Ears whose drums you can scratch: WPRB-FM

I'm "going back" to Princeton for a day tomorrow, 6/1/2013. It's been 25 years since I graduated from the university there, and they have a big party for that kind of thing.

As I reflect on that time in my life, it's worth remembering why I went to college there in the first place: WPRB-FM.

Today, their slogan is simply, "Community-supported independent radio."

Back then, when I was in high school and then college, the slogan was even more simply, "Stereo 103.3."

Today they have a new studio in a new building, and I hope to drop in for the open house they're having. I will be pining for the basement of Holder Hall, a little bit. Not too much. Especially because if we turned up the speakers too loud, the students who lived on the first floor were liable to come down and lecture us. And it was pretty hot in the summer, with one window unit air conditioner stuck in the tech closet next to the studio, and pretty much venting into the rest of the station offices, making them often unbearable.

As the person who could well be the 25th or 26th successor to me as station manager says in this piece, "Playing music on WPRB is a way to reach out and commune with faces you may never hear, hands you may never feel, but hearts you have a few fleeting scrambling hours each week to try to touch. Ears whose drums you can scratch."

Thanks for scratching this Central Jerseyan's eardrums, 'PRB!

That's me cueing up a Brian Eno record
while taking a request at WPRB-FM,
probably in 1985 or 1986. The t-shirt
is from The Fall's tour in support of
their 1985 LP, "This Nation's Saving Grace."

Guest Post: Quaker Food Pantry, by Christine Hoang

My friend Christine Hoang is a parent at San Francisco Friends School. She coordinates the school's participation with the San Francisco Friends Meeting's neighborhood food pantry, which is a local outpost for the San Francisco Food Bank. I was clerk of the meeting when we went through the discernment process to create the pantry, and I'm pleased that not only has the pantry expanded to serve more people, it has helped keep the relationship between the school and the meeting vibrant.

The following piece by Christine was originally published in the school's "Circle Back" newsletter and is reprinted with the author's permission.

Quaker Food Pantry
At the Meeting House

By Christine Hoang
SFFS Parent & Board Member

Saturday mornings, the Friends Meetinghouse on 9th Street begins its bustling day with deliveries from a wide variety of vendors. There’s the regular delivery from the San Francisco Food Bank, which drops off staples like pasta, bread, fresh fruits or vegetables from suppliers or farmers; deliveries from Food Runners which picks up fresh and prepared food items and pastries from specialty stores like Whole Foods; and a very special bread delivery from a volunteer named Al. Al spends his Saturdays gathering bread donations from Safeway and other stores and delivering his bounty to the Meetinghouse. Al’s bread delivery now accounts for over half of the bread distributed by the Pantry.

Three years, ago, when SFFS first began partnering with the Quaker Pantry, the Pantry served 60 – 70 people every Saturday; now, the Pantry serves well over 100. Clients are slotted into twenty-minute windows in which they can shop. Each client usually brings one or two bags to fill up with groceries for the week. For most clients, the Pantry is their only source of fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as staples like bread or pasta.

SFFS families contribute to the Pantry in vital ways. Several families contribute financially, a commitment that has allowed the Pantry to feed another 25-35 clients a week. A few parents are also trained to work as shoppers, going to the Food Bank to order the week’s delivery, and filling in when volunteers are short. Most families though, contribute time. For the past three years, each SFFS grade has adopted a month in which families are responsible for staffing the Pantry. The day starts around 10:00am, when the first deliveries arrive. Working alongside delivery drivers and Meetinghouse volunteers, SFFS families unload crates and boxes off of food trucks and create a real store! Vegetables and fruits are placed into large bins or buckets, cans are sorted, pastries and perishable items are arranged delicately on tables, and loaves of bread are stacked into towers.

