Voice of God

Looking back a year ago:

I had to laugh to myself when I heard people singing (or saying) that they "wanted to hear the voice of the Lord," because for me it meant accepting that my life would be turned upside down time and again. It demanded complete self-honesty, courage, and strength. When I haven’t been totally honest with myself and have done things the way I wanted to, I made mistakes that hurt others badly. Sometimes I was so used to feeling upside-down that I didn’t realize how uncomfortable and dreadful it could be for others. Feeling upside-down also made me sensitive to wrongness, when people around me turned their environment upside down to suit themselves, instead of being willing to suffer change themselves in order to help the community grow. But sometimes my presence or example seemed to act as a catalyst for people to begin to make changes in their own lives, or sometimes a wounded person could begin to heal him/herself because of the gentleness which flowed through me.

I reexamined my call to ministry, tried to discern whether or not formal education in seminary would be helpful, and assessed what my spiritual gifts are and considered how to best use them in compliance with God’s will. My job situation had been disquieting for half a year (at that point), and I tried to analyze my strengths and weaknesses objectively, living with my feelings, which said one thing, and the doors closing, which said another. I came to think that the first half-year of 2006 in particular was an exercise in obedience and humility. Plunged into despair and shame, into the dark night, wondering if there would ever be clarity or hope, yet linked with an underlying and deep-rooted willingness to be changed, to take emotional (and some physical) risks—all of this left me believing that I had come out on another side of my spiritual life, extraordinarily transformed (not the goal of submission to the will of God, yet a welcome side-effect!) and more quietly, that I have become more “attuned to authentic movements of the Spirit leading us into greater fullness of life” (Loring 15). This experience seemed to “reflect an experience of God which is more verb than noun, more relationship than knowledge….” And I seemed to have groped my “way in search of reality, past easy definitions and conceptions of” myself, becoming “graciously freed from the distortions imposed by ‘the world’” (ibid.).

Loring, Patricia. Spiritual Discernment: The Context and Goal of Clearness Committees. Pendle Hill Pamphlet 305. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1992.

Well, I am always surprised by my lack of humility when I look back! Yet, when I take stock, that dark night did seem to help me empty myself, and there was then room for a new person to enter my life, for that relationship to turn my self-concept upside-down in a marvelous way. And I do seem to have made my way into a new conception of myself as a librarian, on the other side of grief and loss.

Human pace, Human face

Live at a human pace, face intimacy. One of our friends is failing at a faster pace than before so we went to see her in the hospital. The TV show, "desperados" as we call it, aka Desperate Housewives, did make a good point this week--it is in those dreadful hospital visits that our human face is most revealed, at its most human pace. Holding a hand, saying, "I love you," is one of the most intimate things we can do for a friend. Keeping a visit short, to accomodate the patient's flagging energy as well as others who want to visit, is to live at a human pace.

Intimacy sometimes begets human pace--and more intimacy. After the hospital visit, I went home exhausted, and slept the following day away as a virus worked its way through my body--and I did my best to accept the loving care of my wifely.


So, the face of God, in the pace of God?

Sabbatical a long way off; thee says truly

I have a list of publishers now who might be possibilities for my Seventh-day Quaker book. I realized after hearing the talk by Wade Rouse that the draft might be considered a memoir, which helped shape the publishers I've noted. But after negotiating with another librarian in my unit who is also applying for sabbatical, I realized that if it is granted, it is still a year and 3 months away. What will carry me through: the discipline of hope, small tasks like creating the bibliography in the citation manager, refining the publisher list, and perhaps an intensive class at Earlham School of Religion.

By the way, I continue to be fascinated with the Spanish Sociolinguistics class I'm sitting in on this semester! The question of English-speakers using the singular came up Wednesday--and I wonder if there are any Friends who still use either thou or thee? I do have a non-Quaker friend who uses "thee" as an intimate and affectionate term for her spouse, as do I. But are there folks who use it as a regular practice, at home or in Meeting, school, in blogs, etc., or has it truly died out? I see that jeanne_d_arc has urged us to observe "October (Tenth Month) 24 ... as International Talk Like a Quaker Day." I also see this article citation from Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts, which says that a 1990 survey of 28 Quakers showed that the 2nd person singular is still in use:
Birch, Barbara M. "Quaker Plain Speech: A Policy of Linguistic Divergence." International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 1995. v. 116, pp. 39-59.
If anyone would like to weigh in, speak thy mind, Friend!

A list of blessings

In this week of so many things going wrong, what have been the blessings?

• My wife, the best blessing of all.
• No one was hurt when the garage door broke on Sunday morning, and on Tuesday the repairman fixed the cable and the one on the other side of the door as well.
• On Monday I saw a bunch of really cool inukshuk outside Lake Ontario Hall.
• A & I heard an excellent talk by memoirist Wade Rouse on Wednesday.
• My talk with the dean and director about my sabbatical proposal went well today and they gave several solid suggestions.
• The dining room is now a beautiful greeny-robin’s-egg color.
• I’ve been playing the viola quite a lot lately. I had a good walk in the park this afternoon, then when we got home, A put together a great dinner while I played the viola. We decided where to have the outdoor motion detector lights, where to plant the mums, and I put together a few inukshuk.
• Tomorrow the electrician is coming, along with the garage door salesman, and Ffriend Walt for a chat—and I am only working a half day.
• Sunday our best friends are coming over for dinner.

