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These rings

November 9, 2015 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

This ring still feels strange and a bit uncomfortable, a foreign object. So often, thinking about our future, I have semiconsciously scratched an itch on that fourth finger, yet the weight of it is still a new and unexpected thing. It’s silly, but I really did feel more like we were really engaged after the ring fit and was on me. The most valuable thing you’ve ever owned always glinting at you has a way of reminding you, of making you think.

I know that soon enough I’ll never notice this feeling; it will be like the high school ring on my right hand – also a gift someone sacrificed to put there. I’ve kept it on all this time because I loved my high school; I want to remember where I come from and the serious teenager I was. They are part of me. Now, soon enough, he will be part of me. We have promised to become a family.

I asked him to marry me, too, and gave him a ring, too. I am proud that it fits and looks handsome on him even though I made it from a thousand miles away. He is hyperaware of his own ring, takes it off when he washes his hands. I like that we are both reminded, both taken, newly conscious, connected somehow by these gifts.

Dating is like one big question, a tightrope of opportunities to fall deeper into a harder, worthier love – and chances to say no. Always that possibility that someone might decide against forever, and the parts of you that have become intertwined will have to be slowly surgically extricated, or else shut up in a locked box labeled “past” that you hardly dare to open. But now we are preparing to cast our foolish lot with a promise that that will never happen, that the days of ‘no’ are behind us. I am glad, in the end, that the months before this moment saw me air a lot of fears, for I know now that I am sure. And I am glad that when the time came, it got to be both of us; we said yes.

Seven states’ worth of home

October 2, 2015 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

It is cloudy and dark, puddles merging into ponds, barely-orange leaves prematurely dripping from sodden trees. “What a beautiful day,” says the man across the coffee shop without a trace of irony. It is the relieved sigh of Cape Cod after summer, after tourists in jaunty nautical garb, after traffic. The locals take back the rock-studded beaches, windy and drippy though they are – loved.

I am back in Boston. After a hectic week, I tag along with Nate to work in Hyannis. I have accidentally crashed a morning gossip-gathering of older folks, skirting the edges with my backpack. My enormous backpack, which has accompanied me to seven states* in the past four weeks. Which holds everything a person could need – clothes, toothpaste, and books – without complaint. After all of this journeying, I feel like a sea-creature hefting my home onto my back.

When I packed this bag to leave Boston in August, it gave me a sick feeling. It is the eleventh time I have moved in seven years, inspiring a preconscious bodily dread of leaving any place – even for journeys I have happily chosen.

There is much I could say about the ways I’ve centered in the past month. I have discovered that sometimes growing pains are, in fact, wounds, and that the growth is only complete when the wounds have begun to heal. Returning to my places of comfort and safety in the South allowed me to stop triage-ing the nicks and scrapes of the last three years; but not because I took a few weeks off of work.

It was because of the way I was welcomed. In all the borrowed places me and my backpack have alighted this month, soul-friends have made space and made food and made time for me to be. In long, long conversations with past professors, in breakfast with my parents, on a drive to the woods, I have been given peace. It seems that at some point I dropped off pieces of my heart with these dear humans, and years later they are giving them back, reminding me who I am. Reminding me Who is my home, even when the only constant in life is travel-size toiletries and the sound of zippers.

It has been fitting to end my journey, in the few days before I move into my next place, as a literal guest in my own house – on my former roommates’ futon. Even in brief meetings I discover that they, too, hold pieces of me in trust; and in that knowledge I discover a deep peace with the transitory phase of life I have been longing to escape. Finally I remember it is an adventure and a gift to be a sojourner, a not-quite-local of so many neighborhoods. Finally I begin to find some love for New England in me. Finally I recall how to be present in only one state at a time. And I can pray with faith that my many friends who are far from home will find welcome. Wanderers and missionaries: there will be home again.

I have heard it is in the character of God to make room for others. If so, there are few holier acts than to give hospitality, and few more humbling than to receive it.

——

*I’ve spent nights in Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, New York, and Massachusetts.

how to get things done in spite of computers

September 23, 2015 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

Today I had the thought that I should do some productive things, so I sat down with my computer.

That is the end of the story.

I did some stuff for a few minutes, then got stressed out, and then the Internet took over. My thoughts of writing, designing, planning or even just learning something completely dissolved into pictures of The Trumpster and Instagram updates on other people’s vacations.

