Why I Don't Care for Wearing Name Tags in Meeting

Strange, I know. Wearing name tags in Meeting is one of those Quaker traditions hard to shake- even though it's not particularly traditional as all, as far as my extensive investigations reveal.

It is also a custom so petty that it's questionable why I'm bothered by it at all. But I am. Granted I'm not routinely concerned about it. On a scale of 1-10 of Great Quaker Issues, this rates probably a 2-3, barely beating out the eternal Rug Debate (bare hardwood floors or tasteful area rugs in the meeting house?) and ranking far, far under things like NEYM's relationship to FUM (I am SO not going there today). But occasionally the Name Tag Affair gets to me- like today.

The point of a name tag, of course, is to be friendly towards outsiders, to help everyone get to know each other, and to promote a sense of community. I'm afraid that for me, it doesn't really do any of the above.

I want people to have to ask me my name. I want that initial interaction. If I've forgotten a name that I should know, I want to be humble enough to ask! Conversely, if someone has forgotten my name, I want them to come up to me and ask (or at least ask the person on the bench next to them). More community is formed from these simple social niceties than is ever created by wearing tags.

I don't want the artificial familiarity that name tags create. I don't want someone to come up and call me by name when we have not met- I find this very uncomfortable. I want to be approached and asked for my name. Names, I believe, are a gift, always to be politely asked for and graciously given (or not given, depending on the circumstance!) . Name tags, I feel, make it too easy for us to pretend to know each other.

A practice intended to make visitors feel welcome does, I feel, just the opposite. If I walk into a room and everyone is wearing name tags but me, I feel like I am intruding upon a strange fraternity. It's almost more awkward when I, the visitor to this group, am asked to make one myself. More than once, in fact, I have been approached by a friendly greeter who skips right over introducing herself and asking my name- in favor of asking me to make a name tag! How backwards is that?

In a true community, everyone knows everyone else (more or less) by name. This much is true. But it doesn't make our Quaker meetings any better of a community by faking it! I've noticed that more traditional denominations- the Baptists, the Catholics, the Seventh Day Adventists- would never dream of asking all their congregates to wear name tags. And yet, their sense of community does not seem in suffer. And visitors certainly don't hesitate to come- aren't the Baptists one of the fastest-growing denominations in America?

Perhaps, instead of wearing name tags, we could make a greater effort to reach out to one another. Perhaps, instead of huddling with our particular friends after Meeting (and I'm guilty of this one, too!) we could approach someone we don't know as well. I'd like to see more fellowship in my Meeting, absolutely. In fact, I think that a lack of fellowship a 10/10 on the scale of Great Quaker Issues. I'm just not sure if we're going about it in the right ways (and something tells me that NEYM cutting itself off from FUM isn't the right way to go about it, either . . . but, wait! Not going there!).

A Ministry of Food

I love to cook. I feel like feeding everyone who comes into my life is a ministry, one I often feel called to. Sometimes it is not only a pleasure and a ministry, but a delightful adventure, the latest of which I will now share.

The Meeting I currently attend has 'hospitality' every week- a light spread of snacks for everyone to nibble. Love of cooking or not, I had avoided volunteering for a week, because I am often overwhelmed with other responsibilities. This past First Day, however, was a business meeting, when a heavier lunch is provided. And I volunteered.

Now, I cooked for 75 at my wedding (with generous help with many friends) and I love to take on projects, as mentioned above. So, 7th day evening, I set out to make a half-dozen spinach feta pies- a delicious cross between quiche and spanakopita.

Shopping for this endeavor was an endeavor in itself. I got hilarious looks from the deli manager when I asked for four pounds of feta cheese- just for instance. But I got it all home (including six pre-made pie crusts), mixed it all up in a 2 1/2 gallon stockpot, poured it into the pie shells, and cooked off six 9-inch quiches over the course of two hours (they had to go into my oven in shifts). Rob and I ate half of one for dinner 7th day night, and gave the other half to our landlord and lady. Four pies went to Meeting the next day. Two were utterly consumed, and the other two were wrapped and popped into the Meeting freezer, to be saved for a needy member. The last pie we split yesterday evening with two friends, a big salad, and a bottle of fine wine. It all came out beautifully. Next time I'll make my own pie crust, as well.

