Monday, November 14, 2011 by Jay T.

I found a lesson one Saturday last summer, but the learning didn’t crystallize until two days ago.  The Greek Orthodox Church in Beaverton held their annual festival on a day when I was in Portland helping Linda set up for dye workshop.  Helping her leaves me free to roam in the city or its surroundings during the middle of the day.

I went to the Greek festival for the food and dancing, but there found the booth where the Orthodox clerics explained their faith.  One of their deacons, named Innocent in the church, was open to drawing contrasts with my faith.  We spoke for fifteen or twenty minutes.  He mentioned that he’d be giving a tour of their meeting room and a talk on their form of worship later.

With bells on, I came early for the tour.  I didn’t need to bring the bells, they had some there.  Not only bells, but smells.  I noticed the incense as I walked through the door.  And pictures–lots of them.  In a flat two dimensional style with vibrant colors.  The iconographer in the lobby had told me a bit about the training and apprenticeship that qualified her to do this work.  She did it with great care and prayer.  Elaborate woodwork.  Choral music–a capella, but in a distinct style with four parts.  Innocent explained that all of this was very carefully done to bring worshipers into God’s presence and out of the ordinary world we inhabit through the week.

This morning, dozens of years after learning that Quakerism doesn’t try to make those contrasts and several months after the smells, sights and explication of the Orthodox worship room, I came to understand why Friends keep our meeting places simple.  Friends want to maximize the similarity between sacred and profane, between worship and work in order to facilitate transfer of the skills and habits we learn in worship.  We don’t want the meeting house to be much different from our homes and our work places, because we don’t want our attitudes to be much different as we move through the week.

The home, the office, the classroom, the barn and the meeting house are all places to meet with God.  Why should we set up the meeting house to look or feel different from anywhere else we find ourselves?

Posted in Faith & Practice, Journal | 1 Comment »

Tuesday, September 20, 2011 by Jay T.

 Is there a coherence to Western Independent Friends?   Are we different from other Liberal Quakers?

I’m interested in views from those inside, as well as outside of the three Western Independent Yearly Meetings–Pacific, North Pacific and InterMountain. What have visitors and sojourners sensed among Beanites?

What’s the historical perspective?  Do the five sentences of the first discipline of the College Park Association of Friends offer anything distinctive?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Tuesday, August 30, 2011 by Jay T.

I was cycling my way to meeting on a recent Sunday and passing cars honked at me.

But it’s not that simple.  You see, I was in Seattle, or rather its northern suburbs.  I’m not familiar with them.  I’m not a city boy, nor a suburbanite.  For the past week or more, I had eagerly planned this bike ride of about two hours.  It included three sections.  First, some hilly residential way-finding along twisty roads.  Then a middle section along several miles of the extensive Burke-Gilman lakefront trail, which Seattle has only recently converted from an old rail line.  The journey would finish (I hoped.) through an urban residential and commercial area leading to the Central Area Senior Center where South Seattle Friends meet.

I had loaded my bike on the rack for a six hour car journey, unloaded it that morning at the hotel in Lynnwood, and fueled up on the hotel’s breakfast.  I was set with a Google maps route especially plotted for a bicycle.  Somehow the Seattle bike map hadn’t been at the hotel waiting for me, although I had requested online that one be sent.  Seemed like a small problem.  Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Flexing some forms, Physical activity, Journal | 1 Comment »

Monday, February 7, 2011 by Jay T.

This entry follows on after the 2/6/2011 blog entry about what I said in a spiritual autobiography for the meeting two weeks ago.

Short on time, I skipped:
My call to return to the Northwest
The years in one of the small meetings in College Park Quarterly Meeting
A year in therapy
Firbank Farm

I did speak about my journey to being a Christian and what God has opened to me.
•    Grandma’s serene and helpful history in her Presbyterian church
•    Friends’ School classes in Human Studies
•    High school friends in the charismatic movement
•    Seeking to experience that of God within me and others
•    His reassurance: I’ve been here all along.
•    YF’s I met on the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage, Elfrida, the Wilsons, Lionel, the 1652 country
•    my brother’s challenges to honestly engage with the issues of Christian myth and spirituality
•    reading the YFNA newsletter
•    Ben’s invitation to fellowship with WYF Christians
•    All your strength and cleverness is nothing next to my loving power; even so, my help is there for the everyday challenges you face.  This is salvation. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sunday, February 6, 2011 by Jay T.

Two weeks ago I spoke to our meeting on my spiritual autobiography.  The meeting does several of these a year, provided there are willing volunteers.

I began by explaining that I’d grown up in a nearby unprogrammed Friends meeting which was rather similar to our meeting.  That I had become a Christian by convincement and that I would be trying faithfully to make the session one of sharing history and insights with my Friends, not an evangelical project.  I explained that my language would be Christian, as that matches best what’s in my heart.

