Remembering Ancestors

The modern Pagan festival of Samhain, celebrated at the same time as Halloween, is often figured as a time of connection with and remembering those who have died – our ancestors, broadly understood. (This is a blog post about my personal modern practice, and I am not going to discuss whether this version is ancient or historically accurate or any of those things – a lot of the language in use now, like ‘veil between worlds’, may be Victorian rather than any older. On the other hand, the Victorians were four generations or more ago now, and eventually everything becomes ancient! This is also not a blogpost about the metaphysics of life after death, but about the experience of the living.)

In the Buddhist practice of Touching the Earth as taught by Thich Nhat Hanh, there are considered to be three categories of ancestors – blood ancestors, those we probably think of first in the context of the English word ‘ancestor’, who are related to our physical form; spiritual ancestors, especially our teachers and those who have guided us in all sorts of ways; and land ancestors, the land itself and the people who have lived on it and worked with it before us. In those ideas, I think there’s something which resonates strongly with Pagan ideas about ancestors – not limited to our physical and legal families, but including people who inspired us, those who went before us in our work and the places we live.

(For those who still have my previous blog post in mind, would the Plum Village community/Community of Interbeing be comfortable with being included in this kind of interfaith thinking? I think so: the text of the Touching the Earth practice mentions Christ as well as Buddha, Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Living Buddha, Living Christ is supportive of multiple religious belonging, and my experience of attending their retreats and sangha meetings in the UK is that I as a Quaker Pagan have been welcome – I took the Five Mindfulness Trainings in 2012, and although my level of involvement has varied over time, maintain some connection with the community.) 

So here are some of the paradoxes of multiple religious belonging in practice: as a Quaker I don’t celebrate specific times and seasons or use specific physical rituals, but aim to remember the key messages all year; as a Pagan I notice the physical changes in the world around me – at this time of year, in England, that means the shortening day length and the leaves changing colour and falling – and tie those to potentially ancient and often universal stories and ideas, like that there are some times when Otherworldly beings are more likely to visit; and as a Buddhist I might use the Five Earth Touchings at any time, to remember all my ancestors and connect with both those I love and those who make me suffer. What to do? I don’t have a neat theory, so I just try and do what I feel led to do at any particular time.

This year, I am remembering my ancestors, and I’ll probably light some candles. I am remembering my grandmother and my grandfather, and my great-grandparents (some of whom lived until I was old enough to remember them, so I have a tangible connection). I’ve thinking of my friends and loved ones whose blood ancestors are not their family, or whose blood ancestors have caused them pain in lots of ways. So I’m including with my ancestors the people who have stepped in when I needed help – the people who have mentored me, who welcomed me to their homes and encouraged me in my writing and my work and my life in all sorts of ways.

It may be a sign of the strength of the intergenerational communities that I’ve been part of that a significant number of those people influenced me strongly in the last years of their lives. Because of these connections, and the way I have needed to move to study and work, it has been my experience that often, when a very dear friend from a previous part of my life died, I haven’t any more been a member of the same Quaker community, haven’t had the overlapping circles of friends any more, and hence have sometimes felt I was mourning alone. So I’m remembering people who were kind and brave, who modelled ways to hold close to God’s guidance even in the most difficult times, who remembered to ask whether I was still writing, who were supportive and caring – sometimes just present, offering lifts to hospital or a meal and a chat – when my own life was very difficult.

Among my spiritual ancestors, I am remembering those who died in war and those who became conscientious objectors (and occasionally died anyway). Of course, Remembrance Day is coming soon, very closely linked to these themes but sometimes used to exalt military service and action at the expense of other responses to conflict; and people keep comparing the pandemic to a war, when (apart from lots of people dying when governments make bad decisions) I’m not sure that it’s comparable at all. 

I’m remembering going to the National Memorial Arboretum, where many of these people are honoured. It’s a very Druid place, with the dead remembered by living trees – although in some ways secular and in other ways, as British ‘secular’ cultural practices often are, deeply marked by Christian thinking and history. I am remembering the Shot at Dawn memorial there, which names 307 British soldiers who were executed in the complex circumstances of the First World War. 

