Tuesday, January 28, 2014

F is for Flowers, and the Figured Bass


Friends’ Meetings in England often have rotas for people to sign up to provide weekly floral arrangements in the Meeting House. Although I lived in England for two years and participated in a Meeting there, I had forgotten how seriously English Quakers took flowers until a year or two ago, when one of my English FaceBook friends remembered at the last minute that she was due to provide a bouquet that Sunday. It was the dead of winter, but the local farmers’ market would no doubt have just what she needed.

When I was in England, the Young Friends were responsible for doing the flowers once or twice a year.  The woman who set up the rota asked me if I would take the Young Friends’ slot that first year. She had a large flower garden and would be more than happy for me to take a look round on Saturday. She had no idea that, in comparison with my British contemporaries, the average North American young person —especially those from a cold climate— had little training in floral arrangement. However, my mother was an exception (perhaps because of various family names or a genetic endowment that has somehow eluded most of the rest of us), and  I picked up just enough knowledge to avoid total humiliation.

Since I am an American and it was spring, I used the first lines from Walt Whitman’s poem in memory of Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” as inspiration. Walt Whitman had a Quaker background, after all. I set up the requisite three arrangements —a large one in the Meeting room and smaller ones by the entrance to the Meeting room and near the guest book downstairs— and went away feeling quite smug about it. I was feeling so good that I almost forgot my mother’s dictum that anyone arranging flowers needed to turn up early the next day in case something was not quite right.

Fortunately, I had only almost forgotten my mother’s advice: I arrived at the Meeting House early enough on Sunday morning to rectify the situation when I discovered that the lilacs had consumed all the water overnight and were hanging limp. The replacements, retrieved via a sweaty bicycle ride to my own living quarters, a graduate student house with a substantial number of flowering shrubs, were more than adequate as far as I was concerned, although I could never quite shake the idea that my English hosts would have preferred more peonies.

That was the first and so far the only time I have tried my hand at floral decorations for Meeting. When I read on FaceBook about the English Quaker dashing off to find a worthy contribution for the flower rota, I had a flush of nostalgia. “Maybe,” I suggested to another Friend who had lived in England, “January would be more pleasant at the Meeting House if we had a flower rota like the ones in England.” I saw a pair of furrowed eyebrows pointing in my direction. “What flower rotas in England?” “English Quakers take having flowers at Meeting almost as seriously as tea and biscuits.” “That they do. I had forgotten that Friends took turns to provide the arrangements. But the best of British luck to you, as they say.”

The best of British luck, indeed. For starters, I would have to be a one-Friend rota. More to the point, few of the flowers available in the northeastern USA or eastern Canada in January are ethically sourced. Even if I could obtain some that would meet reasonable standards, whether ethical, fiscal, or aesthetic, there was the question of getting them to a Meeting House thirty minutes away, in a car that had sprouted frost inside and out. To warm up the car enough to transport them would contribute more to climate change than I wanted to contemplate — but never mind. That Saturday I found a high-end florist near us who sold me some Canadian-grown flowers of a species whose name escapes me. What happened then? You guessed it: they got exactly as far as a vase in our dining room at home. The Meeting room had the same house plant in the corner that it has always had, and that plant does not blossom.

Of course, lots of cold-climate North American gardeners take cut flowers or flowering house plants to Meeting, but most of them do not have the temerity to try it in January. Then again, what would I know? As much as I enjoy roses (I have planted a few Abraham Darby climbers and three or four other David Austin roses around the yard), I have never been able to handle our invasive plant problem. Needless to say, I did not inherit any flower genes from my mother.

Maybe I should phrase that last sentence somewhat differently: I did not inherit any talent for Sitzfleisch (one of those useful German compound words, in this case referring to the ability to sit on one’s derriere until the work **GOT DONE**) from my mother, father, or anyone else. There is a reason I was given the boot from piano lessons at the age of ten, and piano lessons are a lot more enjoyable —to me at least— than briars, goutweed, and sheep manure. For that matter, although I am confronting the demon of the piano lessons, I am still watching my eyes glaze over at that music theory book with the lesson about how to figure out a figured bass. I know about the history of the figured bass, but to construct a figured bass line? Now that requires work and maybe signing up for an exam as a way of instilling discipline. It’s an even question as to whether I would rather pull weeds for an hour. It is certain, though, that mulling over the issue for an hour in Meeting for Worship is much easier than doing either.
An Abraham Darby Climbing Rose by the southern wall of our house ©Kristin Lord 1998

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

E is for Eggplant (a.k.a. Aubergine)


                               Some have meat and cannot eat, 
                               Some can not eat that want it: 
                               But we have meat and we can eat, 
                               Sae let the Lord be thankit.
                                              —Selkirk Grace, ascribed to Robert Burns

Every year around this time, I keep thinking of a real Mediterranean dinner — not a quick fill of pizza or pasta, but something substantial. Ideally, it should contain eggplant (known in the United Kingdom and some other English-speaking countries as “aubergine”). I don’t say this because I dislike winter weather; indeed, I prefer a bracing climate. It’s an issue of cuisine. Unfortunately for me, the weather in Canada or the northern US in January —especially this year, which has been unseasonably cold— is much like what the Scots expect on Robbie Burns Day. The traditional foods of that occasion suit the weather, but they don’t suit my fantasies.