Another wonderful aspect of the project is that kids work alongside adults.  As SFFS parent Tawni Sullivan has noticed, “Kids feel empowered by really owning their own jobs, not just helping the grown ups with theirs.” Younger kids blacken bar codes on donated bread, organize and stack cans, and count out the vegetables for clients. Older kids break down cardboard boxes and do the math necessary to ensure a fair allocation of food for everyone. 

Around noon, the Pantry opens its doors and the first clients filter in. Most of the clients are elderly; many are monolingual Cantonese speakers; several are homeless. The Quaker Food Pantry affords them regular access to healthy, fresh food. During the shopping hour, all volunteers work at distributing food, handing out three oranges a piece, two onions, or a can or two. For Jen Maeder, “working side by side with your classmates and their families on a weekend really cements the SFFS tenets of community and stewardship. Playdates and soccer games are a great way to socialize with the school community on the weekends but there is something different about once in awhile rolling up your sleeves and working alongside your classmate on a weekend. To me, it shows my kids that I take seriously what they are learning about community and stewardship in school. It’s not something I just expect of them, but I am choosing it for myself as well.”

This is my younger son at the food pantry in 2010,
when it was just starting out.

Vital Quaker Tools (Kitchen Remix Version)

Today in leading the Firstday School for our middle school/early high school group, I brought a few props to help me make some points.

Among other things, I brought our sifter and our funnel.

When the lesson was over, it was time for the group to go to meeting for worship for the last 15 minutes. I gathered some of my things up, but left others, including the kitchen gear.

In meeting, I had a nudge to talk about the funnel and the sifter. I wanted to stand up and hold them up, for these simple, everyday tools to be visible, not just imagined. However, I had left them upstairs. So it seemed that this was not a message for that time and place.

We had meeting for business after lunch. It started with the Third Query for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, on spiritual nurture, ministry, and religious education. Among the many queries of the Third Query: "How do we teach about Quaker practices in business and worship and their importance to the functioning of our Meeting community?"

By then I had my funnel and sifter with me again, and I felt clear to speak the message, more or less like this:

These tools are important for Quakers. As with a funnel, in meeting for worship we can take all of our thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and focus them toward the center, and drop them into the container of meeting.

As with a sifter, in meeting for business we sift through the flour and strain out any chaff or pebbles, and let the good stuff drop through to be used. [spin handle of sifter for emphasis]

The tools -- centering, discernment, or even meeting for worship or meeting for business themselves -- are not the point of Friends worship. However, in my experience, they are very helpful tools indeed along the way to learning to love God and to love my neighbor. It's important for adults as well as teens to be taught, or reminded, of this.

Documentary and Discussion at Green Street Meeting: "Salt and Light: The 6th World Conference of Friends"

Chris and Robin Mohr will host the documentary "Salt and Light" on Saturday, January 12, 2013, at 6:30 pm, as a way of reporting back from the 6th World Conference of Friends that they attended in April 2012. They will also speak briefly about their experience in Kenya and about the Friends World Committee. 

The 42-minute documentary was created by filmmakers from Pacific Yearly Meeting. 

The film is appropriate for all ages, but probably of more interest to Friends over age 10. Child care and refreshments will be available. (It is unlikely we will have any ugali, but we'll try to make popcorn.) 

Green Street Friends Meeting is at 45 West Schoolhouse Lane, between Greene and Germantown Streets, Philadelphia, Penna.

