quakers rock

As readers of this blog, you know I write Quaker plays. I should say that as time goes by I am more aware of my shortcomings as a playwrite, but still conscious of my role as one of the only Quaker playwrites in the generation. So, I'm thinking of yet another volume and using this post to explore possibilities of things I could write about. There are a few left over from last time that never were realized; I'll try to put them here too.

Thomas Paine - (biography here) - an interesting guy, father was a Quaker - found himself in the middle of the Revolution and wrote accordingly.

Wetherill brothers - these guys were part of a Colorado ranching family, and stumbled on Anasazi ruins; they had to decide what to do with them, and whether it was ethical to take them to a museum or sell them. Of course the people around them worried much less about ethics. Somewhere in there is a Quaker play on a topic that is very interesting to me.

Here are some from before:

Quakers in the World: Interaction with Tsarist Russia

Elizabeth Vining & the Crown Prince Akihito

Mary Fisher - (not to be confused with the AIDS activist) - wikipedia article

Josh Humphries - a modern character, died recently, had trouble with his Virginia meeting. I have friends who are bold, honest, truthful, and assertive - and sometimes don't get along well with their Quaker meetings. It's not always clear who's at fault when they fall out. The reference for this is somewhere in Chuck Fager's blog; I will have to search for it. I knew him only casually.

More? write me.

Good and bad news on the pamphlets. The printer broke down about 24 pamphlets in on an order of 100 which I'd already made about a dozen (have to look that up) so there's both - the good is that I had 24 to send, and sent them right away; the bad is that I have to get my old printer back up and running and this may be easier said than done. The other bad thing is that I take this as a sign of spiritual disharmony.

The printing, cutting, collating, and stapling are my meditation, in a way. I'd spent about 40 minutes a day doing a batch of four - ten minutes apiece, a pretty steep price to pay - but I had 40 minutes, enjoyed it, looked forward to it, etc. I don't feel the same way about actually fixing a printer, or going about figuring out why it would be "not connected" - who knows? It's not connected because it's not connected. I can turn it off and turn it back on again until the sun goes down, unplug and plug in the router, I've tried all that. The wifi is supposed to just connect. But it doesn't. Is there spiritual disharmony in my life?

There are so many other things in my life that it's too easy to just put off fixing (?) one printer or starting up another (it should at least start up, figuring out how to actually use it might be a different matter)....so I've gone through a couple of mananas putting it off.

Meanwhile, inside, I'm hurting. Spiritually missing a meditation. Losing out on quiet time, making my pamphlets. My epistellary silence.

Another year has come and gone, and I missed anotehr ILYM. I have never actually seen the place, and it is only about an hour and a half away, through Peoria and up or snaking along country roads straight east, crossing the Illinois river at Lacon. No, I passed again, too tired from door dashhing, needing to work and rest on a Saturday and unprepared really for the Quaker social whirl.

I think we can do a lot more as a group than we can alone, so I totally support the gathering of Quakers and the mechanics of having meetings, teaching each other how to help out the world, and getting actively involved in our world. The world needs us, no question. Our voice does make a difference. The world of religion also needs us. Imagine this: A huge number of churches not only supporting Trump but also working actively to get him elected. What does that say for the state of religion in the USA today? Young people are avoiding it in droves. A church like that is not speaking for modern American youth, or even paying attention to it. And it will pay, its structures fading back to the earth from whence they came.

A huge, beautiful church is for sale on my street; it was a Christian Scientist church. Its organ alone is supposedly worth over $100,000 and can't easily be removed from it. It's a grand old thing with elegant gardening around it and stained glass, I believe, kind of dominating a corner that I go through maybe a hundred times a day. I always laugh at the "spirituality.com" electric sign as I sense a little desperation in watching them come online looking for anyone young, knnwing full well that an app might reach them but very little else will. They're not flocking to Christian science, that's for sure, but they're not flocking anywhere else either. The megachurch leaders keep going down in scandal, and the Catholics are notorious.

But the Quakers need a little more before people will actually flock to us. Childcare, for example. We need something for our kids to do.