That's it, just a list. Sometimes all I need is to count them.

Overshoot

Warning: spoilers for the novel, don't read this if you intend to read the novel Overshoot by Mona Clee!


I just re-read this book, and wonder if her idea of an "empathy" gene which mutated and got passed along to most of the population as damaged, could be close to the truth. Why are there only a minority of people who look for and understand the point of the view of others? Why do there seem to be so many people who can do harm to others without seeming to care or understand? And her idea about finding the gene through mapping, repairing it, and then spreading it to the world's population via a cold-like virus...marvelous as long as it was for good but scary since it could so easily be used for evil!

So what does it mean to be obedient? To listen for that still, small voice, to discern the message, to act on that knowledge? If we could only agree on what is "good," or when that voice truly comes from God and the message is meant to be acted upon, and our interpretation valid. If only we were more able to listen openly to those with whom we regularly disagree and take their viewpoints into consideration...REALLY take them into our hearts for discernment!

The Joy and Responsibility of Teaching Well

This morning I attended our Pew Faculty Teaching & Learning Center’s annual Teaching Conference, at which the keynote speaker was Dr. L. Dee Fink, who spoke on “The Joy and Responsibility of Teaching Well.” Here are my notes.

Colleges should be ranked on: meaningful general education, good pedagogical practices, high student engagement, and quality learning.

Joy comes from the things that are important to us, and from the feeling that we did them well.

Is what we’re doing as college teachers important?

• the new world economy is highly knowledge-intensive—we have to keep learning or we fall behind.
• the global problems get worse unless our students (or graduates) work on solving them.

How well are we doing in higher education?

• employers say that our graduates can’t solve problems, work with diverse co-workers, or work collaboratively in small groups
• the National Study of Adult Literacy reports that 2/3 of college graduates are functionally illiterate
• data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) can be interpreted to mean that seniors are not reading, analyzing, interpreting, or applying information in their class assignments
• “Declining by Degrees” –students don’t learn how to engage in critical thinking
• Derek Bok says in “Our Underachieving Colleges” that students are not learning and that there is a lack of overarching purpose in undergraduate curricula.

What can we do? Re-examine:

• what we teach
• how we teach
• how we gear up to teach
• who we are as teachers (see Parker Palmer’s work)

What we teach:

· what we want students to learn is not just knowledge about the discipline

· significant learning comes from a combination of foundational knowledge, application, integration, human dimension (working with others and knowing oneself), caring (new interest, feelings, and values), and learning how to learn.

· Liberal Education – America’s Promise (LEAP)’s Essential Learning Outcomes—engage the big questions in addition to the above combination

How we teach: course design includes learning goals, teaching & learning activities, feedback & assessment

· is there significant learning? active learning? educative assessment (reflective and forward-looking=how will you apply this knowledge?) [we librarians should use minute papers to ask not only what students learned as the most important point in library instruction sessions and what they still have questions about, but also to ask how they will apply their new knowledge to future research]

· criteria & standards=rubrics [we library faculty should work with classroom faculty to encourage them to design rubrics which address the quality of resources students include in their papers and how well students integrate those resources]

· teaching strategy=combination of activities, in a sequence that matters

o readiness test (have they read the material?)=individual, then immediately following the same test in small groups

o application problems=small groups

o exam on content and application

o culminating project

o all of this leads not just to “exposure” to the material but also to understandings, the ability to use the content, and to valuing the content

· President Haas said that faculty are “professional educators”

· all professionals value their own professional development very seriously—

o learn

o use

o assess

o share with colleagues

o reflect

o repeat

o how much time should faculty spend on learning about teaching & learning? Airline reservations employees spent at least 4 hours/month (48 hours/year) in professional development to learn new skills & about changes in the industry

o our job as professional educators is to:

§ be human alchemists

§ change the ordinary into the special (i.e.,—transforming students into confident, capable, caring people

Same-sex Marriage, Wedding, Wife

As I've been reading about Friends at New England Yearly Meeting grappling with LGBT issues regarding FUM's sexual ethics personnel policy, I am moved to share my joy in our monthly meeting's support, acceptance, and engagement with the lesbian and gay members and attenders. A & I were married 4 weeks & 2 days ago "under the care of the Meeting," "in the manner of Friends," the whole nine yards.... It is marvelous, wonderful, amazing to be taken for granted. To follow a process already in place. To use the same words (marriage, wedding, wife) that other people use. We had some variations, to be sure: our "best girls" ran the show unobtrusively and our overseers read a passage about same-sex marriage as they explained the Quaker process to those unfamiliar with Friends' weddings. I was most moved by the verbal ministry of one of A's aunts when she spoke about love and partnership and welcomed me to the family, because I had had an impression that she was not friendly to same-sex relationships. Yet she, too, was moved to take me/us for granted. Maybe Friends in FUM will be able to unite someday to take us for granted--so that we will no longer need to marvel, wonder, or be amazed.