CONFERENCE REFLECTIONS
For years, on my annual pilgrimages to the FCRP at Haverford, I would have no idea at what part of the campus I had arrived, nor in which direction I should be headed. There was something odd about the place; it was definitely different from the state university campus where I’d spent four years. The queerness frustrated me, and made me angry at myself because I couldn’t “get it straight”—a failure of logic, of intellect. I’d leave the dining hall and take a different route to my small group, and suddenly I could not figure out where I was. When I did, I could not understand how I’d gotten there. But as my relationship with the Conference changed, so did my relationship with the campus. I began to learn the importance of surprise and the limits we impose on ourselves through expectation.
My first Conference was in 1972, but it was some years later that I realized that the Haverford campus was at odd angles to the world. The buildings are not placed in relation to the several community roads that form the far perimeters of the campus. Rather, the campus has an inherent organization that reflects an understanding of the lay of the land; the buildings’ positions reflect an awareness of each other; and the paths are sensitive to the view they afford as well as their current of human traffic. The “L” shape of Lloyd Hall seems to have a feeling for its grandly sloping front yard as well as the dining hall that sits near its back. It greets the latter by extending itself in a stone wall that then begets a gateway through which one strolls past friends eating in the dining area, before coming to the dining center entrance. The majesty of Roberts Hall’s high-pillared porch, hung with lantern, smiles generously on the green lawn at its feet. Three dormitory towers with concave walls, within sight of the Duck Pond, are set at angles immune to the world’s notion that buildings lie flat to face the course of traffic. And always the walkways extend like the glad hands of Friends to welcome the human flow from one building to the other.
It is thirteen years since my first Conference, my first Friday night before a Memorial Day weekend, lost in the dark looking for the campus. Thirteen years ago I missed my graduation ceremony at Indiana University of Pennsylvania to come instead with my poetry professor, Rosaly Roffman, to the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology. Here we would meet her former poetry professor, Mary Caroline Richards, who had been the plenary session speaker the previous year. Here also we would meet the dancer, Christopher Beck, who would encourage me to come to New York, if I were serious about dancing.
Lost in the dark is an apt metaphor. I remember those years as a kind of spiritual twilight. I had left the Catholic Church officially at the age of 18, during my freshman year of College. I remember not going to mass one Sunday and being surprised that the wrath of God was not immediately visited upon me. In the remaining three years of undergraduate school I was searching desperately for a replacement for the spiritual backbone—stiff as it was—that the Catholic Church had provided for me since the age of 7, the Church’s “age of reason.” I gravitated toward art which I somehow sensed held the mysteries of the spirit that the Church had hinted at but had never delivered to me. I attempted to embrace these creative mysteries with a desperateness that seemed to convert them immediately to air.
As a youth I had been a talented visual artist; I’d received, at the age of ten, a scholarship to privately funded art classes at the Carnegie Museum. By the age of 15, however, due to the rebellious “attitude” that would cost me dearly in grades throughout my education, I was discouraged against pursuing art in high school. Picking up the tools later in a room filled with university art majors, I found myself at the opposite end of the scale to which I had been accustomed. Though I didn’t know it then, technically I was years behind my peers.
Nevertheless, I went against state college curriculum rules and balanced my English major with art studios, in which invariably I was the least accomplished member of the class. But I continued the quest—whittling away at my cumulative average with the inevitable Cs in my studio courses and endlessly dismayed by the ephemeral nature of the models of the spirit, whom I sought to capture in craft.
I was a serious, articulate student, an anomaly at a state teachers’ college that had only just attained university status. My seriousness interrupted the nonchalance and “fun” atmosphere of the studios. I was disliked by my teachers because of my opposition to this. Besides, I was “not any good.”
Still, I stuck with it, suffering silently, though I didn’t know for what exactly I was searching. My clues were vague. Whatever it was, it had to do with what “came out” unsummoned—and made me feel engaged or alive. While my female peers were searching for a different kind of engagement, I was blindly following every lead I got about alternatives to “completing” one’s life with a male and marriage: yoga, vegetarianism, eastern philosophy, medieval art, playing guitar accompaniment to my voice, dancing …
At my first FCRP Conference I suddenly ran into a whole crowd of people who were stumbling about and picking themselves up and looking, seriously looking it seemed, for the same thing I was. I admired the wonderful, gallant butterflies of older women around me and the sensitive men. They seemed a superior race of human beings. I was intimidated.