I repeat this boring story nearly every day, and then feel bad about all the things I don’t get done. I watch other people (on Instagram) doing way, way more cool stuff than me. Then I keep scrolling. And still, when I want to be productive, I instinctively reach for my computer. Somehow that one object has come to represent for me all the things I should do, all the things I don’t want to do, my entire capacity to do them – and all the distractions I’ll ever need to pretend I can alleviate the pain of to-dos by prolonging them with useless not-that-fun “breaks”.

I’ve known for a while not to do this with personal writing. Going to the Internet for inspiration is like going to a buffet for its pleasing variety of diet-friendly food. You might find it eventually, but not before thirty-two other things have caught your eye and you’re so full you need a nap like NOW.

I’m starting to think of my computer – in all situations – as that friend who can be funny and helpful sometimes, but also keeps you sitting around gossiping or whatever long after you’ve dropped several hints and glanced ever more often at the door until you finally fake a phone call to extricate yourself from the needy situation which is that friend. Every meeting needs an exit strategy.

The computer doesn’t actually contain productivity rays that make things get done. YOU DO. And your new (reliable, nice,
emotionally healthy) best friends are going to be a pen and paper. Maybe a planner if yours is really swell with lots of writing space, or if you are one of those people who gets crazy eyes about their planner, takes it to cocktail parties, and occasionally gives it a fond stroke throughout the day.

Write down all the things you have to do. I don’t usually think of these things in any manner of logical order, so I leave space for putting like tasks together.

Prioritize your tasks.

Set a high but realistic goal for today, and envision a reward for getting it all done (even if it’s just “stop working and go outside/eat with family/drink eleven beers.” whatever.)

Put your smartphone in another room. BE STRONG. You are going to do all the things you just said you are going to do. This requires you to not do other things.

Before you start on any task, figure out exactly what you need the computer to do for you in order to complete it. You may need some facts from the Internet, but be able to analyze the data or have a phone conversation about it without the computer! It is often more helpful to extract the information from the light-box and walk away. Sure, it can feel like handily skipping a step to just refer constantly to the thousand tabs you have open, using the computer as a Portal to All Times and Dimensions – but who really, deep down, wants one of those? (hint: not your brain). You look like a rat playing a game of “Where’d I Hide My Cheese” in a lab experiment to study mammal confusion and desperation. Organize the information in a way that’s useful to you – printed or written – and you can stop “accidentally” clicking on the “GIFs of Raccoons Doing People Things” tab.

Don’t do all the computer things at once. Work on one project or set of tasks at a time. When you get to a point where you really need the computer, think, “time to pull out my fact-finding/word-processing/advertising/telecommunication machine!” and only use it for that fact, that document, that email. Distractions are your enemy! Funny/compelling/worrisome off-topic emails are the barbarian hordes threatening your productivity Rome! THEY CAN WAIT TIL AFTER LUNCH.

At least do a better job of using one program at a time.

Do email for specific chunks of time during the day.

Tick off your to-do tasks with markers, stickers, or by tearing them off and burning them! Whatever makes you happy! Stay focused. Gettin’ stuff done feels good.

mystic’s credo

September 14, 2015 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

When theological disagreements get personal, it has a way of messing with a theologian’s soul.

Those of us trying to make a living out of thinking like to convince ourselves that ours is the most important task – that if we get our facts in a row and our arguments right, if we use the correct hermeneutic and the most accurate sources, we can unravel at least a few quandaries, come to some agreement, and know What’s Right for once and for all. We might tell you it’s about belief and truth and the ways our words can alter our realities, and we would believe ourselves. But just as often, it’s simply about making our homes in books and theories. When school has always been easy for you, you think keeping God there will make God easy. You hope that the theoretical world can make the real world into the place you want it to be.

So when arguments come to an impasse, or our brothers and sisters simply tune us out – when our ideas fail to change others’ behavior –

we’re likely to have a bit of a meltdown. Or, even more often, to reassure ourselves that We’re Right, denounce those other parties, and take our pocket concordances elsewhere, much to the relief of those we’re trying to spite. Churches, schools, nonprofits beware: self-righteousness will destroy all diversity of opinion faster than you can say “interpretation”.