I am thinking about what land ancestors might mean here. I live in Bournville, mainly built on green-field sites by a family who wanted to both care for and profit from their workers. I am remembering those who suffered for the chocolate trade and those who benefitted from it – of course, George Cadbury isn’t just a land ancestor to me, but a spiritual ancestor and maybe more something more direct, since he founded the organisation, Woodbrooke, which now employs me. Is there a sub-category needed for employment ancestors? If I made one, I might remember alongside the Cadbury family figures like Joseph Chamberlain and all the others who help with the founding of large and complex organisations like universities. 

As you can probably see from this meandering consideration, one of the things which attracts me to marking Samhain in this way is that it both steers my thoughts, helping me set aside time to remember the many interconnections between lives and the many people who have shaped my life even though history might not remember their names; and that it leaves things open, for me to focus on the issues which matter to me at the moment and able to draw my own conclusions. Who is on your mind at the moment? If you are marking Samhain – or Halloween, or one of the many related festivals – who are you remembering?

Different Moves in the Meeting Game?

Sometimes I use the idea of ‘religion-games’ to help me understand what is happening in complex religious situations – I’ve written before about how this might help to explain what is happening when people belong to more than one religious tradition, and how this might inspire new approaches to Quaker membership, and recently I gave a conference paper in which I talked about how this might apply to bringing a practice from one tradition (my example was Quaker worship) into interreligious settings such as joint worship services. After that paper, Rose Drew asked a really good question: what does this say about cases where someone uses practices from another tradition, like a Buddhist breathing mediation, in Quaker worship? Rose gives a real example like this in her excellent book, Buddhist and Christian?: someone who is both a Buddhist and a Quaker says (page 174) that she “uses Buddhist meditation techniques (focusing on the breath, for example) to assist her at the beginning of each Meeting in the process known as ‘centring down’, in which one quietens ones’ mind in preparation for the silence and openness of the Meeting.” In the religion-games picture, what is happening here?

One of the points about most games is that you can’t play more than one at once – you are either playing football or rugby, either cricket or tennis, either Scrabble or Monopoly, and putting a seven-letter word down on a chess board won’t get you a triple word score or two hundred pounds, just a lot of confused looks from other players! There are cases, perhaps, when you can be playing two games at once if they are of very different kinds or if you have changed your mind about the objectives. For example, when I was a child who was required to participate in PE lessons, I might officially be playing rugby – in the sense of being on a rugby field – but I would set myself other goals, like ‘how long can I go without moving my feet at all?’ In that case, actually, it’s not clear that I’m really playing rugby at all; I’m mostly playing with the boundary between apparent compliance (enough not to get punished) and actual disobedience (because I loathe PE and have no intention of trying to do the things I’m being told to do). If I went into meeting for worship and – even while sitting in silence – ignored the rules about listening and being open to spoken ministry, and instead determinedly did a visualisation throughout, perhaps it would be like this. Unlike my childhood PE lessons, though, meeting for worship is entirely optional in most circumstances, and people who don’t want to even try out Quaker rules usually quickly work out that they’re in the wrong place.

But I can imagine a case where someone was genuinely playing rugby, wants to play rugby, but also played another game at the same time, perhaps ‘count how often the PE teacher says ‘try harder!”. If your PE teacher has a distracting verbal habit like using the same phrase over and over, you could be playing rugby and phrase-counting games at the same time. This could be what’s happening when someone uses a Buddhist meditation technique in a Quaker meeting for worship – they are playing two religion-games at once. However, I don’t think this fits all the facts in this case. In particular, counting how often your PE teacher yells “try harder!” isn’t likely to make you play better rugby, and it might have the opposite effect. But when Quakers who find a breathing meditation technique useful in general bring it into meeting for worship with them, at least some of them find that it is actively helpful: that it helps them settle into the silence, focus on worship, and so on. In that case, they aren’t just playing two games at once – the two games are interacting in some way, despite having different rules.

There are also cases with ordinary games where you can cross-train – where being good at one games tends to help you with another game. Long ago comedian Tony Hawks challenged the members of a football team to games of tennis. As I remember it, one of his findings was that, even if they never usually play tennis, practice at playing football makes footballers into better tennis players than he had expected. I think this might be closer to what is happening with the meditating meeting attendees. Practising one game – mediation – outside meeting for worship helps them to develop skills which are relevant, even if not directly, to participating well in meeting for worship. 