Always in me an intense, serious fighter was alternated with an innocent child. The fighter, I’ve come to realize was developed to protect the overly sensitive child. The child is quietly hurt and self pitying. The fighter lashes out to keep the world away. My child was being invited to speak suddenly, and she didn’t know what to say. The support was there but my child was frightened. She had not yet developed a language for such a society. Solitude had been the only place where I had found comfort. Suddenly, here were people who said they too understood the importance of solitude. I remember my amazement that the Haverford dormitories where we stayed were all single rooms. I had always been thought odd at the state university for wanting one of the few such rooms available.
The first phase of my involvement with the Conference was a kind of worship, a feeling not dissimilar to romantic infatuation. The nature of the beloved was something magical and beyond me, something I seemed unworthy of yet would not abandon. The feelings were powerful, though the source of power was unclear. As with the feeling of falling in love, I’d finally found some “ones” who understood my soul.
But similar to what might be the pattern of a good relationship, the intense infatuation and idealization moved into a period of experimentation and knowledge-seeking. This was accompanied by the inevitable disillusionment—when the ideal leaves its wet towel on your pillow for the second time, becomes your peer and sometimes not even your equal. I’ve gone through my phase of distancing myself from the “foolish self-indulgence” of the Conference only to come out on the other side and realize that at a distance we tend to feel superior. But it is abandonment to the soul’s forces that promises transformation. For me now, the Conference and I have a “mature” relationship. I love out of knowledge and a recognition of the link between the quality of what one receives and what one gives. This doesn’t eliminate the naiveté of the child who knows that surprise and spontaneity are flares sent out by the spirit indicating a different kind of “logic,” what I call road signs directing one toward wholeness.
Returning each year to the Conference, I kept finding it too short. I wanted it to go on and on. I wanted my life to be of the mettle I felt in the three short days at Haverford. In those days little lights went on everywhere in my soul. I tried to draw pictures of what I saw—to put clay on the bones of dreams and carry the creatures back on the train to New York City—in hopes that they would not go away.
I began to understand how knowledge isn’t really words. The Haverford campus for me became a place where things happened, genuinely happened to me, things that made marks on my soul, or lit up rooms of my psyche I hadn’t known were there. And so the duck pond became first a place where I took a solitary walk at night—when the pressure to be intimate became too much—then later a place where I walked with a special friend, and we shared one another’s story of pain from the year that had passed. The hill above it was where I first met T’ai Chi and Teresina Havens. We stood in wet grass under a grey morning sky when she said, “Our teacher this morning will be the mist on the pond.” On an upper story of Founders Hall, in a dance group led by Nancy Beck, I got further in touch with my physical soul that had become lost for a while following the break-up of my marriage. In a back room of the dining center, I remember George Eastman giving me an important image for recovering from loss and its mourning (roughly paraphrased). “The Self is a cathedral with many rooms. Loss of the heart never goes away. When you lose someone you love, that is always with you. But that is one room, and you can choose how much time you spend in it. You can’t pretend it isn’t there. At the same time, you don’t have to spend the rest of your life there.”
I remember on the first floor of Founders, learning from a tissue collage that I viewed my husband as a god; in a lounge on an upper floor of Barclay, in a group led by Joe Havens, finding as I vengefully kicked a mattress, that I had an extraordinary anger against our society for its mistreatment of the planet; in Lloyd, in a lounge that recalled a living area with hearthside, discovering through contact with Pat Fleming that underneath my black leather jacket I was a sensitive colorful butterfly that badly needed mothering.
I can trace the hills and the trees on this campus in my memory. Those enormous trees exercise some sort of power over people, enticing them to behave out of character. Frequently Conference goers are seen stretching their arms up as though they were sun-worshipping Incas, hugging the trees, or sometimes sitting quietly rehearsing the uncertainties and the certainties.
The dining hall where we have worshipped for so many years remains in my senses like the cathedral it resembles. I hope that I can always keep near, in my recollection, the sense of spirit rising from our collected hearts and resting lightly over our heads amid the walls of calico stone. These events have gone into and become what my life is. The weekend has gone on at last past Memorial Day; and the twilight of those earliest years is no longer an everyday state.
The FCRP and Haverford became without question my spiritual home. In my psyche—in my dreams and thoughts—the Haverford campus has become a landscape of the spirit, more so than the Catholic church where I spent hundreds of hours of my life. The assuredness and the feeling of being “alive” and excited and at peace-sensing the magic that one discovers at the Conference to be a part of one’s life, this, over the years, has been knit into who I am. It is, as I’ve learned, an ongoing journey of understanding and patience—and lowered expectations.
