Monday, September 25, 2006
Written upon my heart
Checking out another Quaker blogger's site (left sidebar, scroll down...Zach...) I encountered this quote which spoke directly to my condition:
I am separated, as to bodily presence, from you; but I cannot forget you, because ye are written on my heart, aI cannot but desire your peace and welfare, as of my own soul.
And this is my present cry for you. Oh that ye might feel the breath of life, that life which at first quickened you, and which still quickeneth, being felt; and that breath of life has power over death; and being felt by you, will bow down death in you, and ye will feel the seed lifting up its head over that which oppresseth it.
-- Isaac Penington
At first I latched onto this Penington quote, because it seemed offer divine insight to the "puzzle" of the Heart Quickening stories of my July post. Then it began to offer insight into my sabbatical experience and questions.
It hasn't been easy to truly give over to God whether or not I continued with this work -- to lay all the cards on the table and wait to know which to pick back up. Releasing. Letting go. Teachings of the very QiGong practice I share inside. As I near the end of three months of separation from the men and the prison, the dust has settled, and I can see more clearly. I can not deny the powerful connection that I have with the men, yet it is not the men, not specific men, as much as it is the experience of God that happens inside our experience of moving prayer together. It is the value that my efforts have in the grand scheme of the human journey into becoming loving vessels of spirit. It is the grace of a unique opportunity. Even these I offered up to God.
Once I had deeply offered up even my devotion to this Call, the Call was confirmed. I was sitting inside a old growth cedar tree a few weeks back at Lake Tahoe meditating. My thoughts kept drifting to potential prison projects, and I would quietly bring myself back to the center (of myself and the tree). Praying once again to set aside such wandering thoughts and truly lay it all down; I heard an "voice" of wisdom come from the tree. "You belong in the prison, just as I belong next to this creek." Doubting, I endeavored to set aside that thought as well, I was reproached with a voice of even greater certainty repeating the message once again: "You belong in the prison as I belong here next to this creek." Oh my, what a clear message, I breathed, scrambling internally to take it in. Later the tears of gratitude, for the clear sign of what has been written upon my heart, came.
So I will be returning. I may or may not see the men I have been teaching inside Old Folsom again. The potential transfer of all my students that was pending three months ago is now 'anyday'. At New Folsom all volunteer ID cards have been recalled and our unescorted entry under scrutiny.
Despite the 'inconvience d'jour' the seed has been planted within my heart, and that will give me the strength to lift up my head and find the way.
Thanks be to God.
18:45 Posted in As a Quaker ... , Journal - my journey , Reflections | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Walking Cheerfully
Today I was outside in the last bit of sun watching the storm clouds roll in, beautifully backlit. Eventually the shadow of the clouds and their water, surrendering to the earths pull, reached me and sent me inside to finish my QiGong practice behind the window.
Today I spent a very contemplative day in delicious reflection and preparation for the workshop I will be leading March 3-5 at the Quaker Center for Study and Contemplation - Pendle Hill (near Philadelphia). There is room if you would like to join us. (Pendle Hill workshops)
Suffering rolls in us like the storm clouds. Death, war, hurricanes, accidents, sorrows, skinned knees, and disappointments come. They bring the unwanted tears and winds of change. They drive us inside. The choices, once inside, are as vast as the blue sky and sunlight providing the back lighting.
George Fox calls out to us from his Journal: “Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you.”
Our weekend together will focus on what it takes to ‘walk cheerfully’ when present to experiences of suffering and despair.
Blog readers will recognize this theme. I claim no answers. This theme has been the background music for my life during the eight years since I was a student at Pendle Hill. I never expected then that my prayers to be of service would lead me into the bedchambers of the dying and the chapels of maximum security prisons. Willingly I go, and willingly I experiment with what it takes to remain spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically healthy, with what it takes to walk cheerfully.
Today the beauty of watching the backlit storm clouds, feeling the rain on my cheeks, and finding a refuge without turning away, brought forth natural guidance from the Creator. ... Stay centered in sensing the presence of the Holy backlighting, within and facing into all the suffering that comes our way.
May I stay centered in sensing the presence of the Holy backlighting, within and facing into all that arises in the forthcoming workshop. Hope to see you there, in prayer or presence.
tretheway-calvi_flier.pdf 
18:00 Posted in As a Quaker ... , Journal - my journey | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
WHAT WE WISH WE HAD BEEN TOLD
(Advice from some Quaker women volunteers who are old prison hands, to new women volunteers,Quakers and others)
1. Prison is, to you, a foreign country. As in any foreign country, it is wise to be quiet, observe, listen, learn the language and identify the values of the prison culture before advancing too many strong opinions or taking any drastic action.