Then we can buy that church on the corner, and use the organ for our own kinds of music.

I'm trying to get a supply of pamphlets printed and done so that when I put it out on social media, I'll have a back supply. Things have been busy around here, though, and it's hard to do them when there's no immediate demand.

Part of the problem is that they're very labor intensive anyway. We looked into shipping them out and they would be way more than $1 apiece that way, as far as we know. But the way I'm doing it takes a lot of my time which I no longer have. I'm mulling over alternatives.

The big printer works and is actually more efficient. It has the wrong kind of ink and seems to be stuck on that even though it worked fine for a long time with that. Now I need to find non-continuous, or something like that. I write this down here as a way of motivating myself to do something unpleasant that I really don't have time for.

I do have time for keeping my puppy on my lap; the puppy has a raspy cough or something caught in his throat, and we're afraid of taking him in and finding out bad news. He doesn't however appear to be sick or failing in health, as he sits here. But the plumber came and he couldn't even bark; he just rasped. Made me worry. I'd rather sit here and worry than run around dealing with printing issues. Meanwhile the plumbers have found very rusty pipes.

I vow here to get the Maureen Pyle pamphlets organized. You however have heard this before.

Lately I've become afraid that if I don't get the pamphlets going they might fall by the wayside altogether.

I've become extremely busy and have, at the age of almost 70, gone back to work. This has been due to a number of financial calamities involved in making a disabled teen independent, and I'm not afraid of the work, just pressed for time. It doesn't have that much to do with the pamphlets; I make a little money from them but they are a huge outlay of time and attention, and the money does not really compensate. I am selling them for about $.80 each plus postage, which comes out to about a dollar apiece to the consumer, and old timers think that's a pretty high price for a pamphlet. But commercially they would be almost $2 each and I've about given up that option. I can make them myself. Materials, like ink, paper, and card stock use up most of that 80 cents. And I figure each one takes me about ten minutes to make.

My fear is that if I advertise in Facebook before I have a supply, I'll get backlogged with orders and no time to produce. If I produce a lot now, hoping they'll sell, then what? That was my plan, to tell you the truth, just make a lot. I need to get this show on the road. The only downside of making a lot is the wear and tear on our pitiful little home printer. And my time.

Here's my resolution: the Maurine Pyle pamphlet won't die. They will be widely available.

OK I'll admit that illuminaria (see below) are not really Quakerly. A true Quaker Christmas is devoid of symbolism, no trees, no lights, no anything that represents God or puts symbols into it that come between us and God. In a strictly Quaker community, no one day is any different from another, and in a kind of austere way, we all try to live as godly a life on Christmas day as on any other day.

I could never live like that, probably, though I like the idea that the symbolism is pretty much culturally generated and does nothing for our relationship with God. But I think that, living in this culture, and having lots of kids, it's necessary to partake in some of the symbols in whatever form suits you. I'm also by the way ok with mixing religions and leaning on Buddhist or other symbols and practices if that's what it does for you. I think we shouldn't scoff at symbols that people use to try to get closer to God because if you think about it, it's much better than symbols that we use to get farther away.

Around here there's been a huge rise in Halloween symbolism to the point that many houses had skeletons on their porch from around September first to maybe December first. Having a three-month run on skeletons gets close to what happens at Christmas when this vast town of decorations keeps its lights up for maybe four or five months. And then there's Hannukah; a lot of people even non-Jews got into the candles this year if maybe because of the war. Is God going to come closer to them through those candles or through the lights on the angel on their porch (as I saw this morning)? I think God is not operating through the symbols although people are demonstrating their need to reach out.

And that's how I feel about the illuminaria (below). Once a year I demonstrate my seeking of God; I show my kids and the world that I am reaching out. I'll be the first to admit that doing it symbolically is not the same as doing it, and not as good, not genuine as it were. I feel that as well as know it. But I do it anyway, and we do a lit tree that shines through the window. They don't have white Christmases anymore around here, but trying to recreate the feeling of seeking in the middle of winter is what we're after. It doesn't matter if the neighbors notice.

