October 2009 issue
John Calvi is a Certified Massage Therapist specializing in trauma and a Quaker healer with a spiritual gift for the release of emotional and physical pain following trauma. Since 1982 he has worked with rape survivors, people with AIDS, inmates, and tortured refugees. He is also the founder and convener of The Quaker Initiative to End Torture, QUIT. John is well-known among Friends in the West, having visited Meetings in Pacific and Intermountain Yearly Meetings and offered workshops on healing at Ben Lomond Quaker Center. This is an edited version of his address to North Pacific Yearly Meeting this year.
So. Experiencing light in hard times: how do we stay faithful in times of trouble?
As someone who taught young children for ten years as a Montessori teacher, sometimes I like to take these larger questions and break them down into smaller questions to help the learning happen. And when I look at this title, which I think is very large, I break it down into two questions: how much are you freaking out? And how large is your anchor?
Times of trouble are known to all of us. There is pain for every person. There is trouble, conflict, difficulty, injustice, known to us as individuals and as groups, and certainly in our witness throughout the world. And so maybe what we’re talking about this morning is that our faith is going to be an aspect of our response to trouble. And when trouble comes, when we experience pain, are we able to keep that connection to the Divine? Are we able to remember our testimonies and our principles as we witness injustice, or maybe as we ourselves are personally offended, or personally endangered?
In some ways this is a very large question, and in other ways it is actually a fairly simple concept. There is a wonderful old Arabic saying, which is, “Pray to God, but tie your camel.” Yes, devotion, but have you done the practical things which are necessary to be in the world? The ways we respond to trouble are as important as the trouble itself. And is there a way that we can be responding to trouble which will maintain our connection to the Divine? Can we do as early Friends suggested, and leave the meetinghouse on first day, but not to leave Meeting for Worship? When trouble comes, can we still be working in the Light?
Creativity in Crisis
How creative can we be, and how much can we work without fear as we enter into crisis, as pain comes into our lives? This becomes a very important question. Can we be creative when trouble comes?
My Great-Aunt Lucy and her friend Ruby came over from Italy. They had some trouble when they came, because in Italy they were farmers, and they had land, and they grew their own food. But when they came to America, they had to live with relatives in the city, where it was crowded and there wasn’t land. But they got some flowerpots, and they planted eggplant, they planted tomatoes, they planted what they could. And at the end of the summer they had three bushels of eggplant. But they didn’t have the heavy crockery they needed to salt and sweat and drain the eggplant. So they took the three bushels to the laundromat, and they put it on a spin/rinse cycle.
When you find yourself in a circumstance where it is not as you hoped and not as you planned, and you still want to go ahead and carry on with your work, your response to the crisis—and your ability to bring Light into it—is going to be very important.
Responding to Pain
When trouble comes into our lives, one of the ways we can understand our response to that trouble is to take a look at our response to pain itself. What is your understanding of pain in your own life, and how have you responded to it at first? Over time, how have you learned to respond to it in ways more helpful to you?
As I have traveled around for the last quarter-century, working with people in trouble, crisis and pain—refugees who have been tortured, the AIDS epidemic, the crisis of rape—I have seen something very clearly. It’s that when we are in trouble and in pain, we have this image of God that’s very much like the one Michelangelo put on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He’s a big white guy in a cloud with a beard, strong—a landlord. But he owns everything. He is very strong and very powerful, and a bit of a grouch. You should not get on his bad side, because he will fry your butt. We beseech this idea of God. “You’re the one who is in charge. I need your help now. Things have gotten really bad down here.”
There is also a very different experience. When we are in a gathered and covered Meeting, it is extremely common that we come to an understanding that the Divine is beyond words. Language is insufficient, and the spiritual experience is so large and so intimate and so intrusive to our lives that it permeates every atom and every molecule—it totally surrounds. The idea of putting the Divine in a human form of one person is really not what we are experiencing. We are experiencing something much larger and grander than that.
It’s common among Friends to have spiritual experiences which teach us the Divine is beyond language and beyond any simple description, and beyond using any simple idea or picture to witness that experience. Now here’s a problem: we have this experience of the Divine over here, and we have this beseeching of the picture over here. These two things don’t match up very well. And they especially don’t match up well when there is a group of people having this spiritual experience over here which is very deep, and the people over here who are in pain and trouble, holding to a picture of what the Divine is.
