"Lost Quaker Journals"

Walhydra has been a convinced Quaker (aka Friend) for several decades.

She believes that one of Quakerism's strengths—though also one if its main sources of potential ambiguity and confusion—is that Quakers tend to value the Spirit-led testimony of individuals almost as much as they do Scriptures. This quality has led to a rich tradition of journaling and of sharing journals, going all the way back to the first Quakers in 17th century England.

Of course, as with any religious tradition, Quakers can get carried away with the seriousness of things. Walhydra being Walhydra, she gravitates toward those Quakers who, despite—or maybe even because of—their weighty faith and practice, have a healthy sense of the absurd, especially regarding themselves and even their most dearly held beliefs.

That being the case, when Friend Brent Bill and a number of other "virtual" Quakers created the Association of Bad Friends on facebook, she of course had to join.

On his blog, Holy Ordinary, Friend Brent once described the founding idea for the ABF in these terms:

Though I have been a member of the Religious Society of Friends all my life, I'm just not very good at being a Quaker. I find that I frequently fail to live up to the ideals of our Religious Society—I'm not always peaceable, humble, truthful, ...well that's enough confession. While confession might be good for the soul, too much is enough to send a depressive like me into an emotional tailspin. But now you know why I say I am a "bad Quaker."

Now Friend Brent has added another service by posting spoof excerpts from "Lost Quaker Journals." Here's the latest, from the Journal of Charles E. Hires:

April 1, 1876

This new temperance movement is driving me wacky. Women armed with hatchets chopping up saloons. It's just unseemly. It's enough to drive a Quaker to drink. What I wouldn't give for a pint of stout right now. Still, there has got to be some way to make some money on it. That Canadian fellow McLaughlin may be on to something with his "Ginger Ale." What could I come up with? .... Hmmm, how about "Sassafras Ale?" No. I've got it. "Root Beer!" We can have our beer and our temperance, too!

There's more.

:-)

I love you, Jim

James Urban Gleaton, Jr.
and
Michael Austin Shell

Marriage Under the Care of Columbia Monthly Meeting
of the Religious Society of Friends

Saturday, December 17, 1994
Saturnalia
Full Oak Moon

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Walhydra goes to church

Walhydra has been so busy for the past few months that she hasn’t been able to tell about the happy developments with her mother, Senior Witch.

As the faithful reader will remember, Walhydra and her brother and sister decided early last year that it was no longer safe for Senior Witch to live alone.

Sister and her hubby and six kids were absolute angels for fifteen months, taking Senior Witch into their home and lives, keeping her physically and socially active and healthy—and bearing with her escalating Alzheimer's foibles, which alternated between amusing and painfully disruptive.

[Youngest grand-daughter once complained in tears, "Why can't Grandma learn how to do this for herself?" Her Mom's answer—which must have sounded both confusing and a bit spooky—was, "Grandma is un-learning things now."]

The sad irony was that, not being able to perceive her own declining capacity, Senior Witch believed she could still live independently. That meant she became increasingly more resistant to "living under her daughter's roof." Loving care seemed to morph into the perennial trial of crones across the globe.

By April of this year, Walhydra agreed with her sister that it was time to find an assisted living facility (ALF) for Mom near her own home in Jacksonville.

Of course, though she was more or less “in recovery” from chronic depression, by this time Walhydra was up to her eyebrows in anxiety about managing Mom’s business.

For reasons she has not yet been able to discern—perhaps she read too much Charles Dickens as a child—Walhydra has always had a near phobia about dealing with the legal and financial world. As if, somehow, any misstep with an application or transaction might bring on pauperdom, the workhouse or worse.

That being case, imagine Walhydra, already struggling to sell Mom’s house from 300 miles away and fighting automated phone menus to get to a human being who might sort out health policies, bank accounts, retirement annuities….

Imagine her doing all of this and then also having to find a reliable, affordable ALF, one that might actually suit Senior Witch, who has always said she “never wants to end up in a ‘home’.”

And yet, though it took time to get up the gumption to act, once Walhydra started calling her local contacts, the network (both divine and human) worked as it always does for those who leap—or stumble—out on faith.

She called a Quaker friend, who referred her to an enthusiastic Alzheimer’s day care social worker, who referred her to a care cost planning paralegal, who said, “Why don’t you call so-and-so at this wonderful, non-profit ALF I know about?”

The place was perfect! And a spacious private room opened up a month later!

This meant that, rather than waiting till after her sister’s vacation in early July, Walhydra was able to get Senior Witch happily settled in her new home by the beginning of June.

Walhydra stayed with Senior Witch all of the first full day. What she kept hearing from her Mom was, “Oh, I’m not too good at socializing. Oh, I’m a very private person. Oh, I’m not sure about eating all my meals in a cafeteria.”

