Of my good friends Freud, Sir Paul, Monica and Cheryl

I have often thought of Freud when sitting in Meeting for Worship on Sunday mornings. He, or maybe it was one of his cohorts, I should know given that this was the subject of my 60+/- page senior thesis at Earlham, had a theory that subconsciously, our life goal is to return to the happiest place we ever knew - our mother's womb. 

I know. Kinda creepy. But so was Freud sometimes.

And Meeting feels like that to me sometimes. It feels like a warm, welcoming, loving, enclosed place, walled off from, but not oblivious to, the noise all around us. 

And it can especially feel that way when it gets particularly loud outside. This past Sunday for instance, there was a lot of noise coming off route 30 - sirens, motorcycles, etc. At times it almost seemed like a parade out there, but a very fast moving one.

At one point I realized that the more the noise outside is amplified, the more it amplifies the silence in our little Meetinghouse.

And that leads to one of the greatest challenges for me as a Quaker. As the outside noises get louder in my life - the national anger, hate, divisions, vitriol - so I am challenged to amplify the love, acceptance and tolerance inside me to tune all that out, or counter it in the best way possible.

The other night, driving home, Paul McCartney's Let It Be came on the radio, and I listened to it more carefully than the first couple hundred times I've heard it:

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Yeah, there will be an answer, let it be

And I wondered if those words would take on a new meaning for me in the upcoming days, while hoping I would be wrong. But I wasn't.

I came to know in the past few days that someone has been attacking me behind my back to some friends. It upset me at first, even though virtually all his accusations were based on untruths. But thanks to the wise counsel of Cheryl, my long time friend Monica and my even longer-time friend (even though he doesn't know it) Paul McC, I decided to just Let It Be, and use it as a chance to amplify my love and acceptance of a differing point of view. And it was another example of something I've tried to teach the kids when someone is speaking poorly of someone else: it reflects more poorly on the one saying it than it does the target of the comments.

UPDATE: During Meeting yesterday, I thought (prayed?) about the person who had been sharing his thoughts about me and reviewed the three choices I had considered in response to his hurtful email: 

- Email him, telling him what I'd heard and countering his arguments. 

- Confront him similarly. 

- Ignore it, as I'd decided above. 

But in the end, I chose a fourth option. After Meeting, I sought him out and went over and gave him a big hug and said simply, "Hang in there, dude."