I had just such a dustup with my church in Boston this year, and it nearly ruined me. I’d always known theology could be used to hurt people; but finally confronted with my inability to Set It Right (from my perspective, of course), I sort of lost my will to live (as a theologian). If two people can study hard, care deeply, love Jesus, and come to opposite conclusions, what is the point? A question theologians often ask each other in the honest light of a couple of drinks – are we just making stuff up here?

Months into my slough of despond, pondering some unrelated episode, an observation blazed into my mind, answering for me the argument at hand and the question it provoked. God has never spoken to me about my theology, I realized; only about our hearts.

The longer I study and pray, the less I am convinced – as maybe I was when I started this journey – that the world is a puzzle, where God has hidden clues about herself for our little brains to busily connect, rearrange, and cogitate until we stumble upon The Right Answer. I think God wants us to look for her, but I don’t think she’s hiding at all. Of course she’s in the onion-paper sheets of the Bible and the languages histories, traditions that help us interpret it. But, as the Bible says, God also speaks the languages of rock and tree, works in all of our histories, and asks us to live both in deepest reverence and radical defiance of tradition.

And, as the Bible says, God takes it upon himself just to speak to us. I believe in that kind of a living revelation – in a God greater than a book – in tongues and gifts, nudges and voices, in the knowledge of the heart and
body when the mind fails. I cast my lot with the mystics of Christianity – the Pentecostals, Quakers, Charismatics, Eastern Orthodox, the early church and all the holy fools ever to say that God lives and speaks in our hearts with knowing exactly what we could possibly mean.

It is not the role of theological study to shackle our hearts and lives to the pages of books. It is to help us cleave ever closer to Jesus Christ, image of the Father, through the comfort and help of the Holy Spirit. My concern for “correct interpretation” – for orthodoxy – is just as strong as it’s ever been. Only I’m realizing that the authors of our scriptures were madmen and poets, priests and pastors, storytellers and prisoners – only a few wrote in comfort and solitude. Our greatest theologians have been dreamers, desert demon fighters, busy bishops, seers and itinerant preachers. God spoke to them through and into the circumstances of their lives; though remembering God’s past works was vital to them, they were not simply regurgitators or gatekeepers over other, older men’s words.

Those precious ancient texts remain central to my faith, plumb lines for the many voices speaking every day, reliable sources for hearing God’s voice. But that voice leads me always to overwhelming awe of God, greater compassion and gentleness and confidence, awareness of my own sin, recognition of the beauty and belovedness within myself that I so often bury. It does not offer systems for organizing reality or even deem for certain which translation from the Greek is better. When the words of scripture and tradition have transformed my theology, claiming my allegiance and submission despite myself, it is because I have recognized the character of God in them – not out of grudging, uncomprehending duty and not because they support my own position.

Academy-trained theologians are not the arbiters of doctrine, though we dearly wish we were. We interpret and champion the voices of the past, deeply undervalued in the 21st century – a hugely important task. And we may draw from other disciplines and theories to understand the world we mean to connect with, helping fellow Christians to see clearly what it is we have in common with our ancestors in the faith. But our task is incomplete without taking seriously the revelations of God to the illiterate and the child, the unholy and uninitiated, to the obviously wrong, the unfavored, the poor and the mad – and until we recognize ourselves among them.

And if in the end we come up with something that doesn’t sound mostly crazy, it’s a good sign we’ve really just been making stuff up.

within limits

September 8, 2015 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

Every time I’ve told anyone I was taking a month off from life, there’s been a lot of shifty eyes, dirt-kicking, and trying to explain on my part. “I’ve got things to take care of down South.” “My lease is up, and I have people to see, and the family’s taking a vacation, and it’s just easiest not to come back until October.”

I didn’t want to simply admit that my heart has been crying for months to go home, just to be in the South and not in the city, for reasons I don’t entirely understand – and that I felt like I would break if I didn’t give in.

A few days ago I sat across from one of the people who has pushed me hardest as a scholar and as a person, reciting my excuses, and after an hour of catching up with one another he had few words for me except to say: “Don’t feel guilty for one minute of this time off. Get in the habit of seizing your rests and your Sabbaths, or you’ll never find a way to be grateful for them.” And at first, I didn’t take this as such profound advice; the idea of Sabbath-taking has been important to me for a long time. Even during grad school, I did everything in my power to take off one day a week. But the more his words stuck with me, swirling and resonating with the book I recently stumbled into about Sabbath, the more I had to admit that after several years with this theme playing through my life, I still haven’t gotten the point.

