TERESINA HAVENS
Teresina Havens continued the discussion of interplay between “the inner” and “the outer” from her own unique perspective. As one whose youth had been dedicated to simplicity and to separation from worldly possessions, she has found herself needing to integrate what she regards as holy with the things she has exiled. In her ruefully humorous way she described her recent problems in coming to terms with three things she had exiled from her life: lawyers, dollars, and machinery. She has been forced to do this, because she has become involved in incorporating Temenos, a religious retreat center, and in building a lodge on its property.
She used to look down on lawyers because they exploit the poor and help the rich get richer. Now she has found a humane lawyer who has used his expertise to perpetuate her ideals in a legal structure — even involving the use of Quaker queries.
As for dollars, when she was living among poor people in voluntary poverty, she thought rich Quakers were sinners. “We were righteous because we lived in poverty.” But their poor neighbors were saying “You can speak … you have an education … you can’t be like us.”
Added to the dollar problem was “the usual feminine numbers anxiety.” Now that Joe Havens is treasurer of Temenos, they are trying to make its budget more interesting with colorful pie charts. So dollars are coming back from being exiled. They can facilitate and they can be passed onward as inheritance. It’s not always “just a happy trip … These things … have got demands, claims, and contradictions.”
And then, machinery! She had drawn a picture of “one of these wonderful machines that has a great huge thing that moves dirt and something behind that moves dirt. They’re so wonderful, these machines!” In the past, “I couldn’t be bothered with machines, only bicycles and typewriters, but not big machines. But now I’m so grateful to these big machines … There are some rocks you don’t move by hand. Maybe the Egyptians did. So we made friends with the machines — and with their drivers, these wonderful local guys. They leave their machine overnight and I make a sketch of it.”
“So this is both the literal machine and also the machinery of life, and this has been hard for me.”
Terry is still “trying to bring back that area from exile … The spirit has got to work through all these various kinds of machinery,” and she is grateful also to the Movement for a New Society’s help in providing the machinery of group process.
She went on to impress on her listeners the problem she feels in respect to the limits of owning and exploiting land. What would a Quaker testimony be, and how could it be brought to bear in terms of society as a whole? She wondered whether it could evolve as the testimony against slavery did. “John Woolman was not just finding his own fulfillment or being his own person. He was contributing to the development of a corporate testimony.”
She added that the last area—physical disability—“is so problematical I’m just going to leave it.… I haven’t found how to use it in the service of divinity. So I’ll ask for help on that one.”
One of the most moving moments of the conference occurred when a young participant rose on her crutches and said, “Terry you asked for help with how to serve divinity with your disability. That particular form of question is hard for me, but what I can at least offer you—is me. My hands are out. Maybe what it is, is a chance to welcome a whole new group of people to be a member of us. I welcome you. I welcome your pain, and your suffering, and your joy, and your pride, and your thinking, and all of you. I’m glad you’re here.”
TERESINA HAVENS, a member of Mount Toby Meeting, is on sabbatical leave from the University of Massachusetts. A course which she taught there recently was “Personal Testimony and Social Change: Gandhi and John Woolman.” She and her husband, Joe, have established Temenos, a center for healing, in the wooded hills near Amherst, MA.