As the Quakers say…

About 25 years ago, Tim and I found ourselves in a sharing circle in a convent in San Francisco. As with most unusual experiences, we can’t exactly pinpoint how we arrived at the decision to be there.

Dubbed the first West Coast “spiritual formation gathering for spiritual leaders,” we joked that we didn’t know what the term meant, and we were certainly not spiritual leaders, which made our presence there even more puzzling.

In that first “get acquainted circle”, the attendees and retreat leaders took turns sharing their names, professions, and why they had come to the retreat. I heard the names of several authors whose devotions I had been drawn to. Pastors, spiritual directors, lay leaders…one by one the introductions continued until it was Tim’s turn.

“My name is Tim. I am a bus driver. I have no idea why I am here.”

In spite of that awkward start, though, we both had seminal experiences that week with our new tribe: contemplatives. The stories of miraculous encounters at this retreat are for another time, but during the week, one ritual occurred that we came to love: the setting of intention for the day.

The leader for the first morning began by leading us in prayer and then explained the plan for the day, which involved a lengthy introduction and a list of activities. This was standard fare for conferences.

In our heads, we were already gearing up to start completing tasks when we heard the leader pause and take a deep breath. Having finished an exhaustive list, the leader looked up, gently smiled, and then simply said,

“Or not…”

We looked at each other and stifled a laugh. Those two words gave us instant freedom from the tyranny of our inner “rule followers” who clamor for control and approval. We were encouraged at the end of each morning’s plan to listen to the gentle promptings of the Holy Spirit and act on those promptings even if they did not include the “official plan.”

We have continued to practice that holy listening especially when we travel, so when we awoke at the Grand Canyon well before dawn, we set the intention to see the sun rise without knowing what the destination would hold. As we walked the darkened path, we could barely make out other forms carefully making their way in the pre-dawn light.

Arriving at Mather Point, we noticed pockets of people who had gathered before us, many wrapped in blankets to ward off the early morning chill. Excited murmurings filled the air, and the conversations swelled as tripods were set up and cameras readied to hopefully capture a miraculous moment. Waiting for this sunrise, I saw faces come into focus that reflected cultures from all around the world. I witnessed selfies and family photos being taken, and I heard the mingled voices become like a rush of water babbling over stones. As the soft grey light increased, eyes seemingly gleamed with the same expectant, hopeful glint.

The sun was coming.

Suddenly, I saw a woman’s gray-haired head turn from a rocky place below the crowd. In a thick German accent reminiscent of my mom’s, she nearly shouted at the crowd above her on the path.

“You need to be quiet.”

A moment of stunned silence spread, thickening the air with shock and shame. Joy was rushing off the path like air out of a popped balloon. I turned to the small crowd near me who seemed almost paralyzed and simply said,

“Or not.”

I get it. We all approach sacred moments in different ways. Some of us are navel gazers, and some of us dance in the aisles with our arms in the air. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

But this was not a classical music concert with strict protocols on when to applaud and when to be silent. This was not a loft in a study library of a hallowed institution of higher learning. This was not a solo hike in the woods that came with an expectation of solitude and reflection.

This was a communal experience of the miracle of a sunrise over one of the seven wonders of the world.

Like her, I too had expectations for how this moment should be met. I wanted that crowd to burst into wild, spontaneous applause and cry out, “Do it again, God” when the sun completed its climb over the rim. I wanted to conduct a spontaneous Mather Point choir, lifting our voices in a magnificent chorus of “How Great Thou Art” as the first red shafts of light cut through the clouds. I wanted us to hug each other before we walked away, total strangers of every tribe and tongue, and wonder at this shared experience of shalom expressed in a sunrise.

But in the end, I simply remembered that after the intention is set, I could gently let go of my agenda and simply say within my heart,

“Or not.”

And I wish she had done the same.

Money doesn’t grow on trees

Growing up as a child in the fifties, we heard a lot of truisms whenever any childhood need was expressed. Probably the most often used was related to financial matters. If we wanted a new toy, for example, we always heard, “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” a phrase that seems pretty common to many of us.

Over the years, when sharing childhood memories, the topic of childhood truisms would often come up while reminiscing with family and friends. Though we found we had many in common, some of us heard slightly darker truisms. In our family, for example, if you expressed boredom, you were often given two options: 1) go play in the street, and 2) go take a long walk off a short pier.

Ask a question? That would be met with, “Where were you when the brains were passed out? Behind a door?” It was, as they say, a rhetorical question.

But there is one truism I have never encountered in conversation with others, and it was an expression saved for me, the only girl in a family of three brothers, a military father, and a German immigrant for a mother.

Only French whores do that.

My first inkling that I was in for a rough ride as a young woman was when, as a blossoming girl, I asked to get my first bra. My dad looked at me and asked with obvious derision, “Why would you want to make mountains out of molehills?” Again , it was a rhetorical question.

To my credit, I did not shrink, but emptied my piggy bank, walked to the nearest five and dime, and bought myself an orange one that I was was sure made me look like Marilyn Monroe.

