Spirit in Action
The Wisdom To Know The Difference - Eileen Flanagan
Eileen Flanagan shares insights & stories of lives heading toward serenity, empowerment and wisdom. A writer, mother and former Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Eileen draws on deep spirit and wide ranging vision to help us make decisions leading to a better world.
- Broadcast on:
- 22 Nov 2009
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be speaking with the author of The Wisdom to Know the Difference, When to Make a Change and When to Let Go. Her name is Eileen Flanagan, and her website is eileenflanagan.com. She's written an inspirational and thought-provoking book that gives us tools to wrestle with life's questions big and small. Eileen, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thanks so much for having me, Mark. Eileen, where exactly do you live? I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and I'm a member of Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. According to the book I just read, The Wisdom to Know the Difference, you have been at home much of the time you've taken up the career, I think, at one point of racing kids. Is that still your full-time profession? Well, I'm at a phase of life now where I'm juggling. I had become a writer before having children, and then after having children, I continued to write, but very part-time, sort of during nap times. I needed some extra income, so I started teaching part-time at one point at Pendle Hill and now at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. But that's still a part-time job, and I basically write the rest of the time when the kids are at school, and then on home when they're home. And why do you write? I normally have guests on this program because they're working to change the world in terms of peace, justice, care for creation and a lot of other things. Why do you write specifically? What's the motivation? I think I have two motivations. One is that for me, writing is a spiritual practice, so even when I was home with my children and they were young, I felt like I really needed to write for my own sanity, for my own self-knowledge and exploration. Really, my journey as a writer corresponds a lot with my spiritual journey. I think when I started really intently asking spiritual questions was when I started writing. And so there's a way that it feeds me, whether it's published writing or not. But the other side of it is that I do want to also be a published writer and influence people and help people, even though that sounds a little presumptuous. Both in terms of nurturing people's spiritual lives and also in terms of impacting the world, because I really believe that if we lived with less fear, if we lived listening to our inner guides more, that that would have a positive effect on society. So this book, although it's a spiritual book in many ways, talks about how making more spirit-centered choices also affects different social issues. So changing the world and changing myself, I guess would be the short answer. And the name of this book is the wisdom to know the difference. And as most of us know, that's the last line of the serenity prayer. You have at least two versions of the serenity prayer that you mentioned in the book. Would you care to share them, so we're all starting from the same ground? Sure. The one that most people are familiar with is the one that got popularized through the recovery movement. And that sometimes said in the singular and sometimes in the plural. I started with the singular version in my book, which says, "God grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can change, and wisdom to know the difference." The other version that I include is one that was given by Reinhold Nieber, the Protestant theologian, who gave this prayer during a sermon during World War II. And many people credit that as being the origin of the serenity prayer. There's a little bit of controversy over that. The version that he used says, "God grant us grace to accept with serenity the things we cannot change, courage to change the things that should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." So it's different in a few ways. It's said in the plural, Nieber's version starts with the word "grace" or the request "God grant us grace." And it also uses the word "should" instead of the word "can," which changes the meaning slightly as well. And why did you start the book on this? Have you been part of the AA movement in one of its manifestations, or is there other ways in which you came particularly close to the serenity prayer? I have not been part of the recovery movement. I don't really remember where I first heard the prayer, but the time that it really took hold for me was when I was pregnant with my first child, which was about 13 years ago. And it just struck me that it was such a wise approach to this situation of pregnancy where there were so many things that seemed completely out of my control. On a big scale, the baby's health, there's no way you can guarantee how this child is going to come out. But there were also lots of little things too. Is she going to be born on time the date they give you as if there's really a schedule for birth? When my favorite doctor be on call, all these things will my water break in the supermarket that I realized I just couldn't control this whole situation. But at the same time, I felt really strongly the weight of this responsibility to