In my ideal world I will prepare an eggplant dish for my family and friends in the dead of winter, and they will be enthralled. In reality, I keep hoping in vain for a Damascene conversion from family members on the subject of eggplant. After nearly thirty years of trying eggplant recipes, the fact remains that only one of my relatives truly enjoys the vegetable, and I don’t see her nearly as often as I would like.

At this point in my meditations I start thinking of how eggplant is an ideal Quaker potluck dish. In a large Meeting that would be true, but I am not dealing with a large Meeting. The last large Meeting I was connected with is several hours away. In a small Meeting, as in a small family, food needs to meet the needs of a critical mass of people. Eggplant can be problematical in that regard. It is not only an acquired taste for people who have grown up with certain cuisines, but it is also a vegetable that cannot easily be enjoyed on its own. Combining the eggplant with those other necessary ingredients, we all too often run afoul of food allergies or other restrictions.

Here I confess to being one of the major culprits: although I am fortunate not to have any known food allergies, I am a lacto-ovo-vegetarian, which means that I consume eggs and dairy but not “red” meat, poultry, fish, or seafood. For instance, the moussaka I eat is the vegetarian variety, which might be as appealing to some as vegetarian haggis. (Actually, the thought of vegetarian haggis is about as appealing to me as Tofurkey for Thanksgiving — but I digress.) Getting back to the matter of taking eggplant to the Meeting House, it seems to be just too time-consuming a gamble. Quakers aren’t supposed to gamble.

It has always been easier to be “the dessert lady” with the flourless chocolate cake made with canola oil and a trace of orange juice.

Taking dessert and not eggplant to potluck means that either I or someone else needs to provide something resembling a main course. It also implies that we have money to spare, and there’s the rub. Many of us, including yours truly, could use some reminding. That was the goal in one of those large Meetings I sojourned at some years ago, in which we had monthly “austerity meals” to benefit the American Friends Service Committee. The meal consisted of two soups— a vegetarian soup and one with a minimal amount of meat, typically stock or leftovers— some bread, and perhaps a bit of cheese. Since the bread and soups were made from scratch in someone’s pleasant kitchen (Friends signed up in advance), and the cheese was from one of the continent’s premier dairy regions, the lunches hardly qualified as being austere, although the basic nature of the ingredients explained why the meals got their name.  Upon reflection, however, the meals were austere because the coffee and tea (and juice for the kids) were distinctly second-tier .... And... There... Was... No... Dessert...

Sadly, for all too many people, even the aforementioned austerity meal is beyond their skill level or budgets — or both. The United States has the highest poverty rate of major OECD countries, and Canada has little to brag about in that regard. It is shameful for any wealthy country to treat people that way. This is especially true of children — but it is true for anyone. The right to be able to eat is a human right and cannot be waved away with the word “deserving.”

This is, indeed, a right, and one that is hard won. There is no guarantee that in a world of increasing economic disparities and climate disruptions we will not return to the spot of the regular famines the world knew in previous generations— or even worse. All of us, as members of the human family, have much to be concerned about. If we have the education, the money, and the opportunity to think about our long-term food supply, then we have the obligation to do so. In the interim, let us take to heart the words of the Selkirk Grace, where the “meat” of the Lowlands Scots language is a synecdoche for all kinds of food, and say, “Sae let the Lord be thankit.
An eggplant dish which I made in the style of a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi

Saturday, January 18, 2014

D is for Dog


Decades ago, I first heard about Brigflatts Meeting House in Cumbria, England from a Friend in Vermont. I still have not seen it, despite two hikes to the top of Pendle Hill and a pair of visits to Swarthmoor Hall. I am not interested so much for its connection with Basil Bunting's magisterial poems (in fact, Bunting is buried at Brigflatts) but rather for the pens where sheep farmers could leave their dogs while they attended Meeting for Worship and participated in the business of the Meeting.

