OK, so let's get started. I remember the day in 1986 when I stood up before a fresh class of Friends Academy (Locust Valley, NY) 7th graders and started to teach Quakerism for the first time. And since the early Friends writings that had been so critical to me in returning to Christ were so inaccessible to young readers, I decided to just use the biblical narrative to introduce them to Quakerism. We started talking about the Bible as if it were just another book you would take off the shelf,…

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Being from Brooklyn, I came to manure late in life.  By that I mean in my 30's when I started reading Organic Gardening magazine.  Free is good, I thought.  So at first I picked up some free manure from a local horse owner.  Good stuff but along with my tomatoes were an awful lot of weeds.  There had to be something better and off I went to the local nursery where it wasn't free but it was close to dirt cheap.  And it was sterilized - no weeds, no hay!

A few years ago when I first…

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I for one do not find the cuts in staffing to be in the best interests of thelocal meetings and their members. This what I thought made up a Yearly Meeting, When I came from the Midwest, Ohio, I was surprised to hear the yearly meeting staff at 1515 Cherry being referred to as the yearly meeting. There are at least three different things called Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, staff, Annual Session, and Members of local meetings affiliated as PYM. The staff has grown beyond what is necessary for… Continue

Recently, I've had the gift of giving a fair amount of ministry on First Days. This seems to be a new chapter in my spiritual life - I don't assume it is going to last, but I am enjoying it (mostly). The ministries often combine prose, poetry and singing. At the request of several friends I've started recording them into poetry-format (not the same as what is actually coming out), and thought I would post some of them here.... among other musings. 

 

I know little about…

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This is part three of a four part review of Glen Retief‘s memoir, The Jack Bank, A Memoir of a South African Childhood. (275 pages, St. Martin’s Press)  Here are reviews (with gorgeous quotes!) Part One–A child takes on his world and Part… Continue

Last night, in memory of a Friend who died suddenly, shockingly earlier in the week, we held a small Memorial Service for those who knew him best.  One Friend in attendance noted that, in addition to the worship, there is a certain group therapy aspect present.  I…

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Yesterday I wrote the first of a four part review of Glen Retief’s The Jack Bank, A Memoir of a South African Childhood, and shared an excerpt about the shadowy sense of privilege the author sensed as a child, but could not name.…

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Jazzed up on my performance enhancement drug of choice (Trung Nguyen Vietnamese coffee brewed in my Bialetti Italian stove top espresso maker) I begin a four-part review of Glen Retief's new book, The Jack Bank, A Memoir of a South African Childhood.

[Full Disclosure: I have slept with the author. In…

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Quakers made the front page of the New York Times last Friday.

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I was reading Ashley W's short post about what she perceived as a generation gap between her and the older members of her meeting.  The topic seemed familiar but being a 70 year old convinced Quaker I knew it wasn't age alone that she was running into but something more problematical.

In the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Luke, starting at the 6th verse, Jesus tells the story of a…

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Well folks . . . just when  life gets back to normal . . .  another heretic has popped up.  And we have reports that the new kid is a first cousin to the bug eater.   Now the new kid is crazier than his cousin  . . . because our sources tell us the new kid is preaching the same heretical nonsense about making a straight road to God.  What is in the water that these people are drinking?

 

We have done a back round check…

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I won two of my senior class category  polls in a class of 185 students.  I was the winner of the shortest male student and the shyest.  And the fact of the matter was I was not the shortest and I was not the shyest.   Another student in my class was the shyest . . . he would never talk to anyone . . . the reason that I won the student poll was . . . I had red hair.  I could not hide.   I weighed 102 lbs. at graduation.

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I am a middle school teacher. Our lives as teachers are models, whether we want them to be or not. The children notice everything about us. They even notice the things we don't notice about ourselves. Their gaze is like cold, clear water that washes away the self-created fictions of adults and bares us for exactly who we are. They assess us from eaves to foundation. It can be soul-crushing, as anyone who has been on the receiving end of a 13-year old girl's sarcasm knows. The only…

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