try and care for this new person coming into the world as well as I could. And it just struck me that that serenity prayer of focusing on the things we can change or control and letting go of the things we can't really was a wise approach. Because I didn't want to get so caught up in trying to do everything right as a mother that I forgot about the face piece because for me trusting God and trusting that God is ultimately in charge is a really important part of my journey. So it's part of trying to figure out how to bring my spirituality into the obstetrician's office with me. And at that point, I wrote an article on the serenity prayer, started thinking about all the other things that it could apply to. So I had the idea for the book a long time ago, but I knew I wasn't ready to write it then. The book contains a lot of information, a lot of input, a lot of interviews I think that you did with a whole range of people, somewhere close to 30 people that you interviewed. How did you pick these people? There's a range of religious and lifestyle and location. How did you get this vast assemblage of people together? Well, I've often thought it would be fun to get them physically together and put them in a room, but that never happened. Partly, it was intuition. Partly, it was people would suggest someone. At the very beginning, I started with a few older folks who just seemed wise to me, who had gone through a lot in their lives and seemed to have a pretty good attitude and outlook on life. Because I realized as I started writing the book before I had done any of the interviews, and I realized that just my ideas by themselves were going to be kind of dry, that I wanted stories to really show how the things I was talking about applied in real life. So I started with a few of those people, and then my husband said, "Oh, why don't you interview Dan Gottlieb?" And someone else said, "Oh, why don't you interview my boss? I'll tell him." One of the wisest people I know, there were a few people who approached me and said, "I heard about your book and I have a story that I think fits that I want to share with you." And then, as I got further in the process, I got a little bit like a jigsaw puzzle because I was trying to be diverse in terms of race and religious background, and in terms of geography, although that was a little harder. And so there was one point that was kind of funny where I was writing chapter four, which is about changing how we think. And I thought of Buddhism and how much Buddhists have contributed to our understanding of the mind and how we can train the mind through meditation and practices. And so I thought, like, I really need a Buddhist, but I didn't want, you know, like I know a lot of Quaker pseudo-Buddhist who have gone to like a weekend retreat or read a couple of books. But I wanted someone who had really studied the tradition, and I wasn't sure how to go about finding them. And two days later, I ran into a friend who is very open about being in recovery and knew about the book. And he saw me and he said, "Oh, I lean. Come here. You have to meet my friend." You know, "This is my friend. He's a Buddhist." And this is Eileen. She's writing a book on the Serenity Prayer. And I have to go catch a bus. He walked out and it was just immediately clear that this was my guy. He had grown up learning about Buddhism in Korea, had come to the United States, and as a new immigrant had started drinking a lot, and then had gotten into recovery. And he had been in recovery for like 20 years and had been really intently studying Buddhism for 20 years. So I have this very unique perspective on the Serenity Prayer. And that I feel like was just grace or way opening as Quakers would put it because I probably couldn't have found this guy if I went looking for him. And there were a few cases like that where the right person just came along at the right time. You've got people who you interview whose concerns, I guess I'd say, are very personal with themselves. One of the people who you highlight in your book is a therapist. So part of his work in helping people have the wisdom to know the difference is that of a therapist. But you also talk in terms of kind of global issues, environmental or peace. You have one section where you talk about the Camden 28, I think it is. So you talk about how this wisdom to know the difference is so essential to so many ways. Do you want to share any of your personal stories, the things where you saw the wisdom to know the difference in the subtitle of the book, when to make a change, when to let go, how personally for you it's been powerful? Sure. Let me just say first in terms of the connection you made between personal issues and political issues. One of the themes of the book is what one of the people I interviewed called getting in your lane or really finding your calling in life, finding what path you're kind of gifted to follow. So part of the reason I think the stories range are that some of us have callings that really focus more on personal issues. Like Dan Gottlieb, the person you referred to who's a family therapist, said this is how I can best help the world, is by helping people let go of their anxiety. So it wasn't that his work is disconnected from the bigger concerns of the world. It's more that this is his path and that not everyone is meant to go out and give lots of lectures on climate change and changing our relationship with the environment like