“This,” Walhydra thought to herself, “from a woman who was a preacher’s wife for thirty-some years. Hmm…. I’ll just wait and see.”

The next night, with Walhydra and Hubby Jim visiting, Senior Witch chattered away happily about all the people she’d met and how much she likes the staff.

“Um-hmm,” Walhydra chuckled to herself. "I thought as much."

Almost two months later, Senior Witch is cheery and at home in her new-found "independence." She's also charming all the staff and other residents.

Now that Senior Witch is all settled, part of Walhydra’s "Mom duty” is to get her to the nearest Lutheran church every few Sundays.

Senior Witch is not dogmatically invested in Lutheran theology. Even so, she feels more comfortable with the richness of the Lutheran liturgy and hymns and the Lutheran style of preaching. She is, after all, a preacher's kid as well as a former preacher’s wife.

A key difference between Senior Witch and Walhydra is that Mom evolved through orthodox Christianity and “came out the other side,” while Walhydra needed to walk away from it in order to meet her Mom on that side decades later.

To understand this odd contrast, the gentle reader needs to know that Lutheran worship is wholly liturgical.

This means that every moment of the service involves either the pastor or the congregation or both in reading or singing some prescribed text. Prayers, blessings, passages from the Old Testament, Gospels and Epistles, hymns, creeds, a sermon from the pastor—and the sharing of the Lord's Supper, the Communion, the Eucharist, the bread and wine.

As a child, Walhydra found such a service reassuring in its regularity. Her father preached, Mom played the organ, the old ladies sang the hymns….

…and Walhydra learned the stories about Jesus.

Those stories—including the difficult, puzzling, contradictory ones—snuck into her heart before she had any knowledge of theology or doctrine. Better still, they conjured for her a real person, one more difficult, puzzling and contradictory, yet ultimately more whole, than any theology or doctrine could contain.

However, by the time she was a teenager, Walhydra was in trouble. She’d learned what Lutherans were supposed to believe and done her best to believe it. Then she sat through service every Sunday, wondering whether she actually believed it enough to go up to Communion.

She didn't doubt the faith as she'd learned it. Yet she doubted—in what she now knows is the classic "dark Lutheran" way—whether she truly knew it or felt it within. It all seemed to make sense, so long as she accepted the basic premises, but it didn't live in her as flesh and blood.

At least, not in the way Jesus did.

One thing that never quite worked for her—though it took getting all the way to seminary to recognize this—was the notion that salvation depends upon Jesus having "paid the price" for the whole human race.

Didn't YHWH say to Hosea, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" (Hos. 6:6a)? Didn't Jesus himself quote those words to the Pharisees (Matt. 9:13b)?

The more she learned from the caring saints and sinners in her life, the more Walhydra came to believe that the Bible was a cycle of stories in which YHWH interrupted the priests and worshippers over and over again to say, "No. That's not what I meant. I'm not like that."

So Walhydra walked away from liturgy and hymns and creeds for a decade or so. She sampled the whole 1970s smorgasbord of Jung, I Ching, Tarot, astrology, witchcraft, meditation, Buddhism...and, um, pot and sex.

When she eventually wandered back into Christian worship services with not-yet-hubby Jim, she maintained a steadfast silence through all the words-in-unison stuff, her inner translator struggling to keep up.

Every week, as the rest of the congregation approached the altar for Communion, Walhydra would hang back, wondering. And then she'd get the giggles as she heard the Master's voice whispering, "Oh, get on up here, you silly witch!"

Eventually, Walhydra and by-then-hubby Jim found their way into the blessèd waiting silence of Quaker worship.

And, every Christmas Eve, they joined Senior Witch for candlelight service at, of all places, the Lutheran church where Walhydra got into trouble in the first place.

So, here she is now, twenty years later, taking her Mom to a little Lutheran congregation near the ALF. Alternating this with taking her to Quaker Meeting—where, of course, Senior Witch has charmed and been charmed by all the members.

This church’s pastor has the genuine preacher’s gifts: humor, humility and grace. He does what Frederick Buechner [see Note] demonstrates so well, drawing his listeners into his own story of doubt and of little glimpses of faith.

How in the world, he asks them, do we make any sense out of these millenia-old Bible lessons we’ve just read out loud? How do we stumble through them toward any real, usable connection with our 21st century lives?

Walhydra could almost be content to sit through the service for such sermons. Except for that little matter of the wholly scripted liturgy.

“Do I ever get a chance to just stop and think about this for a few minutes?” she asks. “Even when the rubrics say ‘Pause for a moment of reflection,’ it’s a very skinny moment!”

