Transitions

Google image from my grandfather's birthplace in IrelandFor years my husband and I felt that we’d like a bigger house and garden, but we pushed those feelings aside in the name of simplicity and loyalty to our neighbors, whom we love. But this spring several things happened that shifted our assumptions. First, our neighbors had a baby, which means that with two other children, they are feeling even more cramped than we are in a three-bedroom, one bath rowhouse. Through a series of conversations and a few house hunting trips, it became clear that we were entering a new phase when expanding a bit felt right, rather than extravagant. Since we’ve settled on a high school for our daughter and are excited about the fact that she’ll be able to walk to school next year, we are clear that we’d want to stay in the same neighborhood, if we do move, which made the prospect of looking much simpler.

Long story short—we have an agreement on a house, but it is a short sale, which makes it complicated and unpredictable, so it would be overly optimistic to go so far as to say, “We’re moving.” Still, I’m an optimist by nature, so I’m starting to go through bookshelves and boxes looking for things we can pass on rather than haul with us. It was overdue anyway and worthwhile, even if the deal falls through.

I’m also in work transition. This Saturday is the last event I have scheduled to publicize The Wisdom to Know the Difference. Although I still want to help readers find the book, for the past few months most of my writing energy has been going into a new project that is gradually growing in my Word document into something that feels like a new book.

It feels like God is at work in all this (as well as in the changes in our two growing children) and I feel exceedingly grateful, though not at all certain about what the next year will look like. It feels like we’ve been given a compass and a shove, rather than Mapquest directions, but that’s OK. A compass and a shove are all most people get.

Recently a friend sent me this story, which feels relevant, though I can’t authenticate or credit it:

"When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at 'the house of the dying' in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life.  On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa.  She asked, "And what can I do for you?"  Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.

"What do you want me to pray for?" she asked.  He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: "Pray that I will have clarity."

She said firmly, "No, I will not do that."  When he asked her why, she said, "Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of."  When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, "I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust.  So I will pray that you trust God."

Family Secrets

Tomorrow will be the sixth Mother’s Day that involves visiting my mother’s grave, rather than cooking for her. It comes at a time when I’ve been thinking about my ancestors, her family in particular, and boy have I got some questions. I had always wanted to learn more about my roots, so when a little time opened up this spring, I went down to the basement and dug up the family tree started by a man I had never heard of. It turns out he’s my 76 year-old second cousin, with whom I’m now in email contact.

The tree follows the descendants of Patrick McEnroe and Rose Brady, who married in 1846 during the Irish Potato Famine and had five children before Patrick died at age 30. My cousin’s notes say that Patrick’s brother Cornelius helped Rose to raise the children, one of whom was my great grandfather, James, who married a woman named Ellen Clarke. James and Ellen had nine children, five of whom emigrated to the United States, including my mother’s mother, Margaret McEnroe, who according to the Ellis Island records arrived in 1898 with $7.20 and the plan of becoming a servant in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. 

There a many free records on the Internet (including Ellis Island’s), so I started supplementing the dry names and dates on the family tree with whatever details I could find online. It was confusing because all the McEnroes named their sons Patrick and John, with the occasional Cornelius and James, and they all seemed to come from the same country in Ireland, which saw a fifty per cent drop in population during these years from a combination of starvation, disease, and emigration, much of it involuntary since landlords used the famine as an excuse to evict their poor tenants. When we were in Ireland, I learned that the place my grandmother was from is no longer on the map because the village was wiped away in the 1840s. Ever since, I’ve been wondering what it’s like to come from somewhere that was so decimated in your parents’ lifetime. What ghosts lurk there? 

I had also heard a story about my grandmother Margaret that never quite made sense: according to my mother, her mother’s family had gone to visit cousins when Margaret was about three. There was a big storm, and they didn’t want to travel with a little one, so they left her there. She liked it, so she stayed—until she was 17 and got on the boat alone to America. I always thought there was something missing in this story, some secret buried in it. I haven’t been able to find out whom Margaret was living with, since many of the 19^th century Irish census records were lost, but I did find another bit of interesting information. According to the 1901 Irish census, my great grandmother Ellen was a “lunatic.”

I can’t help thinking it’s because she had nine children in what by 1911 was a three-room house (It may have been smaller earlier). Of course, she didn’t mind if one went to live with cousins, though I can’t imagine what it would be like to watch five of them emigrate across the Atlantic. Interestingly, Ellen is not listed as a “lunatic” on the 1911 census, though a few years later her youngest child, also named Ellen, committed suicide at age 19. Ellen senior died six months later. 