Hollister Noulton, another person who I interviewed, who felt that that really was her calling in life was to work on these environmental issues. So part of the reason I think there's a range of stories is because among people there's a range of ways in which we're called to work in the world or to give our gifts and contributions. In terms of myself, I find that I often think of the serenity prayer in terms of the little struggles. I think it can apply to little struggles and big struggles, but on a daily basis as a mother, you know, being stuck in traffic when I'm kind of late getting the kids from school or something like that. It really helps me to remember this is one of those things I cannot control and just to let it go. And particularly I think after interviewing the people from the book who've been through such major struggles, their voices are like in the back of my head now, just reminding me about what's important. In terms of bigger things that I've dealt with in the last few years, probably one of the bigger ones has been my mother's death. I was her only child and I was her primary caretaker for the last year of her life. And ironically, it's kind of like birth that birth and death are these transitions in life where we really can't control the timing or how this is going to go. We're engaged with a medical system that wants to control things as best they can and it just makes you realize that it's a mystery. My mother was always a very organized person and a very good planner and she would ask the hospice nurse like, "So, you know, how many weeks do you think I have, you know, if you wanted to put it on the calendar?" And it was just a realm where we had to let go of all that desire to control and to accept things. So the Serenity Prayer was very helpful to me in that realm. On the other side of things, one of the examples I give in the book of someone who had the courage to buck convention, I talk about how Barack Obama didn't listen to all the people who believed he wouldn't get elected because he was African American or biracial. And how part of the courage to change things is sometimes seeing that there's a bigger possibility than what other people think is possible. And so I was very happy to work on that campaign and to sort of see people's belief in a new possibility shift. At the beginning, there were a lot of people in Philadelphia who was like, "He's never going to win, you know, and watching people sort of develop this hope." Now, I was always cautious to believe that just because Barack Obama got elected president doesn't mean he's going to solve all the issues that I care about in the world. But just the process of working on his election and seeing people in my mostly white neighborhood vote for the first time for an African American candidate for president was very empowering. It was just an example of something changing that a few years ago people would have thought was impossible. That is one of the interesting things that you make the point of. You point out that certain religions and certain cultures, certain peoples have a tilt in a certain direction in terms of making something happen or in terms of acceptance. And that is either good or bad, except as the situation dictates. And you give an example about a water or spigot in the middle of an area. Tell that story, if you will. Well, I was in the Peace Corps in Botswana in Southern Africa in the '80s. And, you know, sometimes you don't see your own culture until you go live in another culture. The Tuana culture is very laid back. The serenity part, they do really, really well compared to us. If there was a late train or somebody got a flat tire on the road, people just went with it. They didn't get anxious, they didn't get upset. I remember one night I was catching a train and the announcement came that the train was late. And all the women just kind of laid down and took a nap on the platform. And I felt very comfortable going and doing that with them and feeling very safe that this was a community where people looked out for each other. When I came back to the United States, it struck me how that wasn't true, that people got much more anxious. And the first time I took Amtrak and it was late, the person I was sitting next to looked like his blood pressure rose, 40 points, just because the train was half an hour late. But the story about the spigot is sort of the flip side of accepting things too easily is that sometimes we don't necessarily change things that we could or should change. So I was teaching at this school in a rural area. They were on the British system where they ranked schools and we were actually the second to worst school in the country, which was kind of funny. You know, you could almost brag about it if you were the worst school in the country, but we were the second to worst school in the country. And the students would rinse their lunch plates every day under a spigot that was in the middle of a very dry, dirt space. And so every day there would be a big mud puddle after they rinse their plates. And some other Peace Corps volunteers had this idea to build a drainage, catchment area that the water would run into, but then the agriculture students could use to water their crops. Because Botswana is a very dry country and it was sort of perpetually in drought. So not only did it make a big mess, this mud puddle is also just really wasteful. And so I helped to write a grant to the U.S. Embassy