I don’t think it was sentimentality that made me weep, in our final celebration last year, as we crossed our symbolic “River Lethe,” the river of forgetting. Having at last found my physical self in some sort of concert with my spiritual self, I am reluctant to let go of the earth that made the harmony possible. Haverford has been where the smiles and eyes of friends have encouraged my journey; fellow journey-people hold their own lamp to light a found spot in my psyche when my initial vision fades. The ground at Haverford has been consecrated by both the warmth and tears of friends in the process of discovering and recovering their souls. It is sacred ground, and I wept to leave it.
I have come to believe, since our parting, that the light that rises at Meeting, through the years, has been knit into a golden web. Each year the web is renewed and increased by our collective lights. The Conference is a golden web that spreads over the blessed ground of Haverford and makes it more magical or holy—or wholely. I say to myself we will be able to take our web with us and allow it to fall gracefully on Cedar Crest.
Lorraine Kreahling
The May 1985 Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology was a very special one. It was the last to be held on the beautiful campus of Haverford College. “Meeting the Stranger” was the theme, a theme doubly significant since we were facing change both as individuals, and as a community. We were leaving the security and familiarity of a beloved place to become seekers and strangers in a new land.
We were fortunate to have lovely Spring weather and the familiar trees and lawns looked their best. Near the registration tables Ned Worth unpacked boxes and boxes of books to spread out on long tables near the dining area. Many old friends greeted one another. When Janet Callé asked, at the opening meeting, how many people were new to the Conference, it seemed that half the people in the room put up their hands. The others burst into welcoming applause. Friday evening involved stories and music. Beth Kingsley beat out a happy rhythm on her drum as we went in. Others with guitars led the singing.
The first plenary session was led by Dr. Samuel Laeuchli, Director and founder of the Mimesis Institute in Philadelphia. Dr. Laeuchli is concerned with symbolism and mythology and their connections with religion and art. He has developed a process of reenacting myth in a state of meditative consciousness, helping people to experience in the present moment the power and meaning of ancient stories. The first story selected was the familiar one of Cain and Abel. During the afternoon it was transformed into a gripping reality in which many of us could recognize elements of ourselves.
The chairs had been arranged in a great oval, around a central space where Dr. Laeuchli had placed three chairs. Here he paced back and forth, recalling what is told in the Bible and helping us to prepare, in an inner way, for the action to come. Especially powerful for me was the chanting of the name of the person to be called, in the spirit of the chorus in a Greek drama. Ca-ain, Ca-ain, Ca-ain (on a descending note). Dr. Laeuchli asked for a volunteer to play Cain from the audience. Cain stood and came forward to sit in one of the chairs. Then the group had an opportunity to question Cain about why he had killed his brother, asking about any details which might clarify his motives. Later Abel was called forth in the same way, and then God Himself. Each was questioned and each responded according to the actor’s inspiration. In the end Cain and Abel spoke together and came to some sense of reconciliation.
We knew that for us the Laeuchli’s had had to condense into two and a half hours, a process which usually takes a full day, with many actors taking turns in the roles and with time in between for meditation. Nevertheless, for me, the process had tremendous impact. To my amazement I grew more sympathetic to Cain than to Abel. I have two brothers and this made me more aware of how their different personalities could create misunderstandings and anger. I was also reminded of a difficult student in one of my classes who is hard to understand. It was a riveting experience in which the group of some 200 people became a part of the drama along with the actors. Dr. Laeuchli reminded us that it was Cain who went forth, “out from the presence of the Lord,” and founded civilization. We realized that a part of Cain is in each one of us.
After the enactment Dr. Evelyn Laeuchli, Dr. Laeuchli’s wife and colleague in the Mimesis Institute, lead the discussion. She provided the opportunity to raise questions and speak of individual reactions, helping us to integrate the experience.
The second plenary session dealt with the story of Cassandra. The three characters evoked in turn were Agamemnon, King of Mycenae; his wife, Clytemnestra, whose child Agamemnon had sacrificed to propitiate the gods before the siege of Troy; and finally, Cassandra, the visionary woman who had been brought back from Troy by Agamemnon as his mistress and then rejected because of her prophecies of doom. Both Clytemnestra and Cassandra spoke with anger about the way Agamemnon had treated them. The women in the audience joined in with heated questions. Then the men began to speak. Here was an ancient story which could arouse deep feelings about present-day relations between men and women, this time leaving many negative feelings which were not resolved by the end of the session.
Afterwards it was interesting to see how some people had been touched more by one story than the other. Some found the group too large for such a process and the time too short. All seemed to agree that this type of enactment was a very stimulating change from the usual lecture format.
