’ve been trying for the last couple of days to put my thoughts about the tragedy of Deamonte Driver into words that won’t set my computer on fire.
I can’t do it.
I was a lucky child. As state employees, my parents had pretty good dental coverage, which helped with the enamel fragility my sister and I had inherited. We could get all those cavities filled year after year after year, and were provided with those hideous mouth-burning fluoride rinses that we had to use every night after brushing. My parents didn’t have to secure the services of a LAWYER to find us a reliable dentist, or an oral surgeon who could get us in within a reasonable amount of time. Unlike my now-departed neat-freak Swedish grandmother, I didn’t need to have dentures before I turned thirty.
I am a parent and a former public-health case manager, and I am all-too-aware that sometimes heroic measures are not enough, if the people who are entrusted by the public (and paid by our tax dollars) to help you will not, or cannot, do so. I am saddened and infuriated that it took a child’s death to force people to look at the foul mess we’re in.
Nope. I can’t do it without losing my temper. So I’m just going to stop right here.
The Road to a Serious Butt-Kicking is Paved with Pacifist Intentions.
Published by Ruby March 1st, 2007 in Musings. 0 CommentsMartin Luther King said, “Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.”
Pacifism is easy for me to understand on an intellectual level. I strongly feel that war is wrong, that violence is not a good way to resolve injustice or conflict. I have actively “turned the other cheek” on a couple of occasions. I can finally, genuinely say that I work daily to see the face of Christ in every person I meet (although, in all honesty, my success rate sucks).
I love humanity on an abstract (and in a lot of ways, essentially-useless) level, but individual people? That’s where it starts to come apart. There’s a rather wound-up Tasmanian Devil inside me who occasionally wants to deliver a three pound can of whoop-ass to various individuals, and I can’t seem to completely exorcise him. I find myself thinking such “mature” thoughts as “Boy, if I weren’t a pacifist, I’d pop him one!” and jokingly miming throttling various political figures on television. I’ve been known to laughingly declare that specific people are sorely in need of a butt-kicking, and that my boots are made specifically for that purpose.
Needless to say, this is not the thought process of a pacifist who has fully integrated her nonviolent intentions and values. As much as I want to embrace nonviolence in all aspects of my word, thought and deed, I am seriously falling down on the job here. I might not spank my kids, and I may not act in ways that are genuinely physically or verbally threatening to people, but there’s clearly a part of me that hasn’t quite given up the allure of the beat-down as a fantasy solution to situations that irritate me.
With this in mind, I am actually considering taking some classes in nonviolent communication, and seeing if that doesn’t help my internal monologues a bit. It certainly couldn’t hurt. Of course, my now-departed-and-much-missed grandmother would suggest reading the Psalms, but let’s face it: some of them are all about whooping it up over the righteous and holy smackdown that has been laid upon David’s enemies.
Why yes, I AM a geek. Why do you ask?
I missed Meeting this last week, and oh, how I’ve been feeling it. Spending quiet-but-active contemplative time alone, while it has its own merits, is a very different experience for me than spending time in communal, watchful silence. I have experienced both as a Catholic, and now as a seeker with the Friends.
Community seems to have its own flavor of active contemplation, its own character. I feel strongly that each individual brings with them their own unique addition to that overall character, and communal contemplation can be changed—perhaps even diminished at times—by sporadically-attending members. I think this is why I feel so strongly about any commitment I make to a Meeting. I believe that the Light of Christ in us is there to support, and be supported by, the Light of Christ in others. When a community has a stability in its worship, that’s when the jambalaya really gets cookin’, and lives are changed and journeys are strengthened and the Body is nourished and grows.
I miss what I had as a Catholic, and there are times I’ve been questioning myself about my self-imposed sabbatical, but I feel strongly called to this new way of Friends. There is something here that is deeply “home” for me. It’s as trite as a Hallmark card, but that’s the only way I can explain it.
Happy birthday to that funny, loving, patient, and utterly brilliant geek-boy, my husband Sean. Every day you make me feel like I’ve won some divine lottery I never knew I’d entered. Being your wife is like coming across a beautiful sunset every day, or a flower blooming late in the season, or finding a small-but-precious treasure I thought I’d lost. God has been so good to me through you. You completely r0xx0rZ my s0xx0rZ.
As the Russians say: Many years, dear heart!
…sometimes those mail lists really come through.
Something I needed to read again:
“Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Seek to live in affection as true Friends in your Meetings, in your families, in all your dealings with others, and in your relationship with outward society. The power of God is not used to compel us to Truth; therefore, let us renounce for ourselves the power of any person over any other and, compelling no one, seek to lead others to Truth through love. Let us teach by being ourselves teachable.”
Thank you, Friend.
It’s a sad truth, but I could watch this for days.
Over the last twenty years, I’ve been a member of several e-maillists covering various topics, from metalsmithing and other art techniques to political opinions to history to contemplative practices. I’m the moderator of two myself (one very large, the other quite small), so I’m aware of the human propensity to say things online that one would never speak out loud, or in person (or at least not so contentiously).
Some lists are not very flame-filled. There’s only so much fighting that anybody can do over collage art, or jewelry-fabrication techniques (although sometimes the actual amount can surprise you). But the religion lists are frequently pretty awful, and few of them seem to rise above the human tendency to argue over every blankety-blank little thing. What is expressed in open hostility on Russian Orthodoxy lists, is often passive-aggressive asshattery on Quaker ones. People either openly or backhandedly curse each other, call one another tools of evil/Satan/degeneracy, and generally act in ways that make me wonder if their mommas know they say such things.
I am not exempt from this, in case you’re wondering.
There are days I wonder why I stay on some of them. Is it really the need for companionship and the reading of alternative points of view, fresh from the sources? Or is it the spectator sport that some of my friends call “Trainwreck Syndrome”? Am I approaching listmembers with an open and generous spirit? Or am I indulging in my own passive-aggressive version of watching Jerry Springer?
I don’t think I’ll give any points for the correct answer, since it’s becoming pretty clear to me. *blush*
For the past three weeks, I have attended Saturday “Meetings” on Second Life, a constructed virtual world. There is a Quaker meeting house there, and we’ve had around fifteen participants each time, ranging from Evangelical Friends in Oregon, to Friends from the British Yearly Meeting.
Worship starts at 10:00 am Pacific Standard Time, in the Meeting House over in the “Quaker” section, and lasts about an hour. It is largely unprogrammed so far, with an opening and closing hymn that you can opt to listen to, or not.
You can find us by doing a search within Second Life for “Quaker”.
To check out Second Life, here is the webpage:
http://secondlife.com/
It’s an interesting experiment, at the very least, and one I’ve enjoyed.