to get money to build this way of dealing with the problem. And it was just a funny situation where I felt the positive of our American kind of can-do culture, like here's a problem. Let's figure out how to solve it, which my Botswana colleagues never just felt inspired to do, but then coming home, I felt the flip side of our culture and the sense that we sometimes tried so hard to fix everything. That we have very high rates of anxiety in our country compared to other cultures. There in a field stands a tree holding on. Rooted deep and good soil has lasted through many a stone. Sometimes it means, and sometimes it breaks. And love is the ground where this seed will grow. Deep is the ground that these hearts are sown. Higher than this, that reach for an end sky. Good is the land of where the branches wind, that keeps growing on. There we keep growing on, as if tears are falling, leaves bring a season to close. Soon light green will be showing, and this is the start of its own. And the sun and circles past, and another moon is the breeze. Love is the ground where this seed will grow. Deep is the ground that these hearts are sown. Higher than this, that reach for an end sky. Good is the land of where the branches wind, that keeps growing on. Here we keep growing on, and on, and on, and on, and deeper and higher. Stronger and stronger. Perfect it is, simply in the way that it's not. Beautifully done, a lasting creation of God. And the life that it gives, and the mercy that comes from the trees. Love is the ground where this seed will grow. Deep is the ground that these hearts are sown. And higher than this, that reach for an end sky. Good is the land of where the branches wind, that keeps growing on. If we keep growing on, we keep growing on, and on, and on, and on, and on. [Music] That beautiful music was by Chris Pfeiffer. The song is "We Keep Growing On". Chris was a guest from my song of the soul program, and his music really captured me. That song seems to me to capture the elements that today's spirit and action guest, Eileen Flanagan, is talking about. Eileen is the author of "The Wisdom to Know the Difference", and her book is based on the serenity prayer. So we're discussing acceptance, courage, and wisdom. And of course, what helps us get to that point, the place just right for us in each case. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, host of "Spirit and Action", a northern spirit radio production coming to you from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, broadcast locally by WHYSLP, and at other stations across the nation. Eileen Flanagan is joining us from Philadelphia PA. Eileen, you've been talking about the cultural contrast in terms of acceptance and the attitude to be able to change things, that you notice the differences between Botswana, where you were in the Peace Corps, and here in the US. And you also mentioned this with respect to certain religious groups, that there's fatalism or empowerment that's connected with religion. Can you think of a few of those examples? Well, I quote my mother. I was raised Catholic and an Irish-American family, and my mother used to always quote her Irish nun when she was growing up, who would say, "You are a Patanis Earth to suffer for the Galaria Christ, and the Sonaria gets you to ask the better off, you'll be." And I think there's definitely a strain of that in Irish culture, at least old Irish culture, maybe not so much today, of a kind of just put up with things. My mother said that if the teacher did something really unfair or beat the kids for something they didn't do, you wouldn't dare go home and tell your parents, because you weren't supposed to ever question the teacher, you weren't supposed to ever complain. I'm happy that my kids are not getting that kind of indoctrination going to a Quaker school, where children are encouraged not to disrespect authority, but to ask questions, to say what they think. And I think that they're getting a healthier balance, but I'm not sure that it's possible to get a completely perfect balance. Sometimes I think that my kids are growing up sort of expecting the world to revolve around them too much. So it's really hard to know, you know, where is that perfect balance between learning, even as a young person in your social conditioning, that there are things that you're going to have to accept in life, but there are also things that you can change that you can speak up about. I wouldn't say in general, though, it's one religion versus another. I think that there are different strains kind of within different religions, and that sometimes it has to do with culture and class and education level and all those other things mixed in with religion. One of the people you interview is from New Orleans and suffered the depredations of Hurricane Katrina when it hit there. In the story that she relates to you, how do you see the courage to change, the acceptance, how did those interact in that particular case for her individually, but also for us as a nation? Well, there were so many things that were part of Hurricane Katrina. Excepting it with equanimity is going to relieve some of your suffering. There's nothing you can do about having lost your house or something in a natural disaster. But problems created by human beings are problems that we can and should address. Katrina was an example of those two coming together. Certainly, there were things that could have been done ahead