As always the many interest groups each met four times offering a choice of movement, discussion and sharing, journaling, work with clay and paints in various combinations as paths toward self-discovery. Again this year the men’s group was popular. Two groups were special to this year’s conference: one led by Judy McGahey and Eleanor Perry for people who felt like outsiders in their communities and wanted to discuss their sense of strangeness and isolation. The other on “Resonating with the Trees of Haverford,” was led by an old time member of the Conference, Teresina Havens. This group helped to plan the farewell ritual as a way of saying goodbye to Haverford on the last day of the conference.
The ceremonies on Monday were planned as a Rite of Passage. The small groups had been given the program in advance with the opportunity to choose a favorite tree or spot. My group went to visit the great spreading purple beech on Founders Green on Sunday evening. The group was just big enough for us to reach around its trunk with hands joined, giving us a chance to sense the tree’s presence and to share a quiet time together under the shelter of its branches, sitting on the huge gnarled roots which connected it to the earth.
On Monday we began with Feldenkrais exercises led by Larry Phillips, as a preparation for letting go old patterns. The meeting for worship which followed was a time of waiting for the Spirit. I remember especially Herta Rosenblatt, a refugee from Germany who has given so much of herself to the Conference over the years, saying poignantly: “I was a stranger and you took me in!”
After Meeting the small groups fanned out quietly across the campus to go to their assigned tree or area. There they had time, each in their own way, to thank and bless the space for all it had given us over the years. Then Mercury appeared with wand and silver wings on his feet, signaling that it was time to gather on the great lawn under the spreading Chinese scholar tree. As people came from all directions, we gathered in small group circles linked to each other, dancing and singing:
Ezekiel saw the wheel
Way up in the middle of the air…
And the big wheel run by faith
And the little wheel run by the grace of God
The wheel and the wheel
Way in the middle of the air.
The tree was decorated with an ornate and colorful banner created as a parting gift. We then opened into one large circle singing:
May the circle be unbroken
By and by, Lord, by and by.
There’s a better home awaitin’
In the sky, Lord, in the sky.
There followed readings of several short poems written for the occasion, and then came the unexpected. From behind the big tree came a messenger bringing two crowns woven of vines and white blossoms. To the delight of everyone, two senior members of the Conference, Eleanor and Chuck Perry were crowned Queen and King.
The ceremony ended by everyone singing as they crossed a symbolic river of silver foil to the new land of the future, taking with us the gifts from the past at Haverford.
Michael row the boat ashore
Hallelu - u - jah!
Michael row the boat ashore
Hallelu - u - jah!
River Jordan is deep and wide
Cedar Crest on the other side.
It seemed to me that the sadness of parting had been marvelously interwoven with thanksgiving and joy in sharing the journey together. I, for one, felt better prepared in spirit to move on to new adventures at Cedar Crest College in 1986.
Alice K Smith
“The Way of Relationship” was the topic of the 1985 annual conference of the Redwood Quaker Association for Psychology and Religion held at Ben Lomond in California. The leaders, Paul and Linda Niebank, an environmentalist and a planner, are active members of Pacific Yearly Meeting. The topic was approached from a variety of perspectives emphasizing Quaker values and their relevance to Jungian thought. There was discussion of the ways in which relationships are expressed and experienced as well as of their essence. There was also a special celebration of the art of weaving, and “expressive groups” provided openings for music, painting, clay work, dance, creative games, joumaling and poetry.
An article in the 1985 Spring issue of Full Circle describes the way in which: “Each conference is a culmination of what has gone before. Each one of the conferences is another aspect of our learning about ourselves collectively and individually. Each one of the conferences is a step in preparation of what is to be. The leaders, presentations and materials focus on the importance of understanding ourselves both independently and in relation to others. The leaders themselves have shown us that we can only teach Love, Growth and Understanding through being loving, growing and accepting beings …
“And yet with all of the planning, all the preparation, organizing, scheduling and making arrangements the conferences are only as effective as the individuals who attend. It is … those who gather to share in a loving and supportive manner, who make the conference a garden of enrichment.
“Our preparation is similar to that of the Redwoods. Upon casual observation many of these trees appear to have little relation to one another. They appear independent and alone in their struggle for survival. And yet there is a part of their existence that is highly contrary to competition, namely the Coastal Redwood’s adaptivity, its unique ability to grow in unorthodox ways. Many a Redwood grows out of a burro of an old stump. Many Redwoods grow attached to others that have fallen against them or are in their proximity. Unique also to the Redwood is its cooperative root system which collectively seeks water and nutrients that are shared…
“Many of us who come to the conference find ourselves growing also in unorthodox ways. And yet our support base continues to hold and feed us. The conferences serve as common ground where we come together to weave a spiritual growth base. And although our outward growth stances take many different forms from necessity, we continue to hold each other in a loving and supportive manner.”