When we look at things from this point of view, we can also see some other practices which are well-established as ‘things people sometimes do in Quaker meeting’ as also separable, capable of being played as games on their own. For example, reading a passage from the Bible is an acceptable move within the meeting for worship game, and reading Biblical passages is also something we can do outside meeting for worship – indeed, reading and studying the Bible in different ways probably makes up several different games (some more religious, like devotional reading; some more secular, like academic study). In this account, bringing into a particular practice skills and techniques – and knowledge and experience and feelings and lots of other aspects of life – from elsewhere doesn’t stop you playing by the rules relevant to the current practice: the footballers play tennis according to the rules of tennis. It might, done with sensitivity to the origins of the practice you are borrowing from and the ethics of transporting ideas and practices across cultural and religious boundaries, be actively helpful.

Search terms: some quick hits

From time to time, it’s interesting to see how people arrive at my site – if it’s not from a Facebook link, it’s often from a search term. Here are some comments on some of the quirkier ones.

“quakerisms”

The plural here is curiously apt. Although it’s not standard usage at the moment, perhaps it should be. There are many words we can use to describe the varieties of Quakerism found in the world today: unprogrammed, semi-programmed, programmed; conservative, evangelical, quietest; liberal, liberal-Liberal, not actually liberal; Christian, rooted in Christianity, Christocentic, universalist, hypenated; pluralist, inclusive, diverse, exclusive, elitist; spiritual, humanist, religious; theist, atheist, non-theist, agnostic, gnostic; honest, transparent, open, silent, unknown, secret; clear, sure, uncertain, exploring, vague, confused, determined, open-minded… and maybe all of these at once. How many Quakerisms are there?

“quaker-friends church bloggers 2014”

I guess this person might have been looking for the Quaker Alphabet Bloggers, or perhaps they were just looking for Quaker or Friends Church bloggers in general. There are plenty of them about!

“what does buddha look like”

It was the tense of this query which caught my attention. This isn’t, apparently, a search for information about the historical figure known as the Buddha, but a question about what the Buddha looks like today. This might be about the way the Buddha is depicted in art today, but perhaps it’s a more mystical question. Would you recognise a Buddha if you met one? Would a Buddha introduce themselves as such, or is it more like meeting an angel, an experience you only understand in retrospect?

“wittgenstein space”

I’ve no idea what this searcher was seeking. On first reading, it sounds like a sci-fi premise: Wittgenstein in Space! He analyses the grammar of scientific spaceship jargon! He meets a race of aliens who claim to have a private language! He threatens crewmate Karl Popper with laser-poker!

However, I did once give a paper in which I used Wittgensteinian ideas to explore the ways that we interact with space, specifically with the space inside a Skyspace. If you’re interested, you can listen to the whole piece at the Go Inside To Greet The Light website. It’s officially called ‘wordless thought’, but I’m not sure that’s what it’s really about!

“pagan brigid upg”

UPG, or Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis, is knowledge gained about a deity through a personal practice – meditation, prayer, divination, or similar. I’m fascinated by the processes and vocabulary which are growing up in the Pagan community around this, and especially by how they compare to Quaker processes for seeking and agreeing on ‘the will of God for us now’, but I haven’t yet written at length about them. Nor do I have particular UPG of my own about Brigid; in fact, I don’t especially feel the need of it, and one of the reasons I was drawn to Brigid in the early days of my Pagan exploration was that there’s enough material on her that it even appeared – a few mentions here and there – in my local library. For reviews of books and other resources about Brigid, I heartily recommend Brigit’s Sparkling Flame.

“brigid and the fox”

I see the confusion here! The Fox in my blog title refers to George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement. The story this search is looking for is about Brigid and an actual fox, or in some tellings a wolf: there’s a very short version here and a much longer one here. A charming tale about her power over nature, even if the fox does (usually) run away back to the woods at the end!

A is for Appropriation

An ethical issue which keeps appearing in my work is about appropriation: the taking of an object, word, or practice by a cultural group who did not create it. There are many areas of life in which appropriation is possible – cultural appropriate, artistic appropriation, musical appropriation – but I am mainly concerned about religious appropriation. When I wrote about appropriation before, I was writing from my perspective as a member of the Neo-Pagan community; now I want to talk about some of the complex situations I have considered since.