A friend of mine and I were discussing what we thought happened when we died. She said something about heaven being a perfect remote island but she would be miserable there, since she always loved people.

Well, that didn't sound right; maybe I misrepresented her ideas. But it got me to thinking. If heaven is such a perfect place, wouldn't everyone be perfectly suited for wherever they were put? In other words, if she loved people so much, she would have perfect people around her all the time, right?

According to her, the only perfect people she knew were people she couldn't stand. This made me laugh because it reminded me of the old joke about how one's friends are more likely to be going in the other direction.

But what really bothered me about it was just the general belief that there is a perfect place, and a similar place, perfectly bad, and that somehow these places were created and used for people who as far as I can tell are all a combination of good and bad, with nobody a hundred percent one way or the other. In other words, having a heaven and hell as they have been generally defined (perfectly good and perfectly bad) requires God to put all people in inappropriate places: God must either ignore the good in you, and send you to hell, or ignore the bad in you, and send you to heaven. If you're 50/50 then God really has a problem, right?

In my life I have seen karma work in miraculous ways. I have seen karma as a law infused in every living thing and every living situation. Therefore I rejected this theory. The God I know works in karma, not in ignoring whole swathes of your life. I decided it was safer to bet that I'd pay one way or another for every mistake I made, and that as well every good deed I did would be rewarded in some way. I'm willing to accept that some of this karma would happen in another lifetime, in another place, but I'm not willing to accept that some of it would be simply ignored, in the interest of having a place that was perfectly good or perfectly bad.

She said something about her ideas coming from the Bible. But in fact I don't remember the Bible ever laying out what people thought heaven and hell really were, or where they were, or how God would go about making these decisions. I asked her what she thought would happen to two different people: one, a serial killer who found God at the last possible moment, after a lifetime of horrific killing; and two, someone like Mother Teresa, who spent her entire life saving children, only to find she'd lost faith in God by the time it was all over. The Bible does mention something about belief being the main requirement, which would put the serial killer in the good place. Does that mean that all of good deeds of Mother Teresa will simply be ignored? I think this theory would give God a headache He would have no intention of taking on for Himself. Why would He set up a problem like this? If He got to the first round of people and encountered this, He would be expected to change the system and start over.

On the other hand, if the whole thing is like karma, only possibly spread out over multiple lives, then God wouldn't have to worry about a thing. Both the serial killer and Mother Teresa would get their just desserts, and we'd all be better for it. God wouldn't have to do a thing, just step aside and let karma do the work. This is beginning to sound more like the God I know.

There you have it. Let me review: There is a miraculous order to the universe which we can attribute to God, but its order is mostly based on karma, and we can see the laws of karma in everything. We know that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so we suspect that something happens to us after we die. If we just have faith in the ubiquitousness of karma we can rest and know that we will go somewhere and get whatever we deserve. And this will look more like the world we know than like what traditional punters have called "heaven" and "hell." If we imagine that there's a heaven and hell out there, we have to say that karma no longer matters, and that you will either be improperly rewarded or inappropriately punished one way or the other. This would be true for the vast majority of humanity and possibly not true for a single, 1 out of 1000 case where someone is either completely bad or completely good. I'll be the first to say, I doubt even the Dalai Lama and besides, he doesn't believe in the traditional sense. I'm not sure what the Bible says about such people but I can assure you that the writers of the Bible were much like modern people in that 1) they needed to assure themselves that there was a heaven and hell but 2) after that they hadn't really given it much thought.

I have, however, heard some people point out that if heaven were really a place that was 100% perfect, that would be a little boring. Well, YES. We would all have to simply be changed so that we could get used to it. So we would lay all this on God: you change me so I wouldn't go nuts wherever you send me, and then you make that place so that it has perfect variety of people like what I like. So that perfect is perfect for everyone who is there. And we'll assume that someone is doing the same for that other place.

I suspect that the God I know, will act like the God I know.

We are selling our house in New Mexico, which is in essence my wife's retirement, and although she has spent much of the proceeds already, she is receptive to the idea that 1) I need to get out of here part of the day, 2) we could put some of the money into land or a small house, as a kind of investment that we couldn't touch; and 3) there are lots of small little parcels (<$20k) around.