These two groups have to communicate and work together. This becomes a difficulty. Sometimes it actually becomes a difficulty within the individual. How do I understand the Divine? Is it this as experience over here, where I don’t actually have language, or is it as this experience over here, which is so familiar? This can also set up conflict within and between different groups.
One of the important things for us to remember is that it is a burden to dislike someone. And not only is it a burden, but on those occasions when we enjoy disliking someone, that’s actually pathology. Now, I say this coming from an Italian family, where the tradition of disliking people is very strong. But it is something within all of us. All Quakers recognize this situation: you walk into business meeting, and you see so and so. Your first thought is, “Oh God, they’re still alive. Just goes to show you the limit of prayer.”
There is authority on this idea that it is a burden to dislike someone—Jesus. Speaking in the Sermon on the Mount, towards the end of that beautiful speech, he says, “You’ve been told that if you kill someone, you’re going to Hell. But I’m telling you if you yell at someone, ‘you fool!’ You will go to Hell.”
As an Italian, my first thought is, he’s saying we can’t even get angry at someone. Oh, my God! We’ll have nothing to talk about! We can’t yell? But I think essentially Jesus once again is right. To yell, ‘thou fool!’ at someone, to disrespect someone—it does separate us from the Divine. Even though we know there are people who are worthy of our disrespect and have earned our anger with everything they have done, that act separates us from the Divine.
And sometimes, we can hug someone and say, “When I get angry with you, I miss you.”
So can it be that in all conflict of all sizes, interior to the individual and among nations, that we have to answer the question, “do I still understand that to dislike anyone is a burden?” We need to ask ourselves if this is a burden we need to continue to carry, and if there is a way to lay the burden down.
Sometimes we are truly insulted by someone. I remember my grandmother working their farm with eleven children. A neighbor down the road came by and said, “You know, those Italians, they smell funny because they’re dirty, and they steal things, and they are lazy.” My grandmother picked up the axe and went next door to change his mind. She had to be restrained by my grandfather.
Sometimes the insult is so large that the anger feels absolutely justified and natural, and has to be held and kept. And holding a grudge seems like a good, solid, honest tradition. You’ve heard of Italian dementia, where you forget everything but the grudges?
Sometimes there hasn’t even been a direct insult, but there are qualities about an individual which make it easy to dislike them. We had a person in our meeting who kind of degenerated. She was a social worker, and she had spiritual gifts—she could see the colors around people. She could read those colors and tell you whether or not the trouble you were having was your thinking, or illness in your body. She was also physically and emotionally unwell. When she got off her medication, she would upset people, and as she deteriorated, she became increasingly eccentric. When she needed a ride into town, she’d hang around the ATM, and when you drove up in your car, she’d get in the other door. She’d tell you she didn’t need to go far, and was very friendly, but it scared a lot of folks. For many, she was easy to dislike or disrespect.
The Spiritual Life
There are folks who have been very wounded by Christianity and by churches. I would just remind us that we cannot blame Christianity on Jesus. It was never his intention that there would be millionaire preachers on television saying that God would save them is you sent $700 this year. This is really very separate from the message of Jesus. I would encourage anyone who has been wounded by Christianity to make friends with the teachings of Jesus, because there is useful wisdom there. And for those of who have had a visitation of Jesus, I would ask that you share this passion in a way that other people can understand, because it is a precious experience.
Having a visitation was not something I asked for. But one morning I was in a church basement, working with a woman from El Salvador who had been severely tortured. As she went into prayer and I began my work, Jesus came into the room, and there was no doubt about who is was, how it felt, what it meant, and how beautiful the love. It’s very important for those of us who have that kind of experience to be able to share that in ways which do not bump into the wounds caused by Christianity.
I did have a little bit of fun with this once. My Aunt Rose was a born-again Billy Graham Reagan Republican. And one day when I was visiting with her, her knees were hurting very badly from her arthritis. And I said, “Aunt Rose, if you say your favorite prayer, I’m gonna do a little bit of energy work. Let’s see if we can make this pain less.” Now, Rose was a severe conservative. She thought that the American war in Vietnam was a good idea. But she also had a strong spiritual life. And she had clear direct lines to Headquarters. When she went into prayer, you could feel it. And when she went into prayer, I began to do my energy work, and towards the end her eyes popped open.