I love cooking on the grand scale even more than I love cooking for me and my husband alone. I love buying ingredients by the pound. I love improvising the tools of an industrial kitchen in my tiny apartment kitchen. But mostly I love how many people I can reach. I love being able to feed everyone in my Meeting, all at once. I give to charities and all of that, but I'm afraid I'm a rather literal-minded Quaker, and I like the immediacy of this sort of feeding the hungry.

I've volunteered to cook dinner at Quarterly Meeting, hosted by my Meeting this 12th month, and I am already excitedly planning the meal. Updates to follow, I hope.

Recipe for Spinach-Feta Spanakopita-Quiches, adapted from Moosewood.

6 nine-inch pie crusts (bought or made)
Two heads hard-neck garlic (or 10-12 large cloves softneck).
2 1/2 pounds yellow onions.
2 pounds frozen spinach (or somewhat more fresh).
2 dozen eggs, plus one.
2 1/2 pounds Ricotta cheese (you could substitute grated Swiss for part of this measure- I will next time I make the recipe).
4 pounds Feta cheese, crumbled.
2-4 ounces fresh dill, depending how dilly you like things (I used 4 and it was a bit much).
Salt and Pepper to taste.
Olive oil for sauteing.

Preheat the oven to 350. Thaw the spinach, or cook it if needed. Drain well.

Saute the onions and garlic together with the olive oil in the bottom of a large stock pot, until the onions are translucent but not browned. Remove from heat. Beat in the eggs, followed by the remaining ingredients. If using Swiss, reserve 3 cups at this point for sprinkling on top of the pies.

The batter should be quite thick, more scoopable than pourable. Divide among the six pie dishes, right up to the brim. Top with 1/2 cup of Swiss per pie, if desired. Bake for one hour at 350. Remove, and let set for one hour before serving. Serves 36-48, depending on slice size and what else people are eating!

Enjoy! Feed the world!

Well, so much for posting every week . . .

. . . round two! I have been inspired to write again by my dear friend Amanda (of the best stuff, but plain and/or cracked).

This post has nothing to do with you, m'dear, but I wouldn't have posted at all if we hadn't talked last night.

So a few weeks ago (well, weeks ago when I wrote up this post in my word doc; a few months now) I went to an interfaith panel discussion at my college. There were a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew all answering questions about faith and secularism in the modern world. The Muslim's first name was Fez. Even among a panel of academics, he was remarkably articulate, and something he said very much stuck with me. He said that in Islam there is a theological division made between those who follow God for their own reasons (wanting to go to heaven, for example), and those who follow God with no thought of reward, but only for love. He then said that he personally does not like to make this distinction, because it results in too much judging.

I, on the other hand, was thinking how much I wished Christianity made this distinction. I remember a number of months at all, in my ecumenical Bible study which I have mentioned in numerous other essays, I mentioned that my reasons for being a Christian had nothing to do with my salvation at all. I received looks as if I had three heads. It seemed to be the feel of the room that if I was not focused on my salvation, I was missing what Christianity was about.

I don't want to pretend to be more spiritually advanced than anyone else. I wish that we made this distinction in Christianity because I want more ways of looking at faith to be more widely accepted. Maybe the right way IS to be totally focused on one's own salvation (I doubt it, but it's possible), but I wish that, especially among more conservative strains of my religion, other possibilities were acknowledged. I can't quite express how liberating it felt to have someone else, even someone of a different faith, express these different ways of approaching religion. Mmm.