Much of human life and thought is an attempt to contend with, or to avoid contending with, our own finitude. And not just in terms of time, the search for immortality; we flail against the obvious fact that we cannot extend ourselves to infinity in space (by building empires), in work (by inventing technologies), in understanding (by building philosophies and worldview-systems to encompass reality).

Often I think we are so convinced of our ability to become infinite, and so habituated to trying for just a little more, that we don’t even know we are chasing such an absurd goal – but we are. We are terrified to admit that we have limits, especially in areas that are central to our identities. “I’m the boss here; I couldn’t possibly need advice.” “I’m the relationship-builder around here; of course I can be all things to all people.” Little gods.

American culture – let alone New England culture – doesn’t encourage people to say “I can’t”. Christian culture can do likewise, failing to distinguish between circumstances and projects into which we are called – and for which we are empowered – by God, from burdens we heap upon ourselves. And so even after I had made the choice to put aside career-building and money-making just to breathe and be with my family, I couldn’t let myself be empowered by that choice and instead, called myself weak. Soft. Less than.

And in some sense, the point is that I am those things, and there can’t be shame in it anymore. I am weak and soft and less than infinite, and I’m glad that we’re being honest about it. I think it’s time to retrieve an All-American phrase and apply it to life in general; I think it’s time to live within our means. Is it really getting ahead if you are constantly testing the limits of your emotional, mental, and relational reserves? Have you really made it if your life pushes you beyond your capacities for kindness, for joy, or for peace? Is your dream of being king of the mountain really fulfilled just by being last to collapse on top of the heap?

God commands us to rest if only to force us to sit and watch the world continue spinning without a bit of our help. But that agonizing realization can be the most freeing gift – the gift of pure delight in those things we already have, when we put aside striving for the things we don’t.

As for me, this September off is about living within the spiritual and emotional resources given to me, and about simple gratitude for the opportunity to replenish them in myriad ways while I’m back home and on vacation. It’s not self-indulgence as much as it is surviving as the person I want to be: a person of hope, of trust, of tradition, of faith, when I am beyond my ability to produce these things within myself. And giving myself over to the place and people who have been calling to me, I find they are pouring them into me more and better than I can comprehend.

Waiting beneath a vast swath of Arizona sky, I finally have no choice but to admit how very small I really am, how little of the world’s hardship and how small a fraction of its blessing I can actually hold; but finally without my frantic hubris, I’m able to hear a limitless love humming: here, I’ve got the rest.

notes on a clear moment

August 21, 2015 by Lyndsey 3 Comments

At 12,000 feet I stopped to scruffle the ears of the happiest dog I’ve ever seen. It was the high point of my hikes in the Rockies last week, a couple hundred feet above the freezing alpine lake where my boyfriend was swimming and hollering to every columbine and rockslide in the range.
“That’s his happiest place,” I told the dog’s owner. “Really cold lakes.” She didn’t seem to mind the whooping anyway.
We chatted about where we were from, and I let slip: “I almost didn’t come out here to Colorado.”
“Really?!” she said with more incredulity than seemed polite.
“Yeah… I kind of needed to work this week.”
She nodded in that way that says ‘I hear ya’, and then said the thing I’ve heard echoing ever since: “Yeah, but that stuff is always there.”

That stuff is always there. Always something to save for and spend on, always some voice saying you haven’t done enough. Always the world will measure you in clock punches and bank accounts – the moments you take to love and celebrate and simply be in awe, those moments are always marked ‘stolen’ on that ledger.

That ledger tries to whisper ‘the mountains are always there’ – advises trading today’s wild chances for imagined somedays when the time is right. Here, that ledger says, in work and pennies saved, is the place for a young person. Life bright is the privilege of people with heavier furniture and lots of kinds of bank accounts, whose futures are secure and whose vacation time is dearly earned. Adventures have to cost you, worried days and careful saving for everything else first.

The thing is, at 12,000 feet, with jagged heights punching ever higher, temperatures plummeting from 80 to 40 degrees after dark, wind scrubbing the trees from rock faces and leaving only miles of wildflowers – it doesn’t take an avalanche to know that nothing is secure and everything is precious unearned gift. Here are the stark and solid things insisting that these are the facts, escaping these truths an illusion; the world’s ledger lies.