of time to diminish the impact of the storm, and one of those many things, along with all the things the government could have done, is that more people could have left. I didn't ask Rob and the woman I interviewed about this or challenged, "Why didn't you leave?" But I think that in that situation, she was like many people who thought, "Well, we'll just ride it out. It's not going to be that bad." And it turned out that it was. So whether that's a situation where people maybe should have taken more action ahead of time is easier to see in hindsight. But in terms of accepting it once it happened, she was really remarkable to me. She said that all her life, she had prayed for patients because she thought she wasn't a very patient person. And that saying, "Be careful what you ask for." Because she said Hurricane Katrina was really the experience that taught her patients, sitting, waiting for help for three days. She just sang songs to herself, different kinds of spiritual songs ran through her mind, and she just kind of kept repeating those to keep her spirits up. And then she did kind of make a change in where they lived. She and her husband moved out of New Orleans and decided to start over elsewhere. But that case raises so many questions about what we as a society should be doing. I mean, in a really fundamental way, should we be building cities below sea level under near the sea? It seems kind of crazy that human beings are trying to hold back the sea. But given that there's a city there and a lot of people, what are the things that we could do to make it more safe? It seems to me that you picked out a lot of people and a lot of experiences that capture threads of activism changing the world that are really essential. One that was captivating for me was the man who raised a pisk bold and decides that that's the direction he wants to go, becoming a piskable priest, and runs into problems with that because he's gay. Talk about the threads of that, and again, the serenity prayer, the wisdom to know the difference when to make a change, when to let go. How did that act in his case? Well, and if I can, before answering your question, the story of how I found that man was remarkable enough. As I said, I was trying to have a diversity of people. And among the people interviewed, there was at least one gay person who didn't speak about that in the interview. They spoke about other things. So part of me was wondering, is this an issue that I'm supposed to talk about or not? It was something that I wrote about in my first book, which is on relationships. Some people in the publishing industry suggested that you might sell more books if you didn't include that, but I was very clear with that book that I wanted to include gay and lesbian relationships along with heterosexual relationships, not in a separate chapter. So as I was writing this book, I was just sort of waiting to be open to see, is this issue going to present itself to me again? Am I supposed to include it? Because every gay and lesbian person I know who's talked about their spiritual journey has talked about accepting themselves as being a really important step on their journey and coming out as being something that helped them to be closer to God. So that seemed to really fit. So this particular man who uses a pseudonym, Timothy, with someone who I didn't know at all. As I said, the book was sort of like a jigsaw puzzle. And I got to a point where I had rearranged some things and I needed a story about discernment and looking at the other stories around it. It's since got re-juggled again, but from where it was at that moment, I realized I had a disproportionate number of women and a disproportionate number of people from Philadelphia. I had a disproportionate number of Quakers. And it was right in between two African-American stories at that earlier draft version. So I said, "Okay, I want a white man who's not from Philadelphia and who's not a Quaker, but who will talk about discernment in the kinds of ways that I'm talking about it. And where am I going to find this person?" It just happened that I subscribed to a newsletter about discernment from an episcopal group. And I had seen a newsletter article written by a man and his name just jumped out and I thought, "Well, maybe I should call and ask him about his experiences with discernment." So I called this person out of the blue, "Say, can I come visit you?" He very graciously says, "Yes, I show up with my tape recorder knowing nothing about him and turn on my tape recorder and say, "Well, can you share with me some stories you've had about discernment?" And here he tells this very moving story about feeling called to the episcopal priesthood, going through a very lengthy discernment process. He had a committee that met with him regularly. He was also going through the diocese process of discernment to make sure it was right for him to apply to seminary. And after about a year of this when he felt really clear that this was his calling, the bishop called him in and said, "No, because you're openly gay, we're not going to accept you to the seminary, you're done." And so Quakers would use the phrase "way closed." And that is such a tricky part of discernment when you feel called to something and then the world doesn't cooperate. Does it mean that you misunderstood your calling? Does it mean that other people have misunderstood God's will? What does it mean in terms of what you're supposed