There are some cases which, I think, are widely agreed to be appropriation among those who agree that it exists. (There are, of course, people who don’t think that it exists as a concept, or who insist on distinguishing between appropriation and misappropriation, not accepting that it is all morally problematic. I am not discussing these perspectives in this post because I think that the facts that a) ideas move between cultures and b) sometimes the use of one culture’s idea by another culture is harmful to the first culture have been demonstrated elsewhere, including by evidence which I provided/linked to in my previous post.) For example, the wearing of ‘Native American headdresses’, a very specific piece of ritual kit used by some, and only some, Native American groups, as fashion accessories, obviously degrades and damages Native American cultures, not least by lumping them all together and, frequently, treating them as historical rather than owned and practised by living people.

One of the aspects of that case is the power imbalance between the Native American groups involved and the white Americans who are wearing headdresses as a fashion. The specific history of relations between these two cultures in that place has irrevocably shaped any cultural interchange which happens now. In other cases, the use of cultural material by another group is accepted, even encouraged, by the people from whom it is taken, and this kind of sharing can be advantageous: although it could be interpreted in other ways, recent reports about the popularity of Korean cultural products, especially music and TV shows, in China could be read as this kind of story (especially if it is the case that Korea’s cultural popularity has been instrumental in producing a trade deal which is advantageous for Korea). The popularity of some American cultural products worldwide is clearly good for the USA; but MacDonald’s channels money in a way that the worldwide sale of dream catchers, an originally Ojibwe sacred item which has been taken up, made and sold by many other people, both Native and non-Native, American and non-American, as a ‘New Age’ fashion accessory.

In religious appropriation, then, what are we talking about? Sometimes it will be the same thing: objects, food, music. Sometimes images appear in inappropriate places: Buddha as a tattoo, Kali on a toilet seat. Sometimes it will be practices: yoga might be the classic example of this. Sometimes words, ideas, or stories move between cultures: terms like ‘karma’, originally part of Hindu and Buddhist religions, now circulate freely and detached from their context in Western discourse. The latter is especially a problem if, like me, you think that  the meaning of words is derived from their use in particular contexts. (A blog post later this year will deal with this idea in more detail.) A pattern I observe among Quakers is a push to use words which prove how inclusive we are. Using ‘Allah’, for example, in a list of names of God alongside Spirit, Light, Christ, and maybe some from other cultures (Inner Buddha Nature, Tao, and Krishna all appear in real examples) probably does not so much reflect the presence of Muslim-Quaker dual belongers in the community (although there are a few around) as it reflects a desire to demonstrate willingness to respect the religion of a group much denigrated in British mass media at present. The desire comes from a place of goodwill; but whether a Muslim, or even an Arabic-speaking Christian who might also use the word ‘Allah’, would really agree that it belonged in that list is another question.

Christians have some specific tangles around this issue. Setting aside the appropriation from other cultures, people seeking resources for a change to their tradition often go back and look for forgotten materials in their own history to appropriate for new purposes. This can be very effective – Christian feminist work on medieval women mystics might be an example – although there is still a moral dimension to ensuring that the past is represented as accurately as possible. However, because the Christian past includes material which is Jewish, there is also the complexity of interactions between the cultures. Christian persecution of Jews, Christian failures to recognise how Judaism has changed since the time of Jesus, and Christian cultural power in many of the places where Jews now live are all features of this landscape. For those working in Christian traditions and seeking to interpret the Bible now, the Jewish context of the documents is vitally important – but some apparently obvious ways to use this are problematic appropriations. For example, Christians holding Seders – read about this from a Jewish, interfaith family, Lutheran, or Anglican perspective.

What should we do about appropriation? I think we need to be aware of it, to name it and discuss it both within our religious communities and when relevant topics come up in the course of interfaith work. When considering whether to use material from another religion, whether it’s a single word or a book or a practice, we need to ask questions like: What do I stand to gain? What is my real motive – showing respect for the tradition, desire for the exotic, proving the superiority of my understanding? If I do this, what impression will I give to those who see and hear me? What hidden lesson might I be teaching alongside the message I intend to impart? What potential for damage to people and the relationships between people does this have?