These would have been working dogs, perhaps the remote progenitors of the Rough Collie my family had when I was growing up. Unlike the early farmers of Brigflatts, few Friends have working dogs these days. I know Quaker farmers, and even Quakers who have raised sheep and lambs, but not all of them feel they need or want a dog. If they were to have one, it would be as a "pet" or companion animal —and the numbers of pet dogs are on the decline in North America, both relative to the population (percentage of households owning dogs) and, since the 2008 financial crisis,  in absolute numbers. Needless to say, there are still tens of millions of dog and cat “owners” in all OECD countries. Many Quakers are among them, including at least two of my acquaintance who work in the heart-rending but rewarding area of companion animal rescue. However, the longer-term trends are not good. (I attach recent overall figures for pet ownership in the United States and Canada, although trends from the period before the financial crisis are not shown.) I am one of millions of people who grew up with a dog but who does not have one as an adult. (My favorite breed is still the Collie or, failing that, the Sheltie.) It is one of my regrets and one I see no realistic way to rectify in the foreseeable future.

The reasons for the relative decline of dogs (and increase of cats until ca. 2008) have been thoroughly chewed over, so to speak, by scholars, pundits, and owners of businesses catering to companion animals. The major culprits are money and time. With the hollowing-out of the middle class and the increase in working hours to try to compensate, a lot of people can no longer have pets, especially dogs. Despite the dearth of statistics of any sort about Quaker life, we can hardly be immune to these broader forces. This decline is a small but noticeable index of other changes in our lives as Friends, although little seems to have been said about it.

Owning a dog forces people to be social and to meet those who would otherwise be unfamiliar. So often we spend our days at work and our First Days at worship with people all too like ourselves. Dogs bring introverts out of themselves, induce an acceptance of routine, and force almost all owners to consider how to handle potential or actual conflict with other dogs or cats or with other humans in relation to dogs. Walking a dog is a small-scale peace-building exercise sans pareil. Perhaps most of all, dogs are sloppy by nature and compel us to cope with imperfection, in exchange for more loyalty than most of us can muster. Along with a pooper scooper, dogs hand us a mirror with which we can see ourselves.

Some might object that, as is true of other parts of life, correlation does not equal causation. Perhaps those who get the most out of kibitzing with strangers, regardless of the weather, are the ones inclined to life with the canis familiaris, rather than seeing one's responsibility to the dog as an opportunity to get out more. While this may be true, there remains a broad swath of our Religious Society that no longer owns dogs but who probably would have a generation ago. As I have said, the biggest reasons are finances and time, and we may not be able to do much about either in the face of daunting socioeconomic realities. But before these changes accelerate —and while we still have a large core group of Quaker dog owners— we should ask ourselves what we are beginning to lose. Quakers have had period of great activism, and others of relative quiet; indeed, an earlier period in Quaker history is called Quietism. Is there any way to mitigate those factors —including a decline in dog ownership— that draw us into ourselves as individuals, rather than reaching out to others? 
 
This is as close as I get to having a dog in my home these days — a teapot which I bought 25 years ago. Photograph ©Kristin Lord 2014

Sunday, January 12, 2014

C is for Clerk and Cats

Call me indecisive (and maybe I am, when it comes to the plethora of opportunities for the third letter of the alphabet) but I have been thinking of how Quaker concepts of "clerk" and "cats" might, when taken together, illustrate the strengths and limitations of our ideas about equality. For those readers who are new to Quakerism, by "clerk" I mean the Friend in an unprogrammed Meeting who arranges the agenda in our monthly Meeting for Worship for Business and assists the group in finding unity and perhaps in formulating minutes (or in helping us realize when to set a matter aside if unity cannot be found). Clerks must be able to listen and to park their own views at the Meeting House door. By "clerk" I do not mean a scribe, although the so-called presiding clerk can also write down as well as formulate minutes, and the recording clerk in a Quaker business meeting works together with the clerk. I also don't mean a clerk in the sense of a student of philology or theology (as in Geoffrey Chaucer's words, "A clerk ther was of Oxenford also"), from which we get the modern English word "cleric."

Back when I was a teenager and just starting my journey into Quakerism, my Meeting had a short-lived experiment with a thirty-minute midweek Meeting for Worship. The clerk, a beloved Friend who is, alas, no longer with us, hosted some of the gatherings at her home. One day there were only three of us: the clerk, yours truly, and the clerk's cat. This cat, a magnificent Siamese, was not comfortable with outsiders. On that occasion, however, our feline friend spent virtually the entire period nestled in my lap, purring and asking for the occasional ear rub. Whatever that cat got out of Meeting (and there are probably some Friends who may be rolling their eyes at this point with the thought that a non-human animal might gain anything other than companionship), it was clearly enough to transform her behavior.

