Friday, February 21, 2014

J is for Jesus Lane


Just as all of us parents were confident about our children’s progress through the first grade, the teachers requested that we buy display panels for an exhibit called “The Story of Me.”  Our first-grader is now a teenager, but the project was so detailed that I remember most of its complications. “The Story of Me” was intended as a joint parent-child project that included pictures of a variety of family members at different stages of life, as well as pets, family weddings, homes and apartments, holidays, and trips away. If possible, all photos were to be fully identified and dated, but otherwise everything relevant was acceptable. This last provision gave ample opportunity for omissions, strategic and otherwise, which could be papered over with yet more photographs. I began to feel I knew what President Nixon might have been thinking during the Watergate cover-up, and not because of his Quaker connections.

As it happened, the issue of religion came up early. There are only around 1200 Friends in Canada, and as far as I know, we are the only Quaker family connected with that school, at least for any length of time. Our first-grader wanted wedding photos, and the ones she chose required a bit of explanation for those unfamiliar with Quaker marriage customs. Well, I shrugged, “Some parents will bring in pictures of themselves snuggling with their newborns in the neonatal ward, so I guess sex is already by implication part of the story. If we bring up religion and, by extension, politics, then among the lot of us we will have hit the trifecta of impermissible discussion topics.”

If only the project had ended there.... The one relevant photo that seemed to have gone missing was the sole extant family picture of the place where my husband and I had met: Jesus Lane Friends Meeting House in Cambridge, England. (At least some of my photos from that period turned up years later in my parents’ basement next to a box of craft supplies, the day before the house was sold, so we may have it once again, although I haven’t checked.) Of course, that was the one our daughter most wanted, and it had to be the same size as the other pictures. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get the Meeting website to download and print. (Computers weren’t then what they are now.) We all looked at each other: would a map of Cambridge do? No. How about some other building in the city —let’s say the most impressive one we could find — King’s College Chapel, maybe? That would hardly reflect the Quaker testimony of integrity, now, would it?!

I eventually got the Meeting website to print. By some miracle the photo was the right size. (I vaguely remember e-mailing the warden as to whether it was acceptable to use it.) The pictures and captions were glued on in the right spots. Our project, like the others, received a warm reception.

At that point I just wished that the members of the older generation of Jesus Lane Meeting whom we had known when we were Young Friends were still alive, as I would have liked to have returned to them with our daughter in tow. I am indebted to a number of them in different ways. Some of these Friends will come up in other posts; other reminiscences are more personal in nature. The Friend whose name came to mind that day, though, was the redoubtable Anna Bidder. Friend Anna was known to the academic community as a biologist, an expert on cephalopods. She was a co-founder and the first president of Lucy Cavendish College at the University of Cambridge. She was also familiar in Quaker and in some non-Quaker circles as one of the co-authors of the pamphlet Towards a Quaker View of Sex, to which she contributed her biological expertise. But to Young Friends in Jesus Lane Meeting she was most familiar in two capacities: as a long-serving Elder and as the indefatigable hostess of Young Friends’ gatherings on Sunday evenings in her home on the south side of Cambridge.

We would turn up punctually at seven p.m. and find her living room blue with cigarette smoke. (She lived to be ninety-eight, and I have no idea if she ever did quit smoking.) At around eleven, she would wave us off with the words, “I love you all very much, but I have a meeting tomorrow at eight a.m.” Sometimes one or another of us would visit alone. On one such occasion she made me tea, and then found out to her horror that my all-American method was rather primitive — tea bags. If someone disliked having the tea leaves steep in the pot indefinitely, one could always make a smaller pot and use a tea strainer. To drive the point home, she fished a small vegetable strainer out of the drawer. The next time I had a hostess gift, since I figured there would be other American Young Friends along sooner or later.

One evening I arrived just before the other Young Friends, which gave me the opportunity to ask how she became involved with Quakers. “It’s quite simple, my dear. I am a natural pacifist. At the end of World War I, I was one of two million excess women in England.” She continued with a list of the brothers and cousins of her school friends, almost all of whom were second lieutenants killed in that war. Her answer was a jewel-box version of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, which was always on display among the red poppies before Remembrance Sunday at Heffers bookstore. I could picture her going through childhood photographs in her head.

I sat there in shame. Here we all were, Young Friends flirting and joking in the home of someone who had made her place available to us precisely because these were the pleasures she had been denied. This decision on Anna Bidder’s part was consistent with her work to help establish Lucy Cavendish College, which was established for women students whose educations had been disrupted by domestic responsibilities. Such responsibilities usually consisted of the husbands and children she did not have.