Graduate school and convicting verses

Before I start in on religion, a bit of personal news: I have been accepted to graduate school! I was initially wait-listed, and very disappointed, but on Tuesday I received word that a place has opened up, and I am in! School starts in the fall. I call it grad school, but really it is an odd chimera of grad school, nursing school, and med school. I've been accepted into a program which takes folks like me, who have a bachelor's degree and no nursing background, and in a few years (four or five, I think) turns them into Nurse Practitioners. For the unenlightened, a Nurse Practitioner is rather like a doctor: she can prescribe medication, practice independently (depending on the state), and function as the primary health care practitioner for any individual. From what I understand after talking to a number of health care practitioners, the biggest different between an NP and an MD is the nature of the training; an NP's training is more patient-focused and an MD's training is more disease-focused. If one is interested in pursuing a specialty, an MD is the way to go, but for someone like me, whose goal in life is to work as a general practitioner with the rural poor, being an NP is just the thing. Needless to say, I am amazingly, overwhelmingly excited and pleased, and will probably be rambling on about this at regular intervals, especially after school starts up (school! yes!).

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The greatest impediment to my writing regularly about faith (or anything, really) is that I have so very many ideas that I can never choose which one to write about. Each one looks better than the next, and so like the old man in one of my favorite children's books (Hundreds of cats! Thousands of cats! Millions and billions and trillions of cats!), I never can leave one behind, and therefore become absolutely overwhelmed with the effort.

For now, though, I'd like to offer up a Bible verse that's been kicking around in my head.

Matthew 5:21-22: You have heard that our forefathers were told, “Do not commit murder; anyone who commits murder must be brought to justice.” But what I tell you is this: Anyone who nurses anger against his brother must be brought to justice. Whoever calls his brother “good for nothing” deserves the sentence of the court; whoever calls him “fool” deserves hellfire.

There was a bit of a discussion about these verses in my ecumenical (and sometimes acrimonious) Bible study a few weeks back. Some of us have been eternally puzzled by these verses, especially those of us with siblings. Jesus never seemed to be above some righteous name-calling; he certainly called the scribes and Pharisees a lot worse things than 'fool,' especially around the times when he was hurling tables and laying about with a whip. And surely, calling someone a fool in a moment of anger is not nearly as bad as murder.

So why these verses? Is it a case of 'do what I say, not what I do, because I'm the Son of God?'

I wasn't able to articulate it at the time, but eventually I came up with this, and I'd really like to hear from the Biblical scholars out there whether you think I'm on the right track.

I think these verses aren't referring toangrily calling your little sister a fool when she drives your car into a ditch, but rather about the utter dismissal of another human being that we can all be prone to when we disagree with someone very deeply. This verse convicted me because it is something I catch myself doing, and that I see uncomfortably often in my happy liberal community. I'll use George Bush as an example, as he's very convenient. I'll be the first to admit that I disagree with George Bush on almost any point of politics that you care to name. Yet it can't be very charitable of me when I sneer at his voice on the radio, or roll my eyes and mutter 'that idiot' every time I read a quote, without giving him even the chance to make himself heard.

There's a certain awful dismissal that one can give to another person, the message: you are entirely worthless, a fool, and nothing you say has any importance at all. In a very real way, I think this dismissal is comparable to murder. I might not be harming our president by my dismissal of him, but if I dismiss someone more intimately connected to me, the harm is very real indeed. Oh dear.

I have returned from Hiatus

Back from long and semi-intentional hiatus.

Over the past year, I have:

Graduated from college.

Moved to a small cabin in the woods without electricity or running water partially as en exercise in simplicity (soon to be over; in two weeks I am moving to a small cabin in the woods with electricity and running water).

Found a full-time job working at a worker owned wool mill.

Applied and been rejected to graduate school in nursing.

Joined Volunteer Fire and Rescue in my small town.

Spent a year teaching First-Day-School to teenagers- to be repeated next year!


When I first started this blog, I tried never to post unless I felt truly moved. I am now, instead, going to undertake an experiment. I would like to post at least briefly every weekend, moved or not. The exercise in writing is important to me, as I miss the intellectual pressure of academia.

