This is Tim Herrick's 'Inner Quest' talk at Sheffield Central Meeting in January.
My themes today are Quaker work, and Quaker play; and the
personal examples I will explore are my paid employment at the University, and
my family life with Jayne and Isaac.
These are both areas of work - teaching as paid work, and the effort
that goes into constructing a functional, let alone happy, family life - and
play - doing fun things with lively people, whether in the walls of the
University or at home. I present them
here as examples of playing and working, and want to explore how my Quaker
identity - the things I try to be, do, and say - underpins them both. They may not speak to you as examples, which
is entirely fine; and I hope here to start a conversation about work and play
where your own stories can be told.
One reason for thinking about working and playing in a
Quaker way is that in both of the main activities of my life - teaching, and
being a husband and father - I am frequently required to improvise. Neither area is definite, fixed, or certain;
a student’s question might take a class off in an entirely different direction;
Isaac might decide today is the day he wants to jump in puddles rather than
walk to the cornershop. I need to be
able to respond no matter what, and address the emerging needs of others as
well as myself. In the necessary absence of definite things to do next, it’s
useful to have a bigger sense of what I would like to happen - the shape of an
outcome, not a clear picture. So as a
parent and a teacher I am regularly confronted by new situations where I don’t
know what to do, and my Quaker faith and practice helps in several ways. Firstly, it reminds me that I’m not alone in
carrying my troubles, nor am I the first to feel lost among life’s way. Secondly, it offers a still point of deeper
belief by which to orientate myself.
Thirdly, it offers wisdom, experience, and a sense of loving care. And lastly, for me, it encourages playfulness
and experimentation - those two words, “Live adventurously”, resonated deep
within me when I first came into contact with Quakers. So even when hard at work, I try to retain a
light sense of playfulness; and when playing, an awareness of the heavier
burdens that play might be carrying.
As a Quaker and a teacher, there is a rich point of
inspiration in the work, thought, and writing of Parker Palmer. His book, The
Courage to Teach, is one of my favourite about the slippery business of
learning and teaching, and I am lucky enough to be in a position to recommend
it to others. In this book, he talks
about teachers reconnecting with their heart,
the emotional drive to make the world even a tiny degree better, that is likely
to have pulled them into teaching in the first place. He also emphasises the importance of
wholeness in a teacher’s life - sustained by community, and interactions with
loved ones, but ultimately, a version of yourself that is the same showboating
in front of 200 students on Thursday afternoon, as it is sitting silently in
Meeting on Sunday morning. The integrity
developed here - and reinforced above all by the discipline of a Meeting for
Worship - comes across to learners, and enables them to feel supported and
secure in turn. It also helps with the
vision of teaching to which I hold, the primary component of which being listening; listening to the learners, to
the materials that we share, and to myself seeking a deep sense of what feels
right. The integrity that Parker Palmer
emphasises holds me still in this act of careful, tender listening; my heart an
anchor keeping me tethered to the needs of others.
My work, and the work of any teacher, is also grounded in
hope: a belief that people can and will change, and become better through
engagement with the world outside their heads.
A passage from Quaker Faith and
Practice pinned in my office reads:
To pray about any day’s work does
not mean to ask success in it. It means, first to realise my own inability to
do even a familiar job, as it truly should be done, unless I am in touch with
eternity, unless I do it ‘unto God’, unless I have the Father with me. It means
to see ‘my’ work as part of a whole, to see ‘myself’ as not mattering much, but
my faith, the energy, will and striving, which I put into the work, as
mattering a great deal. My faith is the point in me at which God comes into my
work; through faith the work is given dignity and value. And if, through some
weakness of mine, or fault of others, or just ‘unavoidable circumstances’, the
work seems a failure, yet prayer is not wasted when it is unanswered, any more
than love is wasted when it is unreturned.
(QFP, 20.08)
This passage speaks to me because of the balance it finds:
my work, and my self, do not matter much by themselves, but the things I put
into the work, and the energy that I channel through it, matter a great
deal. This, for me, encapsulates
something critical about the work of teaching, which is using yourself as a
bridge to enable the understanding of others.
If it’s only you as the bridge, then within no time it will be fractured
and adrift. But if it’s you, and your
faith, and the spirit that moves through the Meeting - then it can withstand
almost any amount of pressure. Instead
of a rigid iron bridge, it becomes something light and, flexible, responsive to
the dance of the wind and the pressures of travelling feet. This not only helps it last for much longer,
it also makes it a more pleasurable experience to travel over; and, just as
trying to present your wholeness and integrity can help learners find their own
still small voice, it can demonstrate that to enable others to learn, all you
need is a little flexibility.
The other area I am exploring in this talk is family life,
and the pleasures and perils this offers.
