Here. Now. This.

I come from a family that for generations has been on the move. My great grandfather, Benjamin Cheney, a shoemaker by trade, migrated in the mid-1860s from Northamptonshire to South Africa with his wife, Eliza, and son Walter. Almost exactly nine months after the World War I armistice, Walter accidentally sired my father. I say accidentally because he and my grandmother, Alice Elma, married only five months before my dad was born and shortly thereafter Alice decamped with baby Jack to shack up with another man in what was then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. (My husband, Simon, and I agree that Dad was probably a “celebration” baby.) Dad stayed put in Southern Rhodesia then Rhodesia then Zimbabwe for 61 years but eventually migrated back to South Africa and ended up cold (in both senses of the word) in Canada which is where my sister and her family had migrated. 

True to type, at the very first opportunity (and with a lot of luck), when I was 21 I migrated to the United States where I lived in various localities in and around Washington, DC, before moving with Simon in 1986 to Washington County, Maryland. We’ve been here ever since, and we agree that we will make our stand right here on our 3 1/3 acres along the Potomac River. They’ll have to carry us out feet first. 

Yet, in spite of having spent almost 40 years in Washington County, I still feel like little more than a sojourner in my Here. I know only the surface details of this place. Somehow, I have continued to inhabit my wayfaring stranger identity – observing the local folk a bit like an anthropologist, dabbling in its history, gaining a passing knowledge of its ecology, participating not at all in its politics and very little in its cultural life. To me, news is what I read in the New York Times (although, given the near death of the local newspaper it is hard to know what is going on around here). Even my Quaker meeting is not only in another county, it’s in another state, necessitating a 55-minute drive every Sunday. 

What about the Now? Quite frankly, Now requires a sort of internal stamina I don’t always feel I have. It is obvious that we are at a critical turning point in our planet’s existence and the history of humanity. We are wandering deep in the woods of tectonic change and can barely find the path let alone see where we are going. Climate change, environmental degradation, species extinction, massive income inequality, scary mind-sucking technology, and toxic politics all contribute to widespread angst and the feeling that we are all doomed. This is not limited to those of us who live in the US. No matter where you are in the world, the struggle is real. For want of an alternative (and not even our technological geniuses can help us), we are Here. Now. 

Which brings me to This. New England Friend, Noah Merrill, attributes our widespread anxiety to a loss of “a sense of the sacredness of our journey here on this planet.”(1) He points to Quakerism as a faith tradition that provides the tools for “sacramental living” – “for recognizing that in every moment there’s the possibility for the in-breaking of something beyond us.” Quakerism, he says, is a prophetic path that takes “the condition of the world and all of the suffering and all of the injustice and all of the joy and all of the possibility, and all of the reality of global climate disruption and the massive inequality that we experience as human beings, and also says, ‘but this is not all that’s possible. Something could be different’.” 

What does sacramental living mean for me in the Here and Now that I inhabit? I agree with Wendell Berry who wrote: “If you want to do good and preserving acts, you must think and act locally,” because thinking and acting “globally” is impossible. He adds, “This calls for local knowledge, local skills, and local love that virtually none of us has, and that none of us can get, by thinking globally. We can get it only by a local fidelity that we would have to maintain through several lifetimes…”(2) 

I don’t have several lifetimes. I don’t even have very much left of this lifetime. But I can, at least, in whatever time I have, be faithful Here and Now to This. What can I do Now to help open the door to an in-breaking of something new in the Here I have grown to love? What is my This? 

(1) Noah Merrill: "How Quakers can transform the world." QuakerSpeak video, 2014, Friends Publishing Corporation.

(2) Wendell Berry: "Out of Your Car Off Your Horse: 27 propositions about global thinking and sustainable cities." The Atlantic, February 1991