Ironically, after one recent service, Senior Witch sighed with obvious satisfaction.

“It’s so good,” she said, “to be back in a Lutheran service. Your sister’s church [a hymn-singing evangelical mega-church] was okay in its own way. But I missed the Lutheran liturgy. It directs and focuses your thoughts so well.”

“Yes, it does do that,” Walhydra agreed silently.

Despite this challenge—or perhaps because of it—Walhydra had a welcome little glimpse of faith during the most recent service she attended with her Mom.

Looking forward to the pastor’s sermon, she felt a little wary when she realized that the congregation’s brand new assistant pastor, fresh out of seminary, would be preaching his first “official” sermon.

Worse, the Gospel for the day was that troubling parable comparing the Kingdom to a landowner who’s enemy sows weeds in his wheat field (Matt. 13:24-30).

It’s the lesson in which Matthew, to suit his own post-destruction of Jerusalem agenda, has the disciples wheedle an allegorical explanation out of Jesus, in which the weeds become “the progeny of the evil one,” eventually to be cast “into the fiery furnace” where they will “weep and grind their teeth” (Matt. 13:36-43).

“Oh, bother!” Walhydra thought. “We’re in for it now!”

Sure enough, the novice preacher wasn’t experienced enough yet to step very far away from the textbook, so his words clove to doctrinal formulae and left little breathing space for amateur human beings—which all of us are.

“At least he’s giving us the Lutheran ‘saved by grace’ version, not the Southern Baptist ‘repent or else’ version.”

Walhydra sighed through the offertory and the start of the Communion liturgy. Then her eyes drifted upward…

…to notice again that this church is blessed with a remarkable, life-size statue of what she recognizes as the real Jesus.

High above the altar. Robed and at peace, one knee bent as if stepping down. Raised arms spanning an arc which embraces the whole chamber.

Walhydra could feel that embrace, reaching around and through her to the whole world.

“It doesn’t matter,” that embrace said. “Let each person trust the little piece of grace she is ready to trust. Let each follow whatever worship form buys her enough time to make some sort of peace with me.

“It doesn’t matter. You are all already in the Kingdom.

“Just get on up here, you silly witch.”

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.


Note from the amanuensis: There is a companion piece to this one, quoting from Buechner, on The Empty Path.

Are Quakers Amish?

Walhydra always gets a kick out of Quaker humor, much of which has to do with the fact that no one—including Quakers—appears to know the answer to the question: "What do Quakers really believe?"

Well, thanks to QuakerQuaker, she was recently directed to Haven Kimmel's Blog and found this delightful post: "Bob Loblaw’s Law Blog: Are The Quakers Amish?"

Here's her favorite part:

Q: Are the Quakers the same as the Amish?

A: Although the Amish were founded by a Dutch Anabaptist during the Protestant Reformation, Jakob Ammann, and thus were considered an order of the Swiss Mennonites; and although they speak German (or Pennsylvania Dutch); and although they keep themselves entirely separate from the ‘world,’ or the apostate; have no electricity or phones, and drive horse-drawn buggies on the open road, and the Quakers were founded by George Fox and Margaret Fell during the English Reformation, and spoke English; and although Quakers take it as a directive to change the world through acts of philanthropy and social justice, such as The American Friends Service Committee (which won the Nobel Peace Prize); and although we drive cars and I am typing this on a laptop plugged into a surge protector in an electrical outlet, YES, we are the same as the Amish. We are, essentially, the Amish.

Teehee....

Happy Anniversary

Full Oak Moon Saturnalia, December 17, 1994

Marriage under the care of
Columbia (SC) Monthly Meeting
of the Religious Society of Friends

There's more to the story, of course.

It keeps getting better.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Till death do us, etc.

Walhydra has never understood all the flap about same-sex marriage. Of course, this could be partly due to having been reincarnated as a gay male would-be writer.

“That has nothing to do with it!” she snaps. “As far as I’m concerned, the real problem is that most people have the ridiculous notion marriage is about sex!”

She glares briefly toward the left wing of her audience. “And that includes queer people. It’s ridiculous! Marriage isn’t about sex. It’s about kinship.”

Being a Virgo, Walhydra figures that in a reasonable world that pronouncement would settle the matter. Since she’s dealing with human beings, though, she knows that she’s going to have to explain.

“Look,” she says, feigning patience. “Anybody can have sex without getting married. They can even have on-going affairs, lifelong relationships—families, for Goddess’ sake!—without being married. But….”

Now she glares toward the right wing of her audience. “If they want their chosen kinship to be acknowledged and affirmed publicly, if they want their families to be honored and protected by the government, they HAVE TO GET MARRIED!”