Knowing how Anna felt about “excess women,” I have wondered what she would have thought of the “excess men” in some parts of the world, where the ratio of boys to girls has now been skewed for the better part of a generation. It does not take much imagination to conjecture a response. An unnatural ratio of either sex results by necessity from violence and tears. Those lucky enough to live in an environment with roughly equal numbers of people of each gender ought to think whether our own good fortune should make us “natural pacifists” as well. And, as we approach the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, it is incumbent upon all of us to ensure that our children, as they look back on photographs of their first-grade classmates in the years to come, do not have to say which ones were gunned down, or gassed, or bombed, or otherwise left to perish in despair.
Still life with the teapot my then-boyfriend (now my husband)
gave me the first Christmas after I left Cambridge.
The high-tech tea strainer would perhaps not have met
with Anna Bidder's approval.
photograph ©2014 Kristin Lord

I is for Individualism


I made my usual last-minute decision last December to attend the local performance of Handel's Messiah. My husband, who would ordinarily have been happy to go with me, already had plans, as did the two or three other people I asked. I went by myself, enjoying both the concert and the venue, St. Joseph's Church, the new Roman Catholic church in nearby Fergus.

The parish must have needed this building for some time. The town of Fergus and the township of Centre Wellington, of which both Elora and Fergus are a part, have experienced rapid growth for at least a decade, and it is projected to continue. Fergus has outgrown much of its earlier infrastructure: it has new schools, a new swimming pool, new or expanded shopping amenities, police station, in-town bridge (which choked off the local traffic for a year), even a new liquor store (the liquor business in Ontario is mostly a government monopoly, and new buildings are coveted). Two of the area's historic Carnegie libraries are or have been renovated and enlarged. A new hospital —even harder to come by than the liquor store— is in the works.

So it is not surprising that our Catholic neighbors dreamed big. The resulting structure is a delight, both acoustically and aesthetically. I could only be sorry not to have visited before. The building is a successful marriage of the neo-Romanesque and Ontario rural vernacular architecture. The nave is designed for maximum participation. The Victorian stained glass from the old church is there, too, set off in much larger energy-efficient windows. While I have no idea how it all functions on a weekly basis, it is ideal for the casual visitor attending a concert.

There is no aesthetic overreach. Before I had time to consider the implications of the design and its function, I was pulled up short by the Latin inscription on the cornerstone: “NON NOBIS DOMINE” (Psalm 115:1 = Psalm 113:9 in the Clementine Vulgate), “Not to (or for) us, Lord.” It speaks volumes about my secular and work-addled brain as a Classicist, particularly in December, that I first thought of which chapters of Frederic Wheelock's elementary Latin grammar could be illustrated by this inscription. But then, almost immediately, came a more sober reflection. “Non nobis, Domine:” the building is successful in significant part because a large number of people, whether architects, engineers, or art-critic wannabees, clergy or parishioners, left their egos in the parking lot. 

St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Fergus, Ontario
photo taken February 19, 2014 ©Kristin Lord


The phrase  “Non nobis, Domine”  is from the verse, “Non nobis, Domine, non nobis,/Sed nomini tuo da gloriam,/Propter misericordiam tuam, propter fidelitatem tuam,” which reads in the Revised English Bible as, “Not to us, Lord, not to us,/but to your name give glory for your love, for your faithfulness!”  This Old Testament verse, especially as abbreviated on the cornerstone,  also encapsulates an important point about Catholic thought. While it is a truism to talk about how so much of Catholic theology results from St. Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of Aristotle, whereas a lot of Protestant and specifically Quaker theology stems from the Platonic tradition (see Howard Brinton's The Religious Philosophy of Quakerism in particular), it is a truism precisely because of its importance. Aristotle and Aquinas thought deeply about ends and purposes; a parish church built around the idea of “Non nobis, Domine” is a not atypical illustration of their kind of reasoning.