Personal spiritual practices

There’s been some discussion recently on the Quaker Renewal Facebook group about spiritual practices beyond Meeting for Worship. It’s focussed a bit on spiritual direction, of which I have no experience, but knowing that I find such accounts from other people interesting I thought I would share with you some of my spiritual practices – as they are at the moment; my experience is that these things can, do, and need to shift and change through time.

My core communal spiritual practice is Meeting for Worship, followed by Meeting for Worship for Business (which includes committee meetings, Meetings for Clearness, and other related Quaker processes). I’m also happy to participate in a variety of Neo-Pagan rituals, Buddhist and other meditation or chanting groups, Bible study, church services, other Quaker practices like Appleseed or Experiment with Light, and so forth, but these tend to come and go as the opportunity arises rather than being core to my practices – I enjoy them but I don’t particularly miss them if I don’t go.

Over the past year or so, my core solitary spiritual practice has been a short period of meditation in the morning – typically ten or fifteen minutes, using a handy timer on my phone. I use this for all sorts of things. Often, it will be a recognisably Pagan, often Druid, visualisation meditation – visiting my Sacred Grove in the inner world, for example, or exploring a landscape or symbolic image. At other times, I might use a set of words, such as a Pagan chant, song from Taize, or Buddhist mantra. Sometimes I hold a focus object which is significant to me at the time – a leaf, a stone, an ornament. Sometimes I do Experiment with Light, sometimes I focus on the breath or on listening, and sometimes I just lie there. This practice is core in the sense that I miss it if I don’t do it – it’s not always practical, but it does seem to be beneficial when I can manage it. It’s my practice, since it’s warm and comfortable, to do my meditation in the morning before I get out of bed. This doesn’t work if I’ve been woken by an alarm, as I’ll just go back to sleep, but if I’ve woken naturally because I’ve slept enough it’s in fact the time when my mind is most alert and I am least likely to drift off. This is clearly a quirk of biology and YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

I have, at other times, tried other practices. Sometimes I have found the need to have more tactile stuff going on in order to keep my mind on the practice – at the moment, a meditation bell set to ring every three minutes or so during the time is enough, but I have used music, poetry, incense, candles, lectio divina, various divination systems (such as runes, ogham, and oracle cards), and movement, at different times. I find Scott Cunningham’s book Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, John Pritchard’s book How to Pray: A Practical Handbook and Ginny Wall’s book Deepening the Life of the Spirit: Resources for Spiritual Practice to be useful, and go back to them when I feel stuck, although as you may have gathered from the rest of this post I also find inspiration in a lot of other places.

My other core practice, although it’s not as regular as morning meditation and weekly Meeting for Worship, is being outdoors. This can be walks in the countryside, strolls in the park, gardening, feeding the birds, tree-hugging, etc. It’s much more free-form, except when something arises from my meditation or my OBOD course which prompts me to something specific, but no less important for that.

Tree image from a recent walk.

Not to possess anything which should belong to others.

The Second Mindfulness Training says, among other things, that “I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others…”

Not stealing is, at least, reasonably obvious – if I take someone else’s belongings, I usually know, and if I do it by accident it generally becomes obvious once it’s drawn to my attention. Not possessing anything which should belong to others, though, gets trickier. Sometimes I do know that something in my possession should belong to someone else – if my grandmother gives me something which is actually my father’s, for example, I haven’t stolen it but it should belong to him, not me.

In broader terms, though, what of mine should belong to others? What do I have which would be more use to someone else, or improve their life more than it does mine? Do I have a right to keep useful things in storage for when I want them, or should I pass them on and rely on finding another when I need one? With books, I find it fairly easy to conceptualise the second-hand market as a kind of library; I keep books to which I refer, or which I think I’ll read or consult again, and pass on those where I currently foresee no use for them in my life, reasoning that if the need does occur I’ll buy or borrow another copy. A handful of very rare books might stump this system, and I do keep a few just for being unusual, but my experience so far has been that this works (and that it’s actually very rare that I want a book I passed on – Stig of the Dump is the only example which comes to mind over perhaps ten years of running my book collection like this).

Somehow, I haven’t managed to conceptualise other things like this. My kitchenware, for example, is currently sitting unused in boxes in a spare room. I’m sure it could be useful to other people; but I’m keeping it, as a collection, planning to one day use it again myself.