If anyone is still reading, please stay tuned! More to follow.

Prayer

When my friend stands next to me and says, “I’ll pray for you,” I do not know what to think. I have a slight head cold. I am on the last day of my cold, the day where you feel more or less better but your voice is gravelly and you’re blowing your nose at every opportunity. I do not think I need to be prayed for, not for this. “I’m mostly better,” I say. “I’ll pray for you anyway,” he says.

I believe in prayer. I am not sure when this happened. I used to look at headlines in magazines that said things like “Prayer Study Shows No Effect on Health,” and feel slightly smug. Four years later, I look at those same headlines and feel exasperated. Clearly, I think, someone is missing the point.

I believe in prayer, but when B. stands next to me and says “I’ll pray for you,” for the moment all I can feel is a desire that he’d pray for someone else, or at least over some other part of my life. It’s not that I don’t want to be prayed for. When I’m breaking up with my boyfriend, when my grandfather is in the hospital, when I’ve just lost my job, when I am furious with God and can’t pray myself, at these times I want to be prayed for. In the middle of the night, when a loved one was frighteningly late returning from a journey, I have called this same friend and begged him to pray.

Prayer is not a panacea as far as I am concerned, and perhaps this why I do not wish B. to pray over my cold. This is also why I roll my eyes at those newspaper headlines. Whether prayer is statistically significant is simply not a factor I find worth considering.

I know a little child who was molested. The day I found out, I came home almost in tears and furious. I couldn’t decide what to be angry at: the human who did the molesting, or the society that could breed such an evil, the bureaucracy that prevented me from doing much of anything besides report it and hope someone somewhere would do their job, myself for being helpless, or God for bloody everything. I settled on a blend among all of these things, but mostly I was angry at God. This was a child whom I cared for, whom I loved, even- whom I had prayed for.

More or less, I manage to not be furious at God for hurricanes and cancer and earthquakes and AIDS. I believe in the will of God, but I do not believe that the will of God involves a perfect fairyland with no death. I believe in the will of God as a great Pattern of which death is an inextricable part. That death is necessary for life is something that any neo-pagan or oncologist can tell you. I can accept death as part of the will of God. But I rage because while I believe death to be part of the will of God, evil never is. I can accept lightning strikes, but not child molesters.

Why? Because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God has jurisdiction in the providences of the human heart, and very much I want her to step in and say, “Whoa now, Adolf, maybe you better be thinking less about scapegoats and more about good economic incentives to get the German economy up and running . . .”

At the same time, I recognize (however sulkily) that we must invite God into our hearts, because if she could interfere in our choices without our permission, life would be pretty much meaningless.

I live right next door to the hospital, and I hear the sirens go by at all hours. The sirens are my muezzin; they call me always to prayer. I pray that the medics are strong and do their job well, and can sleep that night without regrets. I pray that their patient feels safe and cared for and loved. I pray that the patient’s family is loved, and that if their loved one dies, that everyone else will bring casseroles. I pray for all of these things because I believe that any act of pure love is an expression of the will of God. If God wills a person to die, she also wills them to die while being cared for and loved.

I do not know if God will always act to save a person’s life, but my faith tells me that she will always act to surround them with love. Even as I believe God cannot enter us without our permission, I also believe that no matter how tightly locked the gates, she can stand outside of them and whisper. I imagine her whispering to the medics, whispering to the terrified patient, whispering to the grieving family, and whispering to all their friends so they bring lots of casseroles. And if one chooses to let her in, she can do much more than whisper.

Love is the essence of God, and this, in the end, is how I explain my prayer to my more skeptical friends, the ones who don’t offer to pray for me when I have a cold. If God is real, then my prayer, an act of love, invokes God, the greatest love of all. But even if God doesn’t exist or doesn’t care, my prayer is still an act of love. And an act of love never goes amiss. Even if no ears hear it, even if no God responds, I have exercised my soul to love just a little better. Love, I find, takes practice; it is not simply an emotion one has. Prayer stretches my capacity to love. When I pray regularly, I find it that much easier to forgive, to hold my sharp tongue, to take the time to make casserole.