2. Don’t be afraid to define yourself clearly. You are not required to be all things to all people at all times, nor to live up (or down) to any stereotype (including the one about the sainted Quaker lady). You are entitled, more over, to define for yourself and for others what you choose to be or not to be, do or not to do. This will take some time, but you should be aware of the need to do it, from the beginning of your prison visiting. Even after you have clearly defined yourself, expect to be tested, again and again, in many ways, including sexually, morally, and religiously. Eventually, however, if you are firm in sticking to your definition of yourself, others will adjust to it.
3. Expect to meet many tremendous and valuable people in prison. Expect also to meet some champion manipulators. Do not be surprised if these sometimes turn out to be one and the same person. Manipulation is a form of survival for the powerless (a fact that women,
historically, have had ample cause to know).
4. Especially at first, you will find it helpful, ...
Use the link below to read the full piece. I highly recommend this to any who are doing prison volunteering or considering it!! I orginally found it as a pdf on the Buddhist Peace Fellowships site (www.bpf.org/html/current_projects/ prison_program/pdfs/QuakerAdvice.pdf) but can't properly give credit the authors. My apologies and gratitude to them. I have heard now that it comes through AVP materials....
quakeradvice.pdf
14:50 Posted in Articles , As a Quaker ... | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
Friday, December 09, 2005
Tom Fox's message Lights my path
"Be patterns, be examples in every country, place, or nation that you visit,
so that your bearing and life might communicate with all people.
Then you'll happily walk across the earth to evoke that of God in everybody.
So that you will be seen as a blessing in their eyes
and you will receive a blessing from that of God within them."
-- George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)
(as quoted on Tom Fox’s blog - see right side bar)
I don’t speak often about my Quaker faith, background and beliefs. The practice is to live from the faith, not to preach it. With one of our own in the news, perhaps it is time to stand up and be counted along side fellow Quaker Tom Fox, one of the Christian Peacemaker Teams held captive in Iraq. His words, as I read them in context of his peacekeeping efforts, mentor my prison efforts.
My heart is full of prayers for him and his teammates, and his captors, and the spread of his message, as so many tune in, if just briefly, to this story. Tom, I trust, would ask us all to look into our own lives, our own callings and see how these same truths he has based his Call upon echo in the work we are each about. It is a beautiful thing to have your life illuminate the lives of others. Tom Fox is doing that for all of us. He is doing that for me.
Seeking to honor him, by applying the mentoring I receive from his written words, I offer these reflections on my own work that arose as I read a Salon article called “Love your Enemies”. My words are in green.
In this essay, Pearl Hoover, pastor of the Northern Virginia Mennonite Church and a member of Fox's five-person support team, says, "Part of his being there was to be a presence with people at their own level of risk.
"For [Fox] it was a very measured approach," she says. "He acknowledged it was a risky thing to do, but he wasn't apologizing for it, and he wasn't saying, 'Bring on the trouble.' He was simply saying, 'I want my life to be meaningful.' And I think that's something that someone who's not mentally balanced would not say. He wasn't looking to die. And that's where his message is completely different than people who choose war or people who choose suicide bombing. He went there because he wanted to look for peace wherever it was and to nurture that peace."
I have told my family and friends, when they fret about the dangers I face in the maximum security prison I visit weekly, that I have chosen this work knowing the possibilities of personal harm. If something should happen to me, they must remember that I was there willingly, that I would not seek revenge, but an increase in the type of efforts I stand for, an increase in the programs that bring healing and transformation, an increase in compassion for the dehumanizing conditions at the beginning, middle and end of the cycle of criminal behavior. Consequences for actions are part of our personal learning process and I know God works in Solitary, in the SHU, in Ad.Seg. I would NOT however, wish any death penalty on my behalf and a signed document stating such is in my files. Please do not use any mistake on my or my students part as justification for reducing the desperately needed spiritual programming that offers a way through the very despair that creates the need for prisons.
The Salon article later discussed
The litany of horrors Fox kept hearing -- coupled with all the other torments visited on Iraq -- clearly got to him. On his blog, he wrote about trying not to simply shut down in the face of so much anguish. "The ability to feel the pain of another human being is central to any kind of peace making work," he wrote. "But this compassion is fraught with peril. A person can experience a feeling of being overwhelmed. Or a feeling of rage and desire for revenge. Or a desire to move away from the pain. Or a sense of numbness that can deaden the ability to feel anything at all."
He continued. "How do I stay with the pain and suffering and not be overwhelmed? How do I resist the welling up of rage towards the perpetrators of violence? How do I keep from disconnecting from or becoming numb to the pain? After eight months with CPT, I am no clearer than I [was] when I began. In fact I have to struggle harder and harder each day against my desire to move away or become numb. Simply staying with the pain of others doesn't seem to create any healing or transformation. Yet there seems to be no other first step into the realm of compassion than to not step away."