What I’m wondering this Mother’s Day weekend is, What did my mother know, and when did she know it? She never talked about her mother’s parents, though she told my second cousin that she had the impression her grandfather James was “severe.” Did my mother know her aunt had killed herself or that her grandmother was…suffering from something? And whether she knew it or not, what did these women pass down to me from a family history that must have contained trauma? It puts a different spin on my decision to become a Quaker, since the Quakers were known as the only English group that truly helped the Irish during the famine. It’s also strange that I ended up a member of the meeting in Chestnut Hill, the neighborhood where my grandmother came to be a servant.

I’m not quite sure what any of this has to do with my spiritual growth, but I sense there is something. I’ve been moved by the various ways I can view my family tree on the computer program where I’ve now entered people from both sides of my family. I can view them as a chart, a circle or as the mobile to the left, which highlights Patrick McEnroe. It makes me feel connected—not just to my own ancestors, but to everyone in the world, as this web expands further and further the more names I enter.

Next weekend I’m looking forward to attending Amanda Kemp’s Pendle Hill workshop, The Ancestors Are Calling You.” Maybe they have some answers for me. 

Flower Show Protest

Thanks to Ingrid Lakey since my photos won't loadAll last week I felt a strong urge to go to the Philadelphia Flower Show—an extravagance I might have hesitated to write about after Jeanne's post on middle class Quakers making others uncomfortable by talking about things they can’t afford, except that my being there and writing about it ended up feeling so right.

At first I wasn’t sure why I was there. It was a mob scene, not at all the peaceful taste of spring I was seeking. But then I passed two Quaker friends who were acting slightly furtive and realized that the Earth Quaker Action Team was planning civil disobedience in twenty minutes, just enough time for me to see the Bonsai exhibit and a few other favorites before coming back to support my friends. “Pray for us,” one requested, “and leave if they tell you to.”

It made sense that they were there. For seven months EQAT has been engaged in a non-violent campaign to pressure PNC to stop funding mountain-top removal, the devastating practice of blowing up mountains to get coal. PNC, which promotes itself as a green bank despite having been the biggest funder of mountain-top removal, has taken some steps in the right direction, but they haven’t stopped financing all the companies that engage in the practice, which is the first of EQAT’s challenges.

PNC is also one of the major sponsors of the Philadelphia Flower Show, which presented an irresistible opportunity for EQAT to set up a “crime scene” in front of a PNC display and sing, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” while the security people scrambled to figure out what to do with them. My favorite moment was when they brought some jazz musicians to play in front of the protest, but quickly realized that it was bringing more attention to the protesters, who pledged to stay until PNC Regional President J. William Mills came down to the Flower Show and took responsibility for his bank’s actions.

While those willing to be arrested if necessary stood in a line surrounded by security people in suits, those who came to support them chatted with the crowd about what was going on and why. I joined in and was pleased to see that most people who paused were supportive, or at least interested in learning about the issue. Only one woman said to me disapprovingly, “Some of us come to the Flower Show to have a good time!” which it later occurred to me was probably true of many white people who frequented the Woolworth lunch counters in the 1950s, only to be inconvenienced by students protesting segregation.

The interesting thing for me was to observe how good a time I had. I was suddenly grateful that three different friends turned down my invitation to the Flower Show because it meant I was free to stay and chat with some of the other Quakers I knew who had come as supporters. My years as a canvasser made me at ease giving strangers a two-sentence pitch, and knowing that I’d write about it afterwards confirmed my sense of purpose.

In the end, Mills didn’t show, and the police didn’t arrest anyone. Instead Convention Center Security escorted out nine EQAT members, who succeeded in getting some local news coverage and raising some awareness about the issue. For me, it was the most expensive protest I’ve ever attended, but also the most meaningful Flower Show.

Me and My Middle Class Taxes

I tried to post a long comment in response to Liz's comment on my last blog post as well as her spouse Jeanne's blog post that referenced it, but putting several links in a comment did not go well, so I'll just make this a new post.

I agree with what I understand to be Jeanne and Liz's major points: 1) From Jeanne, that many Quakers carry middle class assumptions that we are unaware of, and so we are unaware of how they make people who are not middle class uncomfortable. I think it's a fair point and while it's not fun to be made a public example of our failings, I appreciate having that blind spot illuminated in the hope that I'll be more sensitive to it in the future. Of course, I will continue to be a middle class person who writes about her personal experiences on her blog, but I do believe we can share our own experiences in ways that do not necessarily negate or dismiss the experiences of others. 

2) Liz points out that the tax system is unfair and that itemizing deductions is "a rich person's problem" and that we should be thinking more about those who are suffering and less about taking advantage of our own class privilege. Also true overall. Perhaps I should have realized that in the current political climate talking about taking tax deductions would make me sound like a Tea Party tax basher.