I believe any act of love to be an act of prayer. Children teach this to me best. “She hit me!” says one small child. “I know,” I say. “But it was an accident, and she said she was sorry, and look, she’s almost crying. She really is sorry. When someone hurts you, and then is truly sorry, it is your turn to forgive them.” The small child says, “My mother says- sorry isn’t enough!” I look at them and say, “Sometimes when you’re sorry for something, you also need to do a little of work to make it right, like if you spill milk you need to help clean it up. But really and truly, if your friend hurts you and then is sorry, it must be enough. It is enough.”

Maybe this is lying, because I know that there will be times in these children’s lives when sorry isn’t enough, times when they will beg forgiveness and not receive it. But my reassurance to them is a prayer- that they will be lucky, that they will be forgiven.

And here I am back next to my friend, who has offered to pray for my cold, even though I didn’t want him to pray over it. I didn’t want it because I don’t see my cold as against the will of God, but also because I cannot bear to believe that B.’s prayer would cause God to cure my cold, or that my prayer will cure the person in the ambulance. If I believed that, I would have to ask myself why God is not busy curing more important things: like child molestation. Like hurricanes. Like cancer. I do not have enough faith to do this. Perhaps B. does, and I am envious.

I am standing here because B. showed up at my door and said he didn’t have a way to get home and I said “I’ll drive you,” before he had the chance to ask. That act was my prayer for him, and he accepted it for what it was. So now here I am in his driveway, and with thanks I accept his prayer for me and my cold, because no matter my opinions about the will of God for the rhinovirus, his prayer for me is an act of love and, therefore, an expression of the will of God.

Bible Squee

Translations and commentaries are important to me no matter what I'm reading, and I'm oh-so-picky.

Odyssy and Iliad: Robert Fagles.
Shakespeare: The Arden editions, period, and Harold Bloom commentary. (Harold Bloom commentary makes anything worth reading. It's like marinara sauce. Add it, and I'll eat anything).
Tao Te Ching: Witter Bynner or Stephen Mitchell (I also like Stephen Mitchell's Rumi)
Sherlock Holmes: I have the nine-volume hardcover annotated Oxford edition.
Darwin: still torn between the Wilson and Watson commentaries.

I get very excited about nifty editions of the Bible. Today I dug up a 1966 Jerusalem Bible at my parents' house, which they let me keep.

The Jerusalem Bible was translated by Dominican monks in the first half of the 20th century. They tried to be relatively literal, yet write in 'modern' English, yet stay true to the flavor of each book. Thus the Psalms read like songs, the Epistles read like letters, etc. It's a single-column Bible, which I prefer, and it's not a red-letter Bible (I hate red-letter Bibles). It's a Catholic Bible, which also pleases me, and the books of the Apocrypha are in their proper places, not squished between the Old and New Testaments. There's a fairly substantial essay of commentary before each book, as well as extensive discursive footnotes at the bottom of each right-hand page. The verse numbers are in the inside margins, not in the text, which makes everything flow better. Plus, just as the corners of a page in a dictionary reference the first and last words found therein, the chapter and verse are referenced here.

I'm most excited about the outside margins. They contain what is essentially a running concordance- alongside each line of text are the citations for verses which allude to/refer back to/are parallel to the verse in question. This is wonderful. When a verse is directly quoting another verse, it's placed in italics. Even better.

The language of this translation is spare and elegant. Yes, it's a modern translation, and the Psalms sound nothing like the KJV, but it's not flat and ugly like so many of the 'contemporary' Bibles out there. Yay.

And the icing on the cake? Well, I have an affection for the KJV because so many writers of the time came together to complete it, and it's suspected Shakespeare was among them. You know who was a major contributor to the Jerusalem Bible?

J.R.R. Tolkien.

Oh, yes. Oh yes indeed.