It is not the mountains that are always there. It is our pretense at productivity, greed and striving and proving and obliviousness to this very real world beyond the rim of the screen – these will go on when pollution chokes the columbines and the glaciers fade.

Yet grace requires only that you accept it, and the mountains require only that you go. Test the voice, and nature will prove its falsehood to some part of you that simply knows beyond knowing. Only go.

tuning in to static

July 17, 2015 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

Maybe a psychologist would yawn at this – I’m sure I’ve heard it preached a thousand times – but I’d fogotten it lately:
One of the primary tasks of adulthood is deciding which voices get to stay in your head.

I’ve done a lot of exhausting, exhilarating work on this in the past, confronting those ghosts squatting in my home, inviting their nasty friends to parties at 2 A.M. Of course I’d let them stay because they knew how to skulk around the edges of my vision, and because they were terribly, terribly frightening. But when you screw your courage to the sticking-place and put on your boots and go up to the attic to confront them in hand-to-hand combat – they might still say horribly painful things but, looking at them directly, you see they have no bones. The voices that have claimed authority over you are glorified puddles of sound and memory. One by one you look at the middle school bullies, the coaches with their own sad pasts, the grotesque cartoons pretending to be your parents at their worst; you calmly inform them that their presence will no longer be tolerated and, eventually, you watch them dribble away through the floorboards.

Then you forget how hard it is when the voices do have bones.

I’ve done some academic work on virtue ethics, which says that the things we do and the groups we join shape us fundamentally as human beings. There’s all kinds of research about this, theorizing and scientific studies alike, all these people thinking about what this basic truth means to us, and especially what it means for education; but what I wish someone had taken the time to distill down for me back when I was eighteen and worried about school is this. The voices you listen to day in and day out will always, always take up residence in your head.

The voices I’ve read in books and sat under in lectures for the past two years have been different from the voices that used to talk to me about God. I wanted to hear from a new set of people, and I’m glad that I did. I’m grateful for their presence with me, the ways that they have expanded my view of the world and posed questions about God I hadn’t thought to ask before.

Yet they didn’t often draw me towards the God who captivated my heart and mind in earlier years. They didn’t often nurture the mystic in me, the pray-er who was born in a barely-remembered year when a Sunday School teacher said Jesus came to have a relationship with you. That naive wonderer wasn’t really invited to the conversation. My teachers said, “worship brings us closer together as a community,” which is true, but they didn’t say worship delights the heart of God because God is eager to be delighted. They said, “God is on the side of the poor and oppressed,” which is true, but they didn’t often say God is with all those who hurt. They said, The Creator loves all creatures, but they didn’t bother with the truism we all need to hear every, every day – Jesus loves you.

It wasn’t exactly these academics’ job to take responsibility for my spirituality. It’s just that I didn’t have much time or space for any other voices amidst the joy and intrigue, pain, confusion, and discomfort of studying mysteries, wrestling with tradition, confronting injustice every day. Theory, vocabulary, confusion, accusation, discord, and doubt took up residence in my mind and battled daily with testimony, hope, trust, humility, simplicity.

When the words of my pastor stopped sounding like Jesus cares about you and I started to hear God cares about your unruly beliefs and behavior messing up His system – I was incredibly distressed for a while; my last trusted voice was gone. Too weary to keep up the arguments, I quit going to church when I graduated from my program. I committed to the newfound silence.

Utter, blessed silence.

Just two jobs, a boyfriend, summer fun with friends – life as an American twentysomething. Not too much to make sense of. To be honest, for the first half of this summer my life has been as close as it’s ever been to those of the unconcerned-oblivious “religious ‘nones'” people keep worrying about. If you want to talk to me, I said to God, you’re just going to have to do it. Not in a “you big jerk” kind of way, just finally throwing up my hands. It’s not that I wanted to be all agnostic and lazy; I just didn’t know another way to heal, to trust a single voice competing for my allegiance.

I’m finding out that this is an OK thing to do. You have permission to just wait it out with God.

Life with God is a curious dance, a back-and-forth between pursuing God and just waiting to be found. Being called to put some effort into something, and letting go of the things you do under your own power. Analyzing, thinking, considering and formulating with the good brain God gave you – and listening, calmly, into mystery.