Walhydra actually wants to stomp away at this point. It infuriates her that any society would even need “the arm of the state” in order to protect kinship.

“In a sane world,” she insists, “people would be glad to take a couple’s word for it when they said they intended to put up with all the hassles and grief of taking care of each other for years on end. People would rush to celebrate and support them, do everything possible to help them stay together.”

Walhydra sighs deeply. “Instead…, instead…. It just doesn’t make any sense!” She sits down abruptly and waves at everyone to go away.

Walhydra has had marriage on the mind for several weeks, every since her mother, Senior Witch, found a picture from the wedding of Walhydra’s younger brother back in 1986.

Walhydra immediately recognized the gorgeous bearded guy on the right as hubby Jim. She pretends not to know the guy on the left.

“That’s me,” says the would-be writer.

“No. You’re not that young,” Walhydra smirks.

“Neither are you.”

[Slight timeout while the referee intercedes.]

The wedding picture was taken just a year after Walhydra and Jim did the “for better or worse” bit themselves in a private, mostly unspoken ceremony for two.

That mutual promise, in turn, came shortly after Walhydra’s two plus years of grad school and addictions counselor job search—during which, ever the single-minded, studious Virgo, she had failed to notice Jim’s patient, persistent courtship.

Once settled in her first outpatient treatment job in Charleston, SC, Walhydra sat on the floor of a friend’s house one evening, watching, of all things, Somewhere in Time. At one moment, she leaned back against the legs of Jim, who was on the sofa, and thought, “Oh! This is the man I want to spend my life with. Why didn’t someone tell me?”

This brave, brilliant, gentle man with the warm hands, whose Leo body and soul radiate blessing energy!

[Note: Hubby Jim, a convinced scientist, teases that he doesn’t believe in tantric energy or astrology. “Or reincarnation,” he says. “At least, not in this lifetime.”]

Walhydra and Jim went to her brother’s wedding determined to remain discreetly closeted, so a not to draw attention away from the publicly happy couple. Her brother took them from friend to friend throughout the day, saying, “This is my brother, and this is my brother’s, um….”

He confessed later that he kept wanting to say, “…my brother’s loveranddoyouwanttomakesomethingofit?!” Instead, what happened was that “my Um” became a family in-joke term for same-sex spouse.

Toward the end of their visit, Walhydra and hubby went to say goodbye to both of her grandmas, with whom they had been carefully practicing their discretion.

Senior Witch’s mother hugged each of them and said sweetly to Walhydra, “Now, you come and visit me—and be sure to bring Jim!”

Walhydra glanced sideways at her hubby and raised an eyebrow.

A few years earlier, Walhydra had giggled when she received in the mail from her other grandma the pair of carefully embroidered pillowcases. For years, Grandma had periodically reminded Walhydra, “I make a set for each of the grandchildren, for when they get married.” Smiling at the colorful Pennsylvania Dutch stitch work, Walhydra assumed Grandma had finally figured it out for herself.

Walhydra’s stepmother told her later that, during a visit, Grandma had gone snooping to learn why Walhydra wasn’t married yet. When she somehow found out, her wry comment was, “Well, that’s what I get for snooping.”

That was all she ever said about it. Years later, Walhydra and Jim attended Grandma’s big, Ohio farm family reunion, sleeping in the guest bed of one of Walhydra’s aunts. A few years later, they both attended Grandma’s funeral.

So...nine years into their private marriage—on the Full Oak Moon Saturnalia of 1994, to be overly exact—Walhydra and Jim were publicly married under the care of their large Quaker Meeting.

Eschewing clergy and outward sacraments, Quaker couples traditionally “marry each other,” before God and in the presence of all their fellow Quakers, family and friends. They say to each other the vows they have written for themselves and sign a non-secular marriage certificate. Then, after a silent worship during which anyone can speak blessings or prayers, everyone else present also signs the document.

At Walhydra and Jim’s wedding, their Meeting’s historian spoke to explain the significance of what the gathered body was doing.

“In the mid-1600s,” he said, “only marriages performed by the Church of England were legally recognized. As dissenters from the C of E, Quakers decided that they needed to document and witness publicly the vows of their married couples, in order to protect the kinship rights of those couples. This is what we are doing now for these two men, whose marriage we all affirm but our government refuses to acknowledge.”

Twenty-some years into her marriage, Walhydra remembers that moment fondly.

She wonders how it can be in America that, because of the dominant ideology of churches other than hers, the secular government refuses to protect a loving kinship which she and Jim still sustain “for better or worse.”

She snuggles into Jim's calm strength after another long, challenging trip to care for Senior Witch—who considers Jim to be one of her sons—and frowns.

“Oh, well…,” she says softly.