Numbers as Toxins: living qualitatively not quantitatively

A line in the last of the Five Mindfulness Trainings says, “I am determined not to gamble, or to use alcohol, drugs, or any other products which contain toxins, such as certain websites, electronic games, TV programs, films, magazines, books, and conversations.” I discuss these every month with Stephanie, whose thoughts on the process you can read on her blog, and we quite often end up discussing this line. What counts as a toxin?

Previously, we have identified certain kinds of always-negative talk about people as a problem (the thing where you complain about a colleague or a child you volunteer with and never have anything good to say about them, for example), and some kinds of celebrity talk and advertising (film posters which only tell you which actors appear and not anything about the plot, or even the genre, of the movie, for example), and talk about weight and diet which adds moralising to actually-neutral choices (‘Cake?’ ‘Oh, I shouldn’t…’ ‘I’ll be naughty…’/ ‘You’re vegan and teetotal? Do you have any vices left?’ and so forth).

More broadly, I am considering the possibility that living life by numbers is a toxin. I don’t mean that numbers are themselves toxic, they’re a useful tool for measuring things if often arbitrary; but rather that, in quantifying everything, we can get trapped in living by the numbers – in particular, trying to reach a certain number of something – rather than appreciating the quality. I am therefore experimenting with ignoring any numbers and making judgements on other grounds.

An obvious example is my body. I don’t know what I weigh, and I don’t much care; I’m not worried about how much body I have, but rather I want to be comfortable in it. I don’t count calories or weight-watchers points or anything else. I have cake if I want it and not if I don’t. I try not to clock-watch for meals; I eat when I’m hungry and not when I’m not. (Actually, I happen to live in a body which is quite predictable in this regard, and I can tell friends when I’m likely to want to eat and plan to meet them for a meal then, which is handy. I know that not everyone can do this.) I let doctors take my blood pressure but I make no attempt to know what it is – when it’s too low I get dizzy and that tells me what I need to know without worrying about a number.

Similarly, I have abandoned alarm clocks for all but the most important occasions or really unusually early starts. I have the good fortune to live a life in which this is easy, and a very predictable body which wakes at much the same time every day – and a fairly socially acceptable one, to boot. (Socially acceptable among workers and the middle-aged, that is, I stuck out like a sore thumb in a university hall of residence with my bed-at-9pm up-at-7am thing.) I know that I need more sleep than much of my peer group, but I am trying to give up counting it in hours. Who cares? I need what I need, and I’ll wake up when I’ve slept enough.

I do get sucked into job hunting by the numbers, sometimes. If there are x applicants for every job, I should get an interview every y applications, and they interview z people, so I need this many interviews to get a job… Only b in c people with such-and-such a qualification get this-or-that kind of work, so my chances are… This is completely foolish, of course, job hunting and interviewing don’t really work this way anyway. I am looking for the right job for me, and employers are looking for the right candidate for them, and the number of previous applications I have done affects this not at all. It’s tempting, though, because when I’m job hunting the whole exercise seems terrifying and humiliating and it is mostly if not completely outside my control. Trying to predict the outcome is a way of trying to assert a tiny amount of control and to assure myself that the process is not an endless torture but will, eventually, have an outcome.

Another area in which I can sometimes be trapped by the numbers is money. Money is a useful number, and I can’t see a way to give it up entirely. (Likewise, I think I will always need to start with numbers when buying shoes, for example, and baking cakes – although I reject the idea that you need to use numbers for bread dough, which can be done by feel.) However, I think it’s possible to get trapped into tiny numbers, worrying about pennies when spending hundreds of pounds. I try to make sure things are within a reasonable price range – this should be less than £5, that should be less than £50 – but to let myself shop for ethics and convenience within that range. This approach might not work for everyone. The advantage for me is that I can let many choices be made for quality instead – I can buy organic vegetables, I can take a bus when I need to and not worry about it – and because I have reasonably cheap vices, and a reasonable income, I don’t need to get bogged down in justifying every choice to my mean-angry-thrifty internal voice who objects to spending anything ever.

Other areas of life I have identified as ruled by numbers include time management, word counts for writing, and everything which involves making a list on a computer (to-do lists, wish lists, X Things You’ve Never Believe/Remember/Care About lists). I am still debating the extent to which these numbers are useful tools and to what extent they create a tyranny of targets.