My heart has its own insistent little voice with a high-school-principal sort of question: What is the meaning of all this?! And now that I have finally found myself too weary to keep chasing down rabbit trails, I am making peace with my own helplessness to summon answers. I wouldn’t say that God has spoken to me audibly quite yet; it is more that, the less I fear the silence, the less empty it becomes.

I was just getting habituated to my lackadaisical heathen existence, starting to forget what exactly had ever been so important about this church thing, wondering if God was about to drop some crisis into my life so that I would care more – and then came a nudge, do this in remembrance of me. And up I went on Sunday to the church down the street I’ve never visited. There is the voice of the reader, deep and wide, scripture tumbling glory and grace over and over as if they are the same thing. The lackluster preaching while I study the stained-glass windows. And these gifts: The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, your cup of salvation. This voice, this food, I do not struggle to analyze; this food I believe utterly.

Finally the voice of the organ breaks loose from hymns for the postlude, alternately twinkling and roaring majors and minors: It is true! Life is a dramatic and weighty thing. We all struggle to survive, and all break through to show ourselves glorious from time to time. Those battles below the surface are real battles, but you will win if you can only keep fighting; keep waiting; keep believing that the Lord will fight for you. You need only to be still. This warm day means everything, everything, and that is all there is to know.

I walk home, alone, in companionable silence.

if you walk to people with love: an interview with Emily Neumann

July 16, 2015 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

“A lot of Quakers today, like many people in religion, kind of struggle with compartmentalization: you do your activism work, and you do it with other Quakers, but how do you bring the spirituality piece into it?”
– Emily Neumann

The Pipeline Pilgrimage was built around this question. The twelve-day, 150-mile walk incorporated 120 people throughout its course, with a small group of young adult Friends (Quakers) at the core. The group followed the route of the proposed Kinder-Morgan natural gas pipeline through New Hampshire and Massachusetts in order to connect with the communities that would be affected. Though the motivating factor was initially a concern about climate change and the United States’ use of resources, the goal of the pilgrimage was primarily to listen, not to protest.

At a time in my life when Emily’s question was heavy on my mind, I stumbled upon a news article about the pilgrimage and in my excitement sent a fangirl sort of message when I found out one of the organizers lived in my area of Boston. We met on a summer evening to chat about the walk, ending up on a friend’s porch steps.

Going back over these words, I am struck in particular by the Quaker-ness of Emily’s very grammar. She talks about “working against” the pipeline, but never about “fighting” it; she insists that the best work we can do is always the work we are led into. This is activism that isn’t just faith-based, but faith-suffused – a bizarre and beautiful thing. Here is our conversation.

LG: How would you describe, in a few sentences, what you were doing?

EN: One of the things we were trying to do with the Pipeline Pilgrimage was trying to be really intentionally spiritual, and Quaker, and seeking about it – less about opposing the pipeline and more about doing something that’s really inherently Quaker, which is just seeking; not seeking answers, but just seeking. Rather than in a way that’s gonna strategically problem-solve something – we oppose the pipeline, so we’re going to stop the pipeline with this walk – it was more about building community, being very intentional about the spirituality piece, very intentional about the way we walked together.

Our walk was very much – we want to walk all together; we want to walk in silence, oftentimes for an hour in the morning. We want to be very much together in our struggle with what to do about climate, what do we do about this pipeline, what do we do about climate in general, about this thing that’s full of fear and terror.

One of the side benefits was that we walked into communities – not very wealthy communities, very rural communities, they’ve got their own politics going. And there was a lot of struggle to unify them on this. They felt very isolated from the other small-town communities that were working on this; and one of the things that we did by walking through was to help them realize that, no, they’re coming from another town that is fighting this. These are people who are coming from outside of this community to show solidarity, and they’re doing this thing that is giving up so much time of their life, and so it really helped bolster their feeling of not being alone, giving them energy to keep working against this pipeline.

And it also brought attention to climate change. Where a lot of them are sort of Not In My Back Yard – it’s dangerous, it’s not something I want to see or think about –they were much more easily able to catch on to the climate work, too, because we weren’t yelling. We were just walking in, saying we were against this pipeline, and we’re against this pipeline because it’s climate related. But we’re also here as a very religious community. We stayed with churches for the most part, so they understood who we were and what we were doing – that we were doing it from a religious perspective, that was very empowering, I think.