People who are either new to Friends or who are not Quakers sometimes look at clerks as the closest analogues to clergy, which unprogrammed Meetings lack. They might be forgiven for this, and not only because of the linguistic relationship between "clerk" and "cleric:" in some jurisdictions, Monthly Meeting clerks signs Quaker marriage licenses,  and virtually everywhere documents representing Meeting decisions go out under the signature of either the clerk, recording clerk, or an assistant clerk. In some Monthly and Yearly Meetings, the clerk is the person who closes Meeting for Worship with a handshake. Someone is also appointed to "clerk" a Memorial Meeting for Worship, in the sense of welcoming visitors and, along with other appointed Friends, keeping an eye out for those who might be in distress. Nevertheless, although it is true that a clerk is a leader in the Meeting, the role has nothing to do with ordination. A well-functioning Meeting hopes to have at least several people who can serve as clerk; indeed, some Meetings have formal or informal term limits (the usual single term is for one year). The Friend who had the Siamese cat learned to her consternation that people sometimes expected her to have insights in areas in which she had no expertise. It was not always easy to explain Quaker concepts of equality.

Friends believe that human beings have both equal rights and differing talents and experience. There is also an increasing understanding, both among Friends and in society as a whole, that animals who are not human have some rights. We differ widely, however, in our views of what those rights are. I will speak plainly here. Friends have been leaders in the struggle against capital punishment for human beings, but many of us eat meat. (I am in the middle: I do not eat meat, fish, seafood, but, as a lacto-ovo-vegetarian, I do consume dairy products and eggs.) Needless to say, we also differ in the extent to which, if at all, we believe that non-human animals can experience transcendence.

I would leave this rather unorthodox meditation except for two other examples that may shed some light on it. First, as I mentioned above, in some jurisdictions, secular authorities require that Quaker clerks sign the marriage licenses of those marrying under the care of the Meeting.  This is true in the state where my husband and I had our Quaker marriage ceremony. Years later, and some time after the clerk who signed our marriage license had joined another denomination, he was the plaintiff whose name was given to one of the earliest lawsuits  for marriage equality for same-sex couples. Whenever my husband and I needed to produce our marriage license in those days, we were reminded that not all were equal under the law.

On a more mundane note, my Friend's cat was not the only feline to insist on taking part in Meeting for Worship. On several occasions a couple of years ago we hosted a small Worship Group at our home. Invariably, Hermione, one of the two cats we had at the time, made the rounds, greeting everyone with a purr that could be heard in the next room. Her warmth was a reminder of what love may do. She was a former stray who was initially so traumatized by her experience that she hid under the bed in the spare room for a month. Watching her in Meeting for Worship, it was hard to believe that she was the same animal.

We lost Hermione to an undiagnosed heart condition a week before Christmas in 2012. Her successor is an extreme extrovert. If we host the Worship Group again, will the new cat have the same instinctive sense of the boundaries of Meeting for Worship, or will she pounce into someone's lap without warning, just as she did to our recording clerk when he was invited to our (meatless) Thanksgiving dinner?
Hermione (2004-2012) Photo © 2008 Kristin Lord



Thursday, January 9, 2014

B is for Bach's Mass in B Minor (BWV 232)


Broadly speaking, my preferred spiritual experience is the unprogrammed Quaker Meeting for Worship. I am not one of those convinced Friends (i.e., a Quaker who was not raised in our Religious Society) who would list the lack of hymns as one of the traditional drawbacks of this type of religion. It is true that I usually go to a local Anglican (= Episcopal) church during the Advent or Christmas season for a performance of lessons and carols and enjoy “the playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir,” but that usually suffices for the year. I don’t enjoy singing in small groups, and I do know what I am missing.

Having made this confession, it might seem surprising that I believe listening to the Mass in B Minor of J.S. Bach to be of the great contemplative experiences, and that I would also assign a high rank to a number of other renditions of the Ordinarium (sung Latin versions of the mass, whether Catholic, Protestant, or a hybrid, which are not exactly the same as what is spoken in a particular church). In fact, I have a reasonable collection of recordings of choral music in Latin, most of it liturgical, and every now and then some of it makes its way to my otherwise secular classroom where I teach Latin grammar and pagan Latin literature. Usually it illustrates some point of grammar. Most often I choose the “Dona nobis pacem,” “Grant us peace,” which students can translate before the end of the first semester.  If I have enough time, I play Bach’s majestic finale; if I am rushed, I am more than happy to substitute the end of Mozart’s Missa Brevis KV 275, which always reminds me of the truth in William Blake’s lines in his “Auguries of Innocence” about holding “Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.” I sometimes refer to the observation of the great Japanese musicologist Yoshitake Kobayashi, himself a Buddhist, that the B Minor Mass is of universal significance. In any case, I try to avoid anything containing a creed, and not just because I am a Quaker teaching at a secular university.