Fox didn't step away. The day before he was taken, he wrote a brief missive, posted on the Web site Electronic Iraq, titled "Why Are We Here?" He concluded, "We are here to root out all aspects of dehumanization that exists within us. We are here to stand with those being dehumanized by oppressors and stand firm against that dehumanization. We are here to stop people, including ourselves, from dehumanizing any of God's children, no matter how much they dehumanize their own souls."
Fox is speaking directly to my condition this past week. The cell visits last week brought me face to face with the ugly nature of on-going confinement, the challenges of lock-down and facing a life-time of bad food, disagreeable cell mates, the pornography, and a world without normal relationships with women or family. After just one difficult visit, I had to move away, angry at my student’s inappropriate behavior and shut down from all the porn witnessed over the half dozen earlier visits. How do I not step away? How do I find a way to request respect, not only for myself, but for all woman-kind. How do I shake the despair from my being.
Sometimes when I am walking in and out I hear the Guards talking, speaking of the men inside in the most dehumanizing ways. Their jobs too, often seem dehumanizing ... Endless hours in front of a cell watching over a sleeping inmate, picking through feces for drugs, watching for scams, always alert for the worst possible alternative, always alert for a threat on your own life, needing to beat on people to stop them from killing another.
Prison is the most dehumanizing place I've experienced, and I choose to go there. I choose to fret, weep, dance and loose sleep when my desires to move away or become numb well up. I see it as my practice -- to return over and over again to a personal state of well-being and balance, of joy and lightness — to allow the ugliness to open my heart further -- to the men, to the guards, to it all.
When God is ready for me to move on from this, I will leave. Until then the “hints,” out of the silence of prayer, ask that I return to my practice; to pull away from more cell visits for the time being, and to sink into a deeper relationship with God; to cultivate a stronger light within, that I may be more truly present to both the light and the darkness of this home of God we call Folsom Prison.
I pray to cultivate within myself a presence that will not retreat in order to feel better about herself, but can “hold fast to that which is good” in everyone while witnessing to all that is cause for great despair.
“Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude
so that you can feel good about yourself.
If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived,
and that is not what the poor need;
it will only impoverish them further.
Give only if you have something you must give;
give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward.”
-- Dorothy Day
14:20 Posted in As a Quaker ... , Journal - my journey , Reflections | Permalink | Comments (4) | Email this
Friday, December 02, 2005
Integrity and accountability with our Callings
At a gathering of prison volunteers this week we discussed integrity and accountability. Some of us did have spiritual teachers (or an equivalent) that watched over us and to whom we were accountable. But many were accountable just to the prison chaplains, who pretty much allowed them follow their own course. This is an issue that any of us offering ourselves in service to others needs to address.
Even as deeply spiritual people we sometimes have a sense of indignation when someone suggests that there might be more to the process of integrity than our own honesty, and more to be accountable to than our own good ethics an personal relationship with the Holy.
We deflect, procrastinate, and feel ourselves above the process of reporting in to someone else; laying bare the weaknesses in our own practices; telling someone the stories of our struggles so that they might reflect back our growing edges; telling someone our stories of victories so that they might reflect back our assumptions or pride. This just doesn’t seem to be necessary. Aren’t we doing just find on our own?
Where do we find the time in the middle of all our service to the disempowered? Where do we find the money to compensate those who counsel us when we are volunteers ourselves? Besides, who is qualified to listen to us when we are out on the cutting edge? Who can hold the stories of grief and violence? Who is challenging themselves spiritually as much as we are?
Can you hear all the ego? I feel justified to go it on my own, because God is with me, watching over me, because my intentions are the highest I can imagine. I know where to get support if I can’t handle it, right now everything is under control. Can you hear all the pride? Do we grow when everything is under control?
Several years back now I was at a Quaker retreat for those of us following Calls. We shared together about going it alone, and having a safety net, or a leash. Powerful testimonies helped me come into the understanding that we get much farther with realizing our highest potentials of our Calls when we have oversight, when we have people looking out for us, watching over and seasoning our impulses. Those who had already walked this path spoke of how much further they felt they were able to go in taking risks, because they knew they were watched over and would get pulled back from anything out of line or dangerous. Without the support network they had been constantly attempting to self initiate the checks and balances and felt that so often they had not risked what they might have, and did not bounce back as easily as they might have when deeply challenged.
We were bemoaning the fact that our Quaker Meetings did not seem to have the skills to provide the quality of oversight and guidance that we needed, that we had to spend time, we could spend on our Calls, educating them how to take care of us, that our Meetings just didn’t understand. In worship that Sunday morning I rose to speak of the need to forgive our Meetings for being who they are, and offer up ourselves as tools for our Meeting’s growth and the development of the skills in Oversight. When we keep ourselves open and vulnerable to supervision by our Meetings, we were keeping ourselves open and vulnerable to God’s grace to guide our calls. No matter how healthy our personal discernment process, learning trust and vulnerability is essential and ultimately a blessing to both the Call and the community.