LG: I think it was that listening aspect that really captivated me just in reading about it, because I feel a lot of distress about the polarization of politics and… everything else in America.

EN: One of the interesting things was that we got honked at, and oftentimes it was a positive – like, hey, we see you’re there, we’re really happy you’re there. And that was really gratifying. But we got this guy, when we were walking along this very busy road, this oil truck honking at us. And oil trucks are so loud, we couldn’t tell if it was friendly or not; but it turns out he showed up at one of our community dinners that we had at various churches along the way. This die-hard Republican, very NIMBY about it because it was going through his property, but really passionate about it – he had showed up at this potluck dinner at this Unitarian Universalist church. We did not expect to meet any of the people who were honking at us, and it was the oil truck guy; we just happened to be sharing the story, and he was like, “That was me. It was friendly.” It was just an affirmation – if you walk to people with love, they will return it towards you – like tenfold.

pilgrims at the MA-NH border — Climate Change: An Invitation to New Life? pipelinepilgrimage.org

LG: Was there anything else unexpected that happened, or that you learned, on the pilgrimage?

EN: One of the things that came out of it for me was it felt renewing in terms of climate change for me, but more than that I felt really reconnected to my spirituality, to Christianity.

I think this ties back to, like, what is spiritual activism and what is secular activism? Because secular activism, you work out a strategy in terms of power plays – how do you exert the most pressure on particular people in power, how do you target decision-makers in companies. Lots of strategies, rallies, things like that. And those are all great tactics, but how do you access the power of the light within – of God? How do you access that kind of power, where do you access it from? And the pipeline pilgrimage was kind of trying to explore some of those questions. I wasn’t able to be like, I know what the next Quaker action should look like if it’s not just going to be a walk with a lot of meditation, how it will be “effective” – but it did feel very renewing in my own faith, in the leading that I’m working on, in my faith that I can be a spiritual leader within climate work. That I can bring that perspective. I don’t know what that way is, but [I have faith] that there is a way, and if I stay true to that, it will happen.

LG: I’ve been thinking a lot about how people of faith can lose that perspective that we’re going to be the weirdos, we’re going to be the people that have hope when there is no hope left – or that we need to be; that that’s how we came into this –

EN: Yeah.

LG: But we get caught up in the strategies and the concrete. And the thing for me is believing that it is those small actions and the seeds you plant that you never see, that do actually change the world.

EN: Yeah. And then, I feel like people do actually forget that Jesus was a radical activist, and that he inspired his followers, his disciples – instead of just going back to their own thing after he died because the Roman empire decided that he needed to be killed – his disciples created a new religion.

Like, they could’ve just gone back to doing what they were doing, but they had been transformed by the faith that they had, by Jesus coming to them. I feel like that’s forgotten. It’s really important to remember that by being faithful to what you believe, by being faithful to what transforms you, that’s where those seeds start – that’s how spirituality and religion can transform the world.

There was this woman who walked with us, she said she kind of felt like she was grieving the land by walking through it. And that felt really honest to where she was, and it felt honest to the enormity of what we’re facing, and it felt really true to the kind of work that we’re doing.

LG: Yeah. And that [grieving] is important work.

EN: Yeah.

LG: I think the slowness of it, too, is something that we lose. That it’s hard to face, and it takes time to face it. I think people who have gone through some of the grief and the fear are impatient with other people who have not done that work.

EN: I’ve worked through some of the fear, I’ve done some of that work, so I’m not frozen by fear –and I have faith that I can help other people get there. It’s meeting people where they are and getting them past that hump of frozen fear. Getting them to the point of having faith that they can take action, and even if they can’t solve the problems of the universe, it’s still really important to have faith that you can be moved to do the work and you can do your part. Maybe together you’ll help move other people and slowly we’ll have a giant movement of people and it’ll be great, I don’t know – but I do have faith that I’m where I need to be.

EN: Did you have any other questions?

LG: You know, I really just wanted to hear you say that it was good.

EN: (laughing) It was good.

LG: And that it worked, in the sense that you connected with people.

EN: Yeah. If you open yourself up to the transformation, and open yourself up to the faith of doing the right thing, I feel like it comes through. And I think we affected the communities that we walked into, but they really affected us at the same time. Which really felt wonderful and powerful.

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You can find the New England Young Adult Friends at their website or Facebook page, or visit the YAF climate working group for resources.