When I listen to any one of the great sung Masses, I wrestle not only with the music and its social history but also with the words. This is primarily an issue with the Credo (creed); clearly, my reflections on the “Dona nobis pacem” are not related to fundamental disagreements with the concept. Although I am no theologian, my understanding is that the objections George Fox and other early Friends had with creeds are not necessarily in what is said (although questions of belief and interpretation might sometimes be paramount) but in the compulsion to say them rather than to think about them or to express one’s beliefs in actions and not just words.  My own concerns (I am essentially a Christian universalist) are first and foremost of this nature.

The fact that I do not recite a creed in my spiritual life is not an “easy out” when wrestling with the meaning of the Credo — quite the contrary. Nevertheless, I may find this task easier than some Friends precisely because I grew up in a non-liturgical strand of Protestantism and have now been a Quaker for more years than not. I am thus viewing the material with reasonably fresh eyes. All in all, respect and, indeed, affection are possible even when agreement is not — and in the case of the major sung Masses I also subscribe to the dictum that what cannot be spoken may nevertheless be sung.

Since I usually relegate singing to the shower and the car, it is reasonable to ask whether I have any adult experience of making music and not just listening to it. I do, but this a recent endeavor, after one attempt as an adult to start a new instrument at an inopportune time and another —overlapping with the Great Blackout of 2003 (speaking of divine thunderbolts)— to resume lessons on the flute, which I enjoyed in my youth but found less appealing as an adult. For my third attempt, the instrument I chose was the piano, which did not work out in elementary school, despite my mother’s valiant efforts with three teachers in as many years. (To give a Biblical comparison, when Jesus foretold that Peter would thrice deny him, he was right not only about Peter’s psychological make-up but in the significance of messing up exactly three times.) In the spring of 2012, after practicing diligently on my own for nearly a year, I clawed my way back to piano lessons, from which I was more or less booted at the age of ten.
Johann Sebastian Bach. Image via a Creative Commons license from Wikimedia Commons. Bach apparently said that playing the keyboard was simply a matter of putting the right fingers on the right keys at the right time.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

A is for Anniversary


And so 2014, the year of the great anniversary, begins. I do not mean an anniversary of a personal or even a national milestone; those fall in other years. I am referring to the centenary of World War I (“the Great War”), when the eyes of the world shifted from the shock of the new, as in Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du printemps” and Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” both of which were first seen by the public in 2913, to the slaughter of millions, many of them young men just starting their lives.

Within the war itself, the mood and circumstances shifted quickly. We can see this shift in the poetry of the period, which moves with distressing speed from Rupert Brooke’s “there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England” (written one hundred years ago, in 1914) to the decline in morale culminating in Wilfred Owen’s phrase “the old Lie,” his acerbic commentary on Horace’s “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“It is sweet and suitable to die for one’s country”) (1917-18). Both Brooke and Owen were to perish in the course of the war.

I am an American Friend, a member of New England Yearly Meeting, who lives in Canada and works as a “temporary” lecturer in Latin and ancient Greek at an Ontario university. World War I had an even greater effect on Canada than it did on the United States. This is due to a number of factors, only some of which are related to the fact that the US was not a part of the war until 1917. In Wellington County, where I now live, and in the nearby city of Guelph, officials decided a few years ago that at least fifty per cent of new streets were to be named for area soldiers who lost their lives in World War I. The decision was rooted not only in the memory of John McCrae, the physician and poet (author of “In Flanders Fields”) who may be the best known native of Guelph, but also of the scars that the carnage had on the region, scars that can be seen in the relative depopulation of some rural areas even a century later. The region is now growing quickly, but no one expects to run out of names any time soon.


Just as the contours of world geography are shaped by the outcome of World War I, so are those of Quaker institutions. The American Friends Service Committee was established in 1917, and the progenitor of its British counterpart (now called Quaker Peace and Social Witness), the Council for International Service, was organized in 1919.  The modern understanding of conscientious objection to military service and war preparations is rooted to a great extent in this period. This includes the Friends Ambulance Unit. The roles of women both inside and outside of Quakerism were to also shift as a result of World War I and its aftermath.

I hope to see an increasing number of Friendly discussions of this war and its aftermath as this year and the following ones progress. Woodbrooke has a short course later this year on Friends and World War I, the material of which I hope will be made available to a broader audience.

The boyhood home of John McCrae, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
                        photo ©Kristin Lord 2013