Then, nearing my teen years, I wanted to paint my nails a soft red, like the girls I saw in the men’s magazines that should not have have been lying around in the open in our home. The response to my request?

Only French whores do that.

Wear lipstick? Curl my hair? Shave my legs? Wear a bright colored shirt? Wear perfume? Make any movement towards expressing my feminine side?

Only French whores do that.

As a result of that ingrained truism, it should be no surprise that I have lived in a world of black and grey most of my life. But I also developed a life long fascination with people whose nails are painted, who wear perfume, and who wear colors that celebrate the vibrancy of light and life. When I met a new therapist for the first time in Seattle, for example, I remember I remarked how I loved her bright red, painted toes, and she immediately responded, “You could do that too, you know…” At the time, that seemed like a totally novel concept, because…well, you know.

Only French whores do that.

Now living in the Southwest, vibrant colors live loudly in the desert sun, and I am still drawn to folks who celebrate those colors like a moth to a bright porch light. Just yesterday, I met a beautiful elderly woman at a pool. Her nails were painted a lively coral to match her lipstick. An entire bouquet of tropical flowers bloomed on her swimsuit in bright yellows and oranges. Long silver earrings dangled from her ear lobes with green gemstones trapped inside. I couldn’t get enough of soaking in her presence. I wanted to dissolve into her.

Then this morning at 3 am, I was awoken with this thought:

I want to paint my nails.

I don’t think this is about vanity or rebellion or trying to draw attention to myself. I don’t think I am caving in to some cultural perception of what beauty is. And I don’t think I have lost my mind.

I think this is about me, at 70, deciding I want to be free of the paralyzing falsehoods that settled as truth into my spirit all these years.

Maybe French whores do wear red fingernail polish. But so do teachers and lawyers and political candidates and hardworking men and women of every profession. Maybe wearing perfume will make me smell like a French whore, but it also might make me smell like a mom working hard to raise her children or a doctor tending to a dying patient or a pastor walking down the aisle of a church. Maybe red is the color of sinful women, but it is also the color of life saving blood, and on every depiction of a loving heart, and a symbol for the Holy Spirit.

I am going to be on a personal mission today. I hear the local tattoo shop around the corner is good at piercing ears. And they are actually very close to a nail salon that probably has a rainbow of color choices that will still work with these guitar playing fingers. Perhaps a purple streak in my hair? Who knows?

Some might call this a second childhood,

but since I never had a first,

I think it’s finally time.

Mark Twain had it right

”Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”

Many of us have found these words of Mark Twain to be so true as we have traveled to foreign lands, experiencing new cultures, and encountering situations where we are “the other.” I know that in my own travels to Europe, for example, I embraced the “new” vigorously and without prejudice, hoping to expand my horizons beyond the confines of my middle class, Liberal, White American point of view.

Recently, my travels over these last four months have been through a new “foreign land” - Rural America. And as I have been traveling across this rural countryside, I have been mulling over how apropos Twain’s words might be here in this new land I am experiencing as “the other.”

Rural America has received much ridicule in recent years for what has been characterized as “backwoods” attitudes and lack of intelligence when it comes to current issues. In my own urban culture, we have questioned the compassion of folks who live in these foreign lands, and we have impugned their character.

But driving across these lands and through these small towns, I have begun to wonder if it has been I who have been guilty of prejudice and lack of openness to “the other.”

As I have driven past homesteads surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands, of acres with nary a neighbor in sight, I think about how strange our big city concerns must seem. The headline touting Seattle as the having the best naked bike parade would seem very other worldly to the family scratching out a living on a family farm working from sunup to sunset with no break from their labors. To the community of 546 people and declining, concerns about what pronoun should be used in addressing their lifelong neighbors would seem ridiculous.

Having millions of tax dollars going to try and solve the issue of the homelessness that pervades our large cities would seem a small issue to someone whose streets, when they visit, are filled with others who only come into town for supplies before heading out to an equally isolated life. And, it occurs to me, that maybe when someone is in need here, the small community comes together to help each other out. In such a circumstance, creating expensive infrastructures to do what comes naturally to neighbors in a small town would seem wasteful and puzzling, since neighbors are expected to take care of their own.

I know that problems occur in all communities, large and small, but the sheer volume of what we encounter in our urban areas shines a bright light on problems that would seem very dim to some of those rural communities. Not only have they been isolated from the world as I know it, but I have been isolated as well from the world as they know it.

As with most criticisms, pointing a finger at others points all the others in my hand at me, and I recognize that it is time for me to begin to try and understand this other side of America… to travel metaphorically so as to counter the prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness of which Twain speaks.

And of which, I now realize, I am perhaps most guilty.

In doing so, I may find more commonalities than differences. In doing so, I may begin to more fully understand the question, “Who is my neighbor?” and be able to extend a hand of grace and acceptance with the same vigor as I embraced other cultures different than my own.

And in doing so, I may find that as with most travel, sometimes the farthest distance we will ever cross is within our own heart’s landscape.