Quaker Revival in West Philadelphia, 12/6/12

So I went to the Quaker Revival in West Philadelphia on 12/6/12. I missed potluck and the very beginning of the service, because I went there right from the annual joint meeting of the Advisory Council and Board of Directors for the organization where I work, after which I had to help clean up. Micah Bales and Robin Mohr have written about it already and reported accurately, in my opinion. I have something personal to add. Really, it was a semi-programed meeting for worship, with rollicking music just at the start, and a few Friends asked to be prepared to bring a message to share as vocal ministry. There was a good crowd in the parlor (where the organizers were sitting) and the living room of the home where we met. I was waiting for someone to break through the ceiling and lower a pallet down with someone on it who couldn’t get through the crowd. Because I got there late, and for a variety of other circumstances, I ended up standing in the back, in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. At first, I was slumping against the door frame, a bit tired, and wondering if I should mind being in the next room or not, two rooms away. Then I was transformed in the twinkling of an eye. I thought I could stand like a steward at the ready waiting for a call to help. And that helped! I stood with better posture, with my hands clasped behind my back, and felt better both physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I was authentically in “waiting” worship, in the classic phrase of Friends. After a while, my biceps fell asleep, which was a first for me. It felt odd to have my arms flop forward when I reached for something. No pins and needles, just floppy! I found the vocal ministry generally rich and speaking deeply, and sometimes “to my condition” directly and sometimes less so. I do think the messages are still working their way through me, too, over a week later. Overall, the revival meeting was somewhat similar to convergent Friends events Robin and I have participated in. So while she and I may have been a bit jaded, in the sense that this wasn’t spectacularly new and eye-opening (see her post), yet I felt like it was a time of spiritual refreshment and good worship together as a group. The revival meeting closed promptly at 9 pm, which was helpful to us as we had our 9th and 5th graders with us, and it was a school night. It meant we didn’t spend as long socializing at the end as we might have liked, but we did give a ride home to a Friend who had been at one of the original convergent events with Wess and Emily Daniels after Pacific Yearly Meeting in the mid-2000s. PS Micah quotes from Philipians in his 2nd post after the event. That was the book I was reading ahead of the event, thinking there might be a message for me to give! It didn't quite rise to that level, but it's reassuring to know it was on another Friend's heart as well.

Guided by...

A Friend today talked about wanting to worship with others who felt guided by something bigger than themselves, and that has agency. He doesn't care if that's God, or Christ, or Truth in an a-theist view. As long as there's that sense of something bigger. People who attend Quaker meetings without that are there for the culture of Quakers, not the faith tradition -- the religious society, as we're called.

What stood out for me was the word "guided."

I haven't been feeling very guided lately, at least not on a personal level. I moved to Philadelphia from San Francisco because my wife Robin M. is very much led to do the work she is currently employed to do, with the Friends World Committee for Consultation Section of the Americas.

Fortunately, we found a place to rent (though that's turning into a whole nother story lately), a school for our children, and a job for me that's just a few blocks away from Robin's work and the boys' school. I particularly don't take that last item for granted -- in the words of Quakers, "Way opened" for me, in a big way.

My life is focused on helping care for our family, doing my paid work, and doing one volunteer job that is rather substantial. Otherwise, I read Facebook, try to stay current on email, and read books that at least alternate between fluff and seriousness. But I'm not pursuing much in the way of an individual spiritual practice.

I attend meeting at Green Street the Sundays we're home, but I seem to be elsewhere many Sundays. Last weekend we went to Gwynedd Meeting in Montgomery County, and visited an aunt and uncle nearby afterwards; and two weeks ago, we went to 15th Street Meeting in New York City, where Robin and I met. Both of those opportunities came about because of Robin's work engagements. So I'm not as involved in my monthly meeting as I used to be. (Well, even if I were still in San Francisco, I wouldn't be quite as involved in my meeting as I used to be, because last spring I completed four years as clerk of the meeting; that was the right thing to do whether or not we had left.)

It's not surprising that I feel a bit unmoored (haha!) after leaving the area where I'd been living the last 16 years, and where Robin & I learned to be parents, and which had been where our children were born and had lived their lives until then.

But hey, today we went to meeting and then the Woodmere Art Museum where both our boys had pieces in the show of their school's art. Our younger son got to play outside quite a bit in the spring weather, and I did a little yard work and sat on the front porch to read a book about particle physics. And ate homemade pumpkin pie after a substantial dinner. So I certainly am blessed and have much to be grateful for. May I remain open to Guidance.