From Lost to Listening: 7 July 2013

A couple weeks ago, my younger brother Jaco and I finally made it to University Friends Meeting in Seattle. We met the experience with a degree of glee - for me especially, it had been over a month away from one of the first religious institutions/traditions I've ever really loved associating myself with. There's a sign by a spot in the parking lot that reads "NO PARKING. VIOLATORS WILL BE HELD IN THE LIGHT." We both erupted into smiles and it only took a couple seconds for smartphones to come out.

We were there way early, and it's already awkward being new somewhere, so I was more than a little thankful I had Jaco there to talk to while standing around uncomfortably. The building is square, with a fellowship hall on one side, the worship space on the other, and the library, offices, and stairs down to the children's space on the third side. In the middle is a Zen-looking garden - please forgive my complete ignorance about Japanese architecture and culture - and the walls facing the middle where the little garden is are all glass, with panels I believe are meant to look like sliding doors. The worship room in particular is heavily influenced by the clean, square design of Japanese buildings. There is a light fixture in the middle of the room that is probably about 10 by 25 feet that lets in natural light where this picture above has lightbulbs. The chairs under it are organized in four triangles, facing each other in a really interesting clean-cut visual interpretation of what I'm used to. It's definitely much bigger and has a different feel from the early-1900s, ornate old family house that Grand Rapids Friends Meeting meets in.

This building is a mid-20th century creation, inspired by the Japanese architecture one of the Friends had had experience with when he was rebuilding houses there after the Second World War. (This man was in the habit of going wherever every major American war in the 20th century wreaked destruction to rebuild afterward. I was inspired by the story.) We were told this by a kind, very typically Quaker-ish man (about 60; white hair; intelligent, calm disposition; deep eyes; lots of stories about history from both American colonial times and the 20th century) that approached us while we were standing around hoping that anyone that happened to see us and think we were a couple would hear our Afrikaans and assume something else.

There was a 9:30 adult religious education gathering about the structurally-engrained racism inherent in our current American prison system, and particularly the prison system in our county. It was amazing to witness this kind of conversation the moment we walked into the Meeting house. First impressions can be so telling. There have been other first times at places where I've walked into conversations about how there's a disturbing growth of the doubt, among our secularizing youth, that miracles are possible; others about how the church was dying; others about the incredible healing power of Jesus; others about the peace God brings when we surrender our busy busy lives to Him. Though none of these churches were churches I disliked, it was clear how I would come to relate to them very quickly.

I feel a million times more at home anywhere where I can walk in and randomly attend an "adult religious education" session that's literally about racial injustice. I cannot describe how happy that, on its own, makes me. But that it was conducted by a woman that had just authored a book about it and that was very conscious of the fact that we were almost all white and mostly pretty privileged, that it was received critically, earnestly, and practically by the group? This is the kind of religion I want to be part of.

Another very kind man, named Robert, talked to us after the gathering disbanded. He's in his 70s and has a Southern accent - he only moved here about ten years ago, and was, according to him, a very stubborn, dogmatic, old crotchety Southern man until a few years ago when it all fell apart and he sought out the Friends meeting. He was a Biology teacher in his young life, and then a professor of Education in - what was it? Guam, I think. The melting pot of identities bottled up in this one very simple and sincere character was amazing to me. I wish I had had more time today to go up and say hello to him. I very much appreciated his story and his conversation.

I regret that I did not write about the experience two weeks ago directly after I got back as I normally do. I had a fascinating, refreshing time of meditation, and some beautiful, fascinating images. The one that stuck with me most was that of a gigantic bird in the middle of the same room I was sitting in, but the room was much larger and flatter - the detailing seemed smaller as well. It seemed much like a bird cage. When the bird flew out of the room, I hung onto its feathers like a little kid riding bareback. I saw everything from above - the water, the cars, the University, the trees - and then I landed back in my seat again.

