Half an onion

Today when cooking dinner I used half an onion and put the other half in the fridge. I haven't done that in at least three years.

Know what that means? Jeff and I don't live with his parents any more. This week we moved to 380 square feet of our own in Cambridge. I come home and the door is locked because nobody is home before me. Not even a cat. When I cook dinner, there are just two of us to eat it. There's no point in cutting up a whole onion. Jeff doesn't even like onions.

I've been really committed to the idea of living in community ever since I figured out what it was. I've done the vegan women's student co-op, the Quaker center, and the summer camp. I've lived with three different families I'm not related to. I really think group living can be good for children, good for parents, good for old people, good for the environment, good for living cheaply. But here I am in an apartment, in a building full of people I haven't even made eye contact with.

I spent the first twenty-four hours crying. But it's something we need to try. (And eventually the apartment won't be covered in cardboard boxes.)

Knock and it shall be opened?

The New England branch of Quakers is rewriting its book Faith and Practice. This month we were asked to provide feedback for a chapter on worship, starting with this:

Any willing person may come into communion with the Divine without special
ritual, at any time, in any place, under any external circumstance. All that is
required is desire, humility, and a willingness to wait for the Teacher who is
beyond time to come and teach in the present moment. The heart of the life of
the Religious Society of Friends is the communal meeting for worship. It is here
that we have the opportunity to experience the Sacred Presence in a way that
draws us into community and informs our lives, both as individuals and as a
religious body. Vital worship depends far more on a deeply felt longing for God
than on any particular practice.

Upon hearing these words read in business meeting last week, I felt grief at how much they differed from my experience.

In the seven years I’ve attended Friends’ meetings, I’ve never sensed the divine (either in or out of meeting). No meeting for worship has ever felt “gathered” to me. Maybe seven years isn’t long enough, or maybe I’m doing something wrong. I’ve certainly spent a good portion of worship time distracted, but I understand this happens to the best of Quakers.

From what I have heard people of faith say about their spiritual lives, I believe that they are genuinely experiencing something deep and powerful. I don’t think they’re making it up. But I have never tasted it.

During my year at Pendle Hill I described this situation to two Friends. One, from an evangelical meeting in Kenya, answered that I needed to pray harder. The other, from a liberal meeting in California, told me I was so in touch with the universal divine that I wasn’t even sensing it as a separate entity. Neither answer felt particularly helpful to me.

This is the truth I understand: there is no guarantee I will ever experience the divine. Maybe God has me written into her calendar for next Tuesday, and if I am paying attention then I will finally sense her. Maybe it will happen in a few decades. But maybe never.

I don’t expect Quakerism to bend over backwards to include nontheists like me. After all, as this chapter points out, worship is the heart of Quakerism. But it’s painful to hear my experience denied. Perhaps the intended meaning of this paragraph is “nothing outward is required to experience God - no clergy, no special ritual.” But that doesn’t mean that it will definitely happen. Some of us knock at that door and never make it inside.

Back to earth

It's funny how a wedding shifts one's view of economy. For six months, you have to beat people off with a stick to keep them from giving you appliances. Jeff and I purposely didn't register anywhere and asked people to give to Oxfam instead, which worked very well. But there were still people who couldn't stand it and needed to give us those teflon pancake molds.

I think the Target website embodies the worst of the gift registry. No matter what you're looking at - a sofa, a video game, a lipstick - there's a button so you can add it to your wedding or baby registry. If there's anything you want, Target indicates, you can throw a party and ask your friends to buy it for you.

It's true. There's a brief frenzy during which people want to lavish attention and material goods on you. We even did some of it ourselves - last winter Jeff and I went to a pawn shop to get our wedding rings as Christmas presents for each other. At $75, my ring is probably the most expensive piece of jewelry I'll ever own.

And then . . . it's over. After living with Jeff's family for a year, we're now looking at flying the coop. As I tally up what we could take with us, I've realized how many of "our" things are actually borrowed. The things we do and don't own are sometimes laughable. We own:

An immersion blender but no saucepan.
A banjo, mandolin, guitar, stroh violin, bass, and maybe 6 whistles, but no CD player.
An oscilloscope but not a bed.
120 forks but no spoons.

How to balance this one?

For a long time my job strategy was to do something helpful. At a time when my best friend was depressed, I wanted to be a psychotherapist. After I started learning my third foreign language, I wanted to work with immigrants to the US. After my first class in the feminist and gender studies department, I wanted to work in a domestic violence shelter. Finally I wanted to travel to other countries and work in microfinance or some other kind of development.

And by now I've come to believe: my labor is not that useful to saving the world. I think the world's worst problems are not in the US, and I as an American am not particularly useful to solving them. Anyway, I seem to have gone through seventeen years of school without studying anything very practical.

So now I'm convinced that my money can actually do more good than my labor. For example, I could join the Peace Corps and spend a year learning a new language and the names of the people in my village, eventually maybe accomplishing some useful work during the second year. Or I could work a job I'm good at in the US and send my earnings to an organization in the village where people who actually know what they're doing can make their own decision about what they need most. (One thing I like about Oxfam is that they do most of their work by funding local partner organizations, rather than sending Americans zipping around the globe trying to fix things.)

There are some problems here:

1) not many people want to do good works, but lots of people want money. The competition for high-paying jobs is a lot higher than for directly useful jobs.

2) The thought of going into business, law, medicine, etc. makes me feel ill.

3) If money rather than work is going to be my primary contribution to the world, I don't know how much is enough. At our current cost of living, Jeff and I can easily get by on my $18,000 salary. (If that sounds low, please note that it's 25 times the median household income in Haiti). But since we keep more or less only what we need, we get no more benefit from a job that earns $80,000 than from one that earns $20,000. And I think most higher-paying jobs would result in me being less happy.

Usually I don't think money is a good goal. I think people are happier if they choose jobs they're good at and that leave them with free time and energy to spend doing other things. I'm distressed at the thought of measuring my life by it. And if I do something I'm actually interested in, like social work, I'm saving my sanity but abandoning people who don't have the basics they need.

Peanut curry

I've been having a tough time with the amount of meat my family eats. So it was time to bring out a really good vegan meal.

Peanut curry

Pour a little oil in a big skillet. Over medium heat, sauté:
a small onion, chopped

While that's cooking, get together some minced garlic and grated ginger. I grate the ginger right into the pan. Add those and sauté a little longer.

Spoon in:
a glob of peanut butter (crunchy is more interesting)
some lime juice
spicy stuff, if you live with people who will eat that.
soy sauce
some liquid to make it the right thickness - water, milk, or coconut milk
shredded coconut
chopped fresh basil leaves

Heat it through and it's done! I'm serving it with quinoa and steamed chard. Beautiful.

What is your money doing?

I'm pretty sure I want to get my master's degree in social work a few years from now. I've started saving money for tuition. Given that, I realized that it not only felt bad to leave my money sitting in a checking account with a huge multinational bank, but it made no sense.

So I started shopping for an ethical bank, and I've decided to open an account with ShoreBank. I'm satisfied with the ways it invests my money - small business loans in poor neighborhoods and environmental projects rather than giant corporations. And because their online savings accounts require so little overhead for them, the rate is quite good - much better than any account my old bank offered.

Are you happy with where your money is? You might read check out socially responsible investing and this list of socially responsible banks and credit unions.