P. K. M.
The Conference on Psychology and Religion held at Upland, CA in the Spring of 1985 was led by Christine Downing on “The Dark Night of the Soul.” Christine is Professor of Religion and Psychology at California State University San Diego, faculty member of the California School of Professional Psychology, psychotherapist and author of The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine.
Participants report movingly, in the 1985 Spring issue of Full Circle, that the experience both opened and deepened her life:
“Christine asked us to reflect on the ways we shield ourselves from the painful realities of our darkness. What does it mean to stand naked, exposed, open to all of life? What does it mean to wrestle with the night inside ourselves and perhaps receive a blessing while still in that night? Darkness invites a different mode of knowing, a knowing through reflection rather than understanding…Such consciousness does not tell how or why…It asks us to live our experiences fully and not require explanations. Experiences of the dark, those times in our lives when all is void of meaning, when we feel faced with destruction, are not unreal and are not without their own intrinsic meanings. They belong to the flesh of our individual and collective lives.
“Through myth and metaphor we are helped to enter our process more deeply. Christine retold the Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna’s descent into her sister Erishkegal’s underworld and the Genesis story of Jacob wrestling with the night stranger. She asked us to let go of our protective shields and let the darkness work in our innermost spaces. She suggested that Jacob’s meeting with the stranger alone on the river bank be read within the context of his entire life and the lives that preceded his. He met the stranger with all that he was at that moment, carrying in him the breach with Esau, his flight to a far land, marriage, births, deaths, and his hope for reconciliation with his brother. The stranger did not come out of the blue. He carried both personal and archetypal meaning …
“Throughout a long night Jacob and the stranger wrestle but neither prevails. The struggle is exhausting, terrifying, seemingly unending, and without promise or assurance that he will survive. Jacob knows only the experience of the struggle. He does not retreat nor is he paralyzed by the stranger… He meets him with all his strength and resources. The meeting is intense and profound. He emerges with a wound in the thigh which he will carry all his life.
“Like Jacob’s, experiences of the dark come upon us as nameless strangers, arriving from what seems to be the unknown. And, as Christine pointed out, they are always the kind of darkness that we are most afraid to touch. Only in struggling with them, taking them into ourselves, tasting the salt of mingled sweat and tears, can we begin to know that the stranger is part of our innermost self and worthy of our love.
“Christine spoke of the aloneness of such encounters, when we are forced to face our darkness, and all that we have believed about ourselves and God crumbles. Parts of ourselves we have long tried to avoid gather like crows: our rage, loneliness, jealousy, lust, fear of abandonment, madness. Vast courage is required to meet the reality of life as it is.
“Jacob refuses to let go of the stranger without a blessing from him. While it is still night the stranger gives the blessing in the form of a new name. No longer will he be Jacob, He That Supplants, but Israel, Striving With God. Jacob meets the new day and goes to be reunited with his brother transformed by his night’s struggle and bearing a blessing that he had earned, unlike the first which he had stolen. Christine warned of robbing the experience of its potential transforming power by naming the stranger too soon. Naming changes our relationship to experience and has its own delicate timing.
“Jacob’s wound is not unlike the life wounds we carry. They may no longer be raw and bleeding but they are with us always. His thigh wound was not his last, nor did it protect him from more sorrow. Rachael dies in childbirth and his beloved son Joseph disappears. To try to live our lives avoiding the stranger’s cut is to avoid life. We must learn the courage to live all in the depth of our being and know that God is of the darkness as well as the light. To do so is to be alive, complete, and human.
“Small affinity groups met during the weekend to look at the particulars of our (own) lives in the shadow of darkness with the loving support of Friends…We also shared an evening of song, and dance, and a session of mask making. I left the conference … with few words and a sense of having been deeply touched.”
Linda Filippi with Margaret Edwards
The 1985 conference was held at the Wellspring Conference Center near Gaithersburg, Maryland on a snowy February weekend. The theme was “Four Journeys” referring to a puppet play about four persons in a mythical kingdom. In order to fully comprehend its nuances, its author, Pamela Mayer, a student of Jung for many years, presented the play twice during the weekend. Following the second performance the group was ready to discuss its implications after which small groups held three sessions each. These were devoted to fairy tales, symbols and masks, discussion, dreams, and movement, relating them to individual and collective journeys.
C.P.