The end or purpose of our worship is a good idea to keep in mind. (For those interested in the details of Latin grammar, the dative of indirect object, which we see in the psalm, and the dative of purpose, to which I have been alluding here, both fall under the broader heading of the dative of reference.) One of our favorite Quaker passages, that of Margaret Fell's convincement by George Fox, illustrates a fundamental difference between the phrase chosen for the cornerstone and much about the way unprogrammed Friends in particular approach religion. Margaret Fell (later Margaret Fox), wrote that George Fox said, “You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?” (“The testimony of Margaret Fox concerning her late husband,” in George Fox, Journal, 1694, p. ii, bicent. edn., 1891, vol. 2, pp. 512-514; cited in Britain Yearly Meeting, Quaker Faith and Practice, 1995, 19.07). As a “liberal” Quaker, I am all too prone to forget the warning in the second half of that statement, as crucial as the “what canst thou say” is for progress in both religion and in society as a whole. Although the Ranters disappeared as a movement in the seventeenth century, the attraction to their modus vivendi is very much alive.

I expect my Catholic friends would turn the two parts of George Fox's statement around. The differences in motivation, while perhaps subtle, underlie a much greater discrepancy in the role of ecclesiastical authority and of the nature of those in authority. Indeed, as I write this post, a Roman Catholic nun, Sister Megan Rice, has just been sentenced to nearly three years in prison for her role in a break-in at the nuclear weapons complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Her courageous actions, and those of her two companions, have won admiration among many Friends and others (and no small amount of concern for their well-being). She is nevertheless bound by holy orders in ways in which we Friends are not.

Whatever ecclesiastical differences we all have, and there are many, there has never been a more important time than now to learn from each other. Despite fears of a future environmental catastrophe that may jeopardize life on earth, governments and individuals are squandering resources on all types of weapons, and societies are increasingly structured for the benefit of the rich at the expense of the poor. Whatever may be said about our theology, our religious structure, and our rationale for action, our work is not about us, but rather for a higher purpose of which we as individuals and a Religious Society are but one small part.

A "selfie"with my cell phone (and a fresh haircut!),
February, 2011

Monday, February 17, 2014

H is for a Home away from Home


Having a second home is not on my wish list. It would drain our resources even if we had some to drain. A spiritual home away from home is another matter, though. We could all use one. Here I am not thinking of sojourning minutes, although others might. (For those outside the Quaker fold, a sojourning minute is a document used by some Yearly Meetings to request a sort of temporary membership in a local Meeting for a person in town for long enough to take full part in the life of that Meeting; Yearly Meetings that do not have sojourning membership, like Britain, use other procedures in this situation.) A sojourning Friend may be likened to a person who rents an apartment (“flat” for my British readers) while studying or living away from home for work for an extended period; indeed, some sojourning memberships last long enough for a Friend to buy and sell a house used as a principal residence.

I am thinking of something a bit different: either a Meeting or a place of worship of a different religious community that one visits enough to feel comfortable and to know at least some of the “regulars,” but not often enough to be called upon by Nominating Committee, say, to teach First Day School or serve on the property committee, or to be expected to contribute financially to the extent of one’s ability to do so (although, of course, treasurers and finance committees always welcome donations). Part of the responsibility of a sojourning member is to take part in the host Meeting in just those ways. Non-resident Friends also have responsibilities to their home Meetings.

Since I lived a rather peripatetic life for some years, I have had several candidates for such a spiritual home away from home, but the only one which has worked out in the longer term is the wonderful Meeting in Hanover, New Hampshire, because of its reasonable proximity to close family members. I lived in Hanover for several years as an undergraduate, and the only reason I did not obtain a sojourning minute is that Hanover Meeting and my “regular” Meeting are part of the same Quarter; there have been Friends equidistant between them. While a sojourning minute was technically feasible, it struck all parties concerned as unnecessary.

When I first left Hanover, I did not expect the Meeting to become a home away from home. Undergraduates are not always in their most congenial phases of life, and I certainly was not.  I was delighted when Friends asked me to keep in touch. That gesture meant the world to me —it still does—and thus began years of insight into how another Meeting functions. This is not only a question of touching base with old (F)friends. About fifteen years ago, the Meeting I currently attend was asked to consider what was at the time a controversial issue. I knew that my “home away from home” Meeting had a relevant minute (Quakerese for “written statement that met with Friends’ approval”) that could be used to help formulate a draft for discussion. The minute was available on the Internet by that point, which made it appropriate for consideration, but knowing at least some of the people who would approved it gave me some perspective as to how we might approach the situation. Indeed, within the past six months I have made an inquiry to that Meeting because of a property-related issue forwarded to me by someone in yet another Meeting. The person who answered my question was a preschooler when I was part of her Meeting.