In fact, I believe in paying taxes, as I've written before, though I confess that I am happier paying my state and local taxes than I am my federal taxes, more than half of which go to the military and wars that I believe are immoral. After some discussions in our meeting a few years ago about war tax resistance, I decided to pay more attention to ways that I could reduce my contributions to these wars, while also increasing my charitable contributions. I have also tried the advice of one Friend who pays extra on her city tax, both increasing the amount she is paying toward local human needs and decreasing the amount she contributes to the military, since local taxes can be deducted on your federal returns (if you have enough deductions to itemize).

It's true that some of the most common tax deductions were designed for middle class people--like interest on one's mortgage or health care costs. It's also true that I wouldn't be able to itemize at all if I weren't in a heterosexual marriage where I get to combine my meagre income with my spouse's for tax purposes. Still, many of the things I'm trying to keep better track of are related to my ministry of writing and speaking, which did not make much money last year partly because Quakers tend to assume I don't really need to be paid for my work. (One meeting told me that they usually pay non-Quaker speakers twice as much as Quaker speakers, presumably because people led by the Spirit couldn't possibly have bills to pay.) Getting a tax credit for the travel I do in the ministry is frankly providing me more financial support than I get from Friends, which is why the criticism of my tax deductions feels a bit like salt in a wound.

To put this in a broader context, the current budget conflict in Wisconsin and states around the country often pit unionized workers vs non-unionized workers, those with benefits vs. those without them. As the folks at the solidarity rally we attended Saturday pointed out, this is misleading scape-goating which misses the most significant inequality in our system. Check out this great Mother Jones article and the graphs below to see what I mean. I think it's good for middle class Quakers (and others) to become more aware of their privilege, but let's not lose site of the big picture. Are milage deductions for writers really the problem here?

How Spiritual Discernment is Like Doing Your Taxes

I'm teaching Discerning Our Calls at Pendle Hill this semester, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how we listen for divine guidance in our lives. I'm also working on my 2010 taxes. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would start to see connections, far fetched as they may sound. This blog may be the only place I can get away with this outrageous comparison, but here are a few similarities I've noticed:

1. It helps if you keep track of what's going on throughout the year. A regular practice of paying attention—whether it is to your expenses or your spiritual experiences—makes it much easier when you get to the big moment of declaration. If you don't pay attention throughout the year, you're likely to feel overwhelmed at crunch time.

2. Paying attention takes time and a certain amount of discipline. Whether it's recording your dreams in a journal or recording your mileage as you go out to lead workshops, jotting things down is easily forsaken when there are emails to be answered and children to be fed. If you don’t want to be in the same state of confusion next spring, you need to make paying attention a daily (or at least a weekly) habit.

3. The more you do it, the more you realize you don’t know. This is definitely my experience of spiritual discernment, which seemed much more clear-cut when I started writing about it seventeen years ago. It makes a person wish there were unambiguous rules, like in the tax code. But even there, the sand seems to constantly shift. It turns out that I can deduct my mileage if I drive to Syracuse to give a talk, but not if I drive across town. (Phoenixville, where I spoke last Sunday, is apparently a bit of a grey area.) And did you know that you can deduct 50 cents per mile for driving to volunteer work, no matter how close it is? That means all those business meetings when I was assistant clerk, the soccer games I chaperoned for school, and the meetings my husband attended to set up a homeless shelter. Too bad I wasn’t keeping track.

It occurs to me that, like a journal, our mileage and financial contributions reveal something about our values. They are worth a serious look from time to time. Of course, if you take the bus to all your volunteer gigs, you have even better values than we do, and you can probably deduct your bus tokens, but you'd better check with your tax advisor about that.

4. It helps to consult others. Recently my writers group invited a tax guy who specializes in helping artists and other small business people who tend not to be naturally business savvy. Along with all the things I learned from him, it was good to hear the questions of other writers, some of whom had great systems for keeping track of all this stuff. Likewise, it’s best to do your discernment in community; we can learn so much from each other and feel empowered to make needed changes.

5. You can't really pay someone to do it for you. Well, OK, you can pay someone to figure out what numbers go in what boxes on the tax form. But the real work is in adding up all the contributions, prescription co-pays, books given away to reviewers, and money spent on health insurance. It’s keeping track of where we are and what we’ve been doing that’s the hard work, and as any tax accountant will make clear, that part is your job. Likewise, a spiritual director or a clearness committee may make suggestions or ask good questions, but in the end they are no more liable for the truth of what you tell them than your accountant. 

Of course, there are obvious differences between these endeavors, most notably the fact that discernment is meant to grow out of our relationship with the Divine Spirit, which has helped me with many decisions but which has never actually done my taxes for me. Maybe I should start praying for that, though I suspect this is one of those areas where we are meant to grow up and figure things out for ourselves.