Growing into Contemplation
Parker J. Palmer. Getting Real: From Illusion to Reality. In On The Brink Of Everything:
Grace, Gravity And Getting Older. (Oakland: Barrett-Kochler Publishers, 2018)
The paper is part memoir of becoming a contemplative and part how to be a contemplative in four short essays. He is a seeker in a religious setting. By which I mean his inherited faith is not carrying him into personal faith automatically and he seeks, what for him is, a more rounded understanding of God, the universe and everything. Born into a United Methodist[1] family it did not sustain this ‘almost contemplative,’ and he searched. He met his soul mate Thomas Merton twelve months after Merton’s death when he began to read, The Seven Storey Mountain. This led him to bring his family as he says, “In 1974, when my family and I moved to the Quaker living- learning community called Pendle Hill, I knew only a little about Quaker faith and practice[2].” Reading Palmer made me reflect on why I did not join the Quakers back when I lived at the edge of Pendle Hill. Palmer’s Pendle Hill was in America, mine in the wilds of Lancashire which gave a backdrop to my childhood. This was more “Coronation Street” than “wuthering Heights”, but both were set around the same area. Quakers are more properly known as The Society of Friends and do not have a structure like main denominations. “One of the truly revolutionary aspects of the early Religious Society of Friends was the freedom granted to Quaker women to preach, prophecy and travel in the ministry[3].” I knew I was called to ministry but at the time that would mean joining the Anglican nuns and appealing as it was the world called me in other directions.
Pendle Hill is special to me because of the Quakers and because of the experience of women at the hands of men in the area. As I read Palmer I am drawn back not alone to my youth, but to the story of those women who were called witches. In the Christian tradition all such practices are heretical and punishment was death by whatever means. During my youth a friend, Ann, took the name Alice Nutter to signify her allegiance with the slain women of Pendle Hill. I am drawn back time and time again because now I am engaged in contemplative practice, I recognize in Parker’s short essay, “Contemplative By Catastrophe[4],” being pulled into the contemplation through a series of unfortunate events. For him it was depression and for me it was caring for a sick child. He says,
“Depression was, indeed, the hand of a friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand—the ground of my own being, with its messy mix of limits and potentials, liabilities and assets, darkness and light[5].”
There is no other way than contemplation for me. I operate in an extrovert world but my mind remains in my hermit shell and I cannot wait each to return to my silent home. The girl of my youth, she could not join the Quakers because she found no comfort in silence and filled the void (God shaped hole) with loud music, loud friends and noise of any description.
[1] Parker J. Palmer. Getting Real: From Illusion to Reality. In On The Brink Of Everything: Grace, Gravity And Getting Older. (Oakland: Barrett-Kochler Publishers, 2018) 64
[2] Ibid 118
[3] Margaret Hope Bacon, “Quaker Women in Overseas Ministry.” Quaker History 77, no. 2 (1988): 93-109.
[4] Ibid 55-60
[5] Ibid 73
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