Aside from making an occasional financial contribution and “paying it forward,” I am not sure what I can give back in this situation. This is probably an occasion in which opening one’s wallet is especially appropriate. It is certainly true in the other example of the “home away from home” that springs to mind. Many Friends have this type of relationship with another faith community. The Meeting of which I am a non-resident member rents space from another such community, and at least one family in that Meeting has connections with both. On a broader scale, Friends do not have remotely close to the numbers to run relief and development efforts in all areas that need them. When I asked someone with a Quaker service organization about a suitable response to a major disaster in another part of the world, the Friend was happy to point me in the direction of several organizations affiliated with other churches, as well as secular entities, because we ourselves had nothing to offer. It is vital not to let our own desire for leadership stand in the way of what needs to be done.

I now live in the village of Elora, Ontario, in which many people, of all faiths and of none, owe a huge debt to a group who started a summer music festival a generation ago. Front and center (or “front and centre,” as Canadians would put it) were Noel Edison, the music director of the Church of St. John the Evangelist, the local Anglican church, and Robert Hulse, then rector and now rector emeritus. There is still a large overlap between the parish choir of that church and the Elora Festival Singers; both have recorded under Noel Edison with Naxos and can be heard from time to time on the radio. Other area churches also have significant musical offerings. Some are connected with the Elora Festival, most notably St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic parish in nearby Fergus, which has a brand-new church with superb acoustics and is the only year-round venue in the area suitable to host the numbers attending performances of Handel’s Messiah and J.S. Bach’s Passion music. (Unfortunately, the nearest Friends Meeting is in Kitchener, thirty minutes’ drive away, and the Meeting House is quite small.) Like many Quakers from unprogrammed Meetings, I want to see the Elora Festival and similar ventures succeed, and I would also like to make at least a token gesture in support of the musicians whose day jobs are elsewhere. After all, unprogrammed Friends aren’t typically in the forefront of promoting choral music on an institutional basis.
© Kristin Lord 2012
“And the granite of New Hampshire/Is made part of them ‘til death.”
(from the Dartmouth alma mater, by Richard Hovey ’85 and H.R. Wellman ‘07)

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

G is for Global Warming


Gearing up the electronic console in the classroom for my second-semester Latin course that day, I did not expect to be challenged on a point of science. I was showing a series of quotations which I had edited for translation into Latin. One of them showcased global warming. I began by explaining that, while changes in weather patterns affected the Roman food supply around 200 CE (200 AD), which in turn was a factor in the decline of the western Roman empire, the Romans had no concept of climate change as a general problem. A few of the best minds of the day (Varro and Pliny the Elder) knew about the consequences of development, such as mining and draining marshes, on local ecosystems, but nothing on a broad scale. How, then, can Classicists describe the phenomenon, preferably without using neo-Latin (Latin words developed by modern scholars)? It turns out that clima in the sense of climate is known from the later days of the Roman empire — from a couple of sources, including Servius's commentary on Vergil and a line in Vegetius (the writer perhaps best known for saying, "If you want peace, prepare for war," not exactly the favorite bon mot of Quakers). "Change," mutatio, is common enough. The whole phrase is mutatio climatis. So I was off and running with the translation passage.

Not so fast. One of my students —and a good one, I might add— averred that not everyone saw climate change as a problem. I admitted that I am a Classicist and not a scientist; I was following scholarly consensus. If the scholarly consensus were to change, unlikely as I thought that was, then I would revisit the issue. In the interim, I had a wide variety of passages for translation, and a reasonable amount of student choice. I hasten to add that my choice of passages and authors includes a number that stick in my Quaker craw.

This episode was not the first time I have encountered global warming skeptics, and I am confident it won't be the last. Most Friends I know accept at least the broad outlines of the current scholarly view about climate change: that it is occurring, that it is anthropogenic (caused by humans), and that it provides both a direct and indirect threat to life on earth. A number of people, however, do not accept at least one of these propositions. Some of them, like the student in class, are highly educated, while others are leaders in their fields.

In short, there are people whom we may never be able to convince about the urgency of climate change. If actuarial tables (about their own lives) and scientific data (about the likely unfolding of events, depending on what humanity decides to do) are at all accurate, many of them will not live long enough to see its most dire consequences. But that's not the point: they don't think their children and grandchildren, or the grandchildren of relatives and friends, will have a problem. What can we as Quakers say to them?

Earth Hour, Elora, Ontario, March 23, 2009. photograph ©Kristin Lord 2009