I feel I can do this here, in the room where Jayne and I were married
and where Isaac first visited when he was six days old, amongst friends, with
large and small Fs alike. One of the
many delights of spending time with Isaac is the development of little games
and activities where we each have certain parts to play and variation, within
strict limits, is encouraged. The term
that fits them best is “routines” - following the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
this seeks to capture both their rule-bound nature, and their comedic
intent. An example may help. After bath, either Jayne and I will sit with
a towel-wrapped Isaac, and play “The clapping game”. This is essentially a game of imitation with
Isaac leading - clapping might have been the initial action, but now, when he
puffs out his cheeks, we puff out ours; if he shakes his head from side to
side, we follow suit; and if, as he is wont, he shouts “PIRATES!”, then we are
obliged to do the same. The core intent,
it seems to me, of the clapping game and related routines, is for Isaac to be sure that we are listening to him and
responding in ways that he appreciates. Quaker Faith and Practice 22.62 might
help us take this further:
There is little question that if
as a parent we have not taken the time really to listen to children when they
are young, listened not only to their words but to their feelings behind the
words, they are unlikely to want to come with their sharings in later life.
Sometimes, Isaac is so keen on us listening, he will compel
us - placing his favourite snuggly, Baa Lamb, over mine or Jayne’s mouth, he
will repeatedly ask “Can you talk?” The
appropriate response here is a combination of expressive eyebrow movements and
“Mmm mmm”, until Isaac chooses to remove the gag and carry on with a two-way
conversation. But most other times he is
very happy to listen to us, and us to him, without the need for
compulsion. He will recite and act
convoluted stories that put the myths of Babylon to shame, as the dolls from
his dolls house fly to the moon, get trapped in a tunnel, or go for days out
(with plenty of telling each other to “hurry up”). Listening to these is a pure pleasure as we
enter into his imaginative world, laying aside adult cares and taking time to
be still. As the passage quoted earlier
from Quaker Faith and Practice goes
on, “Learning to listen to each other in families can help to make us better
listeners to others and to the Inner Guide”.
Another routine Isaac has developed is called “Scary
monsters”, and it comes from a dark place.
It was developed after two very raw arguments between Isaac and I, when
hurt, frustration, and anger were what we shared as we were locked in
combat. The details of these arguments
matter so little I can’t recall them; but they both pulled hard at the threads
of our love, and I am (amongst other things) enormously proud of Isaac for
having the resilience to find his own way to handle conflict. “Scary monsters” involves putting your face
very close to your partner’s, almost nose to nose; and shouting, loudly, and at
length. Turns are taken, at least
initially, and it ends with a hug, or a wrestle that is also a hug. A passage from Quaker Faith and Practice perhaps helps explain “Scary monsters”,
and the work that Isaac has realised it does.
The passage reads:
I have heard some Friends deny
their anger in a silent ‘peace’ where there is no understanding of each other.
Such Friends are angry but by their silence the progress of world peace has
stood still. If we are angry we know how wars develop. It does not matter who’s
wrong. What matters is that we care enough to talk to each other.
How do we become reconciled to
each other if we are asunder? All I can say is to go up to that person and say
what is in your heart; that their ways are hurting but you still love them. But
this takes time and not many people like to look in a person’s face and find
out who they are. So we miss the reconciliation and do not have the experience
– that we cared. Given that, then we
will know who we are and find relief in tears we all should share. This is
where peace starts.
(QFP 20.68)
As a family, we do many things. We argue, and we care. We make each other laugh, and we make each
other cry. We play, and we work with, on,
and for each other. An image I sometimes
have in mind is Jayne, Isaac, and I as enmeshed cogs within a machine, each of
us supporting each other by turns; but also sometimes catching on each other,
and wearing each other away. The outcome
is that we fit together very well, but perhaps slightly less well with other
people, other parts of the machine. This
is one reason why Meeting is so important; it offers surrounding parts that
support and work with what we’re doing, while also offering differences and
things that we can imitate. Within the larger family of the Meeting, our little
family can be grown with love, as we continue to work and play together.
●
How does your Quaker identity come out in the work you
do for love, and/or the work you do for pay?
●
Where, for you, does playfulness meet Quaker-ness?
In the discussion that
followed, the ideas outlined here were given much more richness and depth by
the contributions of others. The point
was beautifully made that as adults, we all have experiences of being children,
and these experiences will be shaped by our families and other immediate
influences. Our memories and experiences
are not all going to be happy, which means that there are likely to be hurts we
are carrying around; these may come out when confronted with other people’s,
including children’s, hurts. We also
discussed how adults have forms of play - routines of their own - which give
them opportunities for creativity and joy, from sport to drama and the
wonderful-sounding “silliness therapy”.
Lastly, there was a good discussion of some of the differences between parenting
and grandparenting - which could perhaps provide the starting-point for another
Inner Quest in future.
Tim Herrick