One of the items on my bucket list is to have a small bookstore, but the town already has one, and I know and like the people, so pure competition there would be somewhat pointless. My goal would be not so much to make a lot of money but rather to not lose too much, and have a place to finish my books, which require extended concentration which I'm not getting at home. My wife can handle the racket here which is mostly of her own making, and she actually sees the value of getting my whole unable-to-retire self out of the house. So the various plans: a house with no other purpose, a bookstore, or a Quaker bookstore....

Hey wait a minute. I need a place to print and make my pamphlets; we don't have enough room here and I can't even get the big printer out because there's no place to put it. So with a little house I could start out each morning and print a few dozen pamphlets, and advertise because I'd have a few in stock. It would be Quaker printing house and a place where I could print a few dozen, make a nice dark cup of coffee, and sit and watch the trains. At about $130 a month, it might be worth it to both me and her.

One option of course would be to fill it with Quaker books (and shelves) and just make it a Quaker bookstore. I figure that I could supply a small house with good Quaker books for about five or six hundred and a good set of shelves to fill up the entire place might cost about the same. If it's got a purpose within the Quaker world I might be able to get co-investors or people who are at least willing to watch the place once in a while, dusting the shelves and making themselves a nice dark cup of coffee to watch the trains by. This place I have my eye on is right by a very strange train intersection, roads and a big train going northwest, I think, but I would set out as my goal making it clean, open, presentable, and simple, Quakerly. It's already gray. But it looks a little <20k dilapidated.

The thing is, if it was Quaker, it wouldn't be technically mine. My wife is thinking, we could put wayward sons there if necessary. Or we could use it as a kind of retreat from here, each going and shutting ourselves off. I want to grow a garden (not sure if the place is too close to the train). I have personal uses for the place.

So right now I'm leaning toward keeping it a personal second house, and then a gradual building it up until it's ready. A local carpenter making shelves, for example, or a trip to Philly to bring back a few boxes of good books. If it were to open then it would just be my bookstore, and it would open when it was ready. It doesn't have to open tomorrow; we just have to raise $130/mo., or whatever. All this seems pretty cheap and reasonable. Doable.

Of course, if the Quakers owned it, we might get out of the taxes on it. That might be something to consider. I know the area has Quakers but also know they don't have a set place to meet. Maybe I could change that. No better place than right by a railroad track, as we used to say in southern Illinois.

It would be wild to have a Quaker bookstore in western Illinois. I'm not sure how many Quaker bookstores there are. It would give me a reason to get out of my chair in the morning.

The pamphlet saga continues. I decided that by only being able to print and make four or eight at a time, I'm actually slowing down the process of getting these pamphlets out there, when I know there are printers out there who will just make a hundred and be done with it. So I went out to try to get estimates.

I got one - $130 for 100 - which is significantly higher than the $.80 * postage that I now charge. I could just make a hundred, pay $130, and charge $1.30 + postage and it would almost double the cost. I might do it though. I literally don't have time to run four or eight through our little home printer every day until I get a back stock of a hundred.

They are popular in St. Louis - they keep asking for more. If they get around (and I have done literally NO marketing really) I could very easily find orders piling up and myself unable to keep up with them. I have not put the word out on the Facebook Quaker sites although Cloud Quakers are familiar with them and they appear on the CQ site every once in a while. What I'm saying is that this idea of being backlogged is not that far from reality. One order of fifty from St. Louis and I'm already backlogged.

The other possibility is becoming more efficient here at home. I've actually got a better printer than the one I use - it's bigger and faster, but it takes "noncontinuous ink" and I haven't figured that out yet - somehow I have the wrong ink in it and it's stalling on me. It can crank out ten or twenty in the time the other one cranks out four. But we don't really have room for it here in the house. And, I haven't solved that nasty ink problem.

One way or the other Maurine's pamphlets will get back out there and enjoy the fame they have coming to them. She worked hard on it, and this is what I have to remember her.