There was a little bit of a thing going on between me and Aunt Rose because I was her favorite nephew, but she did not like the idea that her favorite nephew was a homosexual who went and married another man. For God’s sakes! And when her eyes opened up and she said, “My knees don’t hurt anymore. How did you do that?” I said, “Well Rose, when you are a child of God, holding to the Light…”
Our experience of a spiritual life can begin to interfere with the difference between knowing and believing. One of the differences between knowing and believing is whether or not your respect for other people is spiraling upward or spiraling downward. If you are quite sure that you know how Heaven is constructed and who God is and how the Divine works, then every time you listen to someone with a different understanding, chances are your capacity to disrespect them is spiraling in a way that increases that disrespect. Whereas if you have your ideas and you believe how things are constructed in spiritual life, rather than ‘knowing’ it, you may learn something different. You may be open to continuing revelation. In that case, your capacity to listen to another person who thinks differently actually increases.
Understanding Responses to Pain
In terms of being in the Light during troubled times, I want to take a close look at what we understand about pain. What do you understand about the pain in your life? All of us have some pain. Maybe it’s an old pain, maybe it’s a new pain, maybe it’s something that has passed and left an impression. Maybe it’s something that’s happening right now. What it is that you know about your pain and your response to that pain? And how is that different from the people around you? How do those other people respond to trouble in their life?
Think about crying. How is it that you cry? When is it you allow yourself to cry? I find that if I cry about two hours a week, I can keep about even with my grief for the pain of the world, with my grief for the pain within our nation, with my grief for the pain within my own individual life. What are the circumstances under which you allow yourself to cry? And how is that different from the people around you? Some folks need to be alone, some folks need to be with someone else, but that other person can’t really pay attention. Other people need to be with someone, but the need to be held while they’re weeping.
What is it you understand about how you respond to pain? Has that changed? Is that changing now? Does that change with the different kinds of pain you experience?
Something else I would remind us of is that the Light, the Divine, the presence of reverence, is constant—just as sunlight is constant. When there is a cloud or there is nighttime, we understand that the sun is coming back around, and the sun is still shining even if we can’t see it. The Divine, the Light, is the same way. It is there, it is constant. It doesn’t leave, it doesn’t go away. It is we who are interrupted in that connection to the Divine. It is we who lose track of the fact that we ourselves are aspects of the Divine, that we are the breath and the fingers of the Divine.
How is it that we reawaken ourselves to come back, and understand that we are aspects of the Divine? What brings you back to your own greatest wisdom, to your own best capacity to receive spiritual guidance?
One more idea about trouble: the only way that I am able to go and do my work, where I witness so much suffering, is to understand that trouble and pain have a function, and that function is learning. Any kind of trouble or pain we have experienced has parts and pieces of it we can learn from. And it is in the learning that we move pain and suffering into knowledge and wisdom. Whatever pain you have now, somehow, there are ways to understand the parts of that pain so that it is less fierce within you. Somehow, there are some ways to consider it in parts and pieces, not just as a big block with no handles on it. And when there is pain or conflict or trouble where there is no learning going on, the conflict simply remains pain and trouble and conflict.
An old friend of mine used to give thanks for his troubles. His prayer would be, “Thank You, dear Lord, for this pain in my life. I know I didn’t do very well with it today, but I’m sure if you bring it back again tomorrow, I can try again and improve.” I have never been able to sincerely say that myself. I have only gotten to the point of being able to say, “Thank You that it didn’t hurt as much as it could have.”
When I was sixteen and first came to Quakers, I felt so much that I kept coming back. And I began to understand that Quakerism is cumulative. The more you enter into the silence and the stillness, the more that you ask to be washed in the Light, the more that you participate, the more you begin to understand that there is ground opening up beneath you that is larger and deeper than you first imagined. As members of the Religious Society of Friends, as Quakers, we have a duty to come to that place which I think of as a spiritual pinnacle, which is to be in awe of Creation. We are called to that point of stillness and deep-centeredness, whether in Meeting for Worship or in service, where we can look at the most beautiful and the most horrific and be in awe of the creation of all of it, and be astounded, and be grateful. We have an obligation as Quakers to continue to try and reach for this place where we can be in awe of all creation.
Visit John’s website: www.johncalvi.com.