I now sit monthly with a spiritual director, as well as my Meeting Oversight Committee. The Sacramento Buddhist prison volunteers have a Sangha that welcomes my participation. I also have a network of mentors: former prison staff, former inmates, Qigong teachers, therapists and spiritual friends that are not afraid of the nature of my work or of challenging my ego. Weekly I open up to some part of this team and ask for guidance. I do this as a part if my practice, a part of the Call. It’s a good way to stay humble and to keep others engaged with my journey and their own wisdom. I can clearly see the impact that expanding the base of my accountability and practicing “asking for help” has made upon my prison work. Not only have the numbers of men impacted dramatically increased, but my own integrity, presence and offerings are several important levels deeper.
The key to “ask and ye shall receive” is that I must be willing to receive.
PS: One of the best guides to volunteering, motivation and integrity is Ram Dass’s book How Can I help? I believe it is essential reading for all volunteers whose intention is to grow spiritually and have our efforts come from the place of highest integrity within ourselves.
13:15 Posted in As a Quaker ... , Journal - my journey , Reflections | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Sunday, November 13, 2005
The Ultimate form of Worship is Silence.
After meditating Saturday evening, preparing for Sunday Meeting for Worship.
I can not offer myself in a greater way
to the service of another,
to God,
than to listen silently,
setting my own ideas and needs aside,
to wait upon their direction;
to hold them in highest esteem,
to be in Worship.
To be in awe
is to be wordless.
Not words, nor music; no scent, nor image
can reflect God, name God or approach God.
They are self-serving scratches
at a keyhole so vast
only the unbounded silence of expectant waiting
might have a chance at opening the lock,
that was never locked,
And open the door
that has always been open.
Come put your silence into the lock,
Open the door into the heart of God,
Lay yourself in the doorway.
Offer all that you might ever be
And always have been.
21:50 Posted in As a Quaker ... , Poetry & Prayers | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Monday, October 31, 2005
Let My Life Preach
Blog readers, you are now nearly 1000 souls, looking in on me and praying for this work. My strength grows stronger feeling you behind me, watching over me.
My goal for this blog is that it serve as a circle, you sharing your prayers energic support, and me sharing the story of the prison practice and my spiritual journey. I really don’t know who you readers are and what kind of writing, which stories, would serve you best. What I am hearing (internally) is not to write for an audience other than God. Everyone who reads this is a child of God, and the intersection of our lives and experience is best left in bigger hands than mine.
Quakers have a tradition of sharing the experience of God’s movement in our lives through Spiritual Journals. The Journals of George Fox and John Woolman provide spiritual teaching in the context of individual struggle and openings while searching for a greater perspective. You don’t find statements proclaiming truth (creeds) with Quakers, but you do find Questions (queries) to ask yourself in prayer. George Fox challenged us to “Let Your Life Preach”. As I seek to be in Truth 24/7, can I offer up my journey in this way?
How can my writing become much more than personal catharsis and serve to “to let my life preach”? How was the chi (spirit, God) blocked or flowing this week (this class, this conversation) in myself, in the men, in the institution? How is Truth being revealed? How did my teachings emerge from the circumstances? How is God speaking through each student’s life and presence? How is this work remaking me, and the men? What are the ripples? Where is the stagnation?
As we wait and listen for the movement of spirit in Quaker worship, we must discern if a message that comes to us is for ourselves or for the group. As I choose what stays in my private journals and what gets sent to the blog, I feel called to discern likewise. If it is for the group, God will give me the strength to speak it and be with those hearing it. An inner “quaking” usually appears that helps me know. May I grow in my ability to discern the difference.
As I write this, I feel intimidated, even frightened, by what this new level of commitment means. I am remembering the spiritual story of the woman who grabs a branch falling off a cliff, and dangles there in the pitch dark, not knowing, fearing a terrible death on the rocks below. Time passes and no rescue is possible, so she must eventually choose to let go. ... She didn’t know that solid ground was but few feet below. I trust the same will be true as I open, letting the Holy move my blogging and releasing my fears.
As I have been listened to, by others helping me with this call to greater integrity in this blog, what moves me to tears and trembling is desire to bring the men out with me via this blog, to “let their lives preach”, for readers to bear witness as I do when I go inside to these other children of God who are finding their way in the face of great odds.
May we find out together where God takes this Journal.
May I find the honorable way to share the stories of the men inside.
May I use the same courage I find to teach openness and flow to a room of 20 maximum security prisoners, to expose my own vulnerability and unfolding spiritual story.
May I get quiet enough, and feel the communion with the readers, so that the messages will lift themselves up out of my quaking.
May this blog take on the spirit of a Meeting for Worship. May the Holy guide my steps and stumbles. Amen
11:30 Posted in As a Quaker ... , Blog , Journal - my journey , Reflections | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this