Everything would suddenly seem like it looked so much smaller than I knew it really was in those moments. It was as if I were being shown the enormity of the world, the openness of possibility, the importance of thinking of the world in those ways. The humanity and clunkiness of the world outside of this joyride on the back of the bird seemed, counter-intuitively, to minimize the importance of thinking of the world in that clunky, limited state of mind. The sky was the limit on the back of the bird, and everything seemed immeasurably fresh and real.

Today, there was no such exploration. There was no ball, no flame, no air, no journey. I have never had the kind of meeting as I had today. I know that a large part of that is because I really know no one at this meeting and had talked to no one before sitting down, and I could tell there were several others present that were in my shoes. There was a vibe - where the vibe was clean-cut and fresh and pure and straight-edged the week prior, this week it was its antitheseis: void, still, clinical. Those words may sound more negative than I intend them. What I mean to say is that for the first time since I began attending meetings, nothing really happened today.

I focused for a long time on the bodily feeling of discomfort I brought with me. Part of being slanted towards a tendency for depression is that sometimes tiny things set me off and I'm unsure what they are until I examine the feeling very deeply, and even then, it's not the incident itself that was responsible. Someone had asked us to move our conversation from the space outside the meeting hall about five minutes before the start of meeting, and it served as a way for me to channel my insecurity about being in a new place, leading a sibling that was hiding in my shadow.

My reading from Whipping Girl, by Julia Serano, has given me new thoughts about the nature of what she calls "body feelings" - a deep sense of where and how things are in your body that contributes meaningfully to your self of self and identity. I spent some time doing body scans, focusing on the location of the faint pains, trying to decipher for myself what "discomfort" actually felt like, bodily. This exercise has replaced for me a process that used to be going to God "with open hands and an open heart," carrying the burdens I was bearing. The reason that this no longer works for me is that it's a passive, weak motion - it's not productive for me to risk becoming needy and whiny (as I have in the past) as a byproduct of finding emotional community and release.

Again, this process of mediation may not seem to have anything to do with the standard conception of the Christian deity, but I never rejected that deity as I've morphed into the understanding of the universe  I have now. Whatever it is I am doing and whatever it is that God has become to me, I do it all in God's presence. God is the mother's blood flowing through my thought fetuses - my meditation is just the umbilical cord, and the place I meditate is just the placenta. God is life and movement and learning and community - I love using a mother or father figure to represent the metaphorical source of all these things, because it grants a sense of unity to experience. The unity rings so true when I dwell in it: I see reflections, pieces, of God in every person I meet, in every tree, in every book, in every article I read.

That is no different than it's ever been. The way I think and believe has changed immensely in the past year, and with surprising apathy on my part. But while I was taught that this release would surely be surrendering to darkness, this process of letting go is as much surrendering myself to God as anything I have ever done. Probably more. It means I'm no longer occupied by the existential strain of truth and falsity on my own mind. God - my metaphor God - directs my thoughts and my revelations and my understanding of truth without my trying to coerce reality and rightness into boxes.

My thoughts this morning were cloudy and uncomfortable - a kind of Pepto Bismol texture, murky and amorphous. I saw a piece of chalk start sentences on a green chalk board over and over and never really write anything coherent - it was the same sentence over and over, in fragments: "My thoughts are a sea of disjointed restrictions." It only existed to deliver the emotion I seemed to need to express, and it went nowhere. But then I gave up.

It was like taking the needle off of a scratched record - like finally popping your ears after a sudden climb in elevation and being able to hear again - like turning off some static background noise your subconscious had been distracted by. I just gave up, and gave in, and listened. I did nothing. I just sat there and rested. I listened to some annoying tapping sound someone on the other side of the room was making. I listend to the yawns and coughs and shifts and knuckle cracking of the people in the room, the birds outside, the cars, the sound of the room itself. I felt my body in that space and kept feeling the way I physically reacted, despite the numbing of my previous physical discomfort. And something just worked, somehow. It didn't feel brilliant or bright or hopeful like the best weeks, but it was honest and plain.

Maybe sometimes Meeting is like waiting for a bus that never came. But listening to the other cars as they come by seems a worthwhile activity in and of itself.