Then I opened up to questions, answers or topics people wanted to hear about.  As I proceeded through my outline, I paid attention to those parts of it that might address those interests.

Here are the points I had written as an outline.  I haven’t expanded these in writing, but might someday.  If you’re interested in one or two, please ask for details, make suggestions or offer your related experiences in a comment.

• Childhood in an unprogrammed meeting.  The influences of that community and some of those Friends.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Monday, December 6, 2010 by Jay T.

Yesterday, I finished the last of the cucumbers from our garden.  Or most of it.  The end bit was starting to soften.  I like cucumbers.  Especially the long, skinny kind that cost a dollar or so at the supermarket.  That’s why we grow them–because they’re good and because I’m too cheap to buy them.

The cucumber was the last.  We had saved it in the fridge for weeks.  The last of the tomatoes was appreciated a few weeks ago.

Now we enter a new season.  We start figuring out whether to spring for supermarket cukes, or rely on the less preferred celery sticks.  Will our kale and broccoli yield anything to eat?  How soon?  How much of that box of Fuji apples we got from some friends with an orchard will last for fresh eating?  How much should we sauce?

The autumn sports seasons have finished.  Two local football teams just lost their last games yesterday.  The scholastic soccer teams played out the season not so many days ago.  The election is over, with mixed results around here.  Students have settled into routines of behavior and misbehavior at school.  They are learning.  Last week I started to observe systematically to see how much.  Rains have set in, most days.  Nights can get cold.  We’ve even had our first snowfall on the valley floor–early this year.  Outdoor exercise is harder to find in comfort.

So what’s next?  Is this all there is?  All there will be?  Where do we find glory, or even sufficiency?  Will the days ever stop getting shorter? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Food, Keeping low, Journal | 3 Comments »

Monday, September 27, 2010 by Jay T.

And for the principles of the Society, I would claim no inflexible, invariable form of manifestation. They are principles of life, and in life there is growth,and variety, and adaptation to time and place.

                   from Joel Bean, Why I Am A Friend, 1894

Posted in Journal | 1 Comment »

Monday, September 27, 2010 by Jay T.

This blog represents just me.  My reflections and insights are drawn from my experiences as a husband, Friend and teacher, but what I write doesn’t attempt to reflect the views of my wife, my Friends meeting or the school where I teach.

This blog is hosted on my wife’s website.  Linda Johansen is a fabric artist and teacher.   Her spiritual insights are quite different, but complementary to my own.

I don’t speak of my faith as I teach.  I wish to assure my students, their parents, my colleagues and my supervisors that my teaching is a reflection of the curriculum and best practices within the discipline of Physical Education.

Posted in Journal | 3 Comments »

Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by Jay T.

My wife’s mother died early this year.  She was a collector who lived just up the street  from us for almost twenty years.  The last seven months of our lives has been about stuff.  Lots of hers and some of ours.  We’ve carried truck loads of it to the recycle depot, the thrift store and the Habitat for Humanity ReStore–a shop for used building materials.  We’ve given away bunches to neighbors.  Corvallis Antiques sold lots of it before and during an estate sale.

Our floors are being refinished.  We painted the ceiling and walls first.  The living room, dining room and hallway were stripped of furniture, curtains, wall art and baseboards.  It not only stinks in that center part of the house, it echoes.  The floors are curing and giving off gas now.  We can walk through those rooms, but it gives me a headache to remain.  So I’m turned out of our house.

Time for an adventure.

For the first time since college sophomore year, I went camping on my bicycle without support.  I hauled all my own camping and cooking gear.  It worked.  I didn’t take much.  It was only an overnight turnaround to Armitage Park.  About 37 miles there.  I returned on a hilly route–to show myself I could do it, so the return was 60 miles or so.

Armitage Park still has the classic picnic grounds of my childhood–even if they’ve built a freeway bridge over the top of one end of it.  It now has a campground, which I knew about, but hadn’t seen.  It was filled with large recreational vehicles–some of them towed by semi-truck tractors.  Several pulled box trailers behind them, Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Physical activity, Keeping low, Journal | 1 Comment »

Sunday, April 4, 2010 by Jay T.

The meeting room for Corvallis Friends looked a bit different this morning.   Big sheets of newsprint were spread around the floor.  All who came were invited to lie down and be traced around, yielding a body outline.

A special invitation had been issued to children, letting them know that worship would be designed to include them.  A few adults, seeking a quieter space on this Easter Sunday, chose to absent themselves.  Some probably chose to join the early walk and outdoor worship, which gathered at 6:20 am in a local park.

After many body outlines had been traced and some posted on the walls, I explained that the markers, yarn, ribbon, flowers and glue could be used at any point during worship to add to the image of one’s body.  I asked Friends to notice how the feelings within and recognize them.  I explained that George Fox had written about this process many years ago and that contemporary Friends, some of them in our meeting, were rediscovering the ways our Teacher is present in our hearts and bodies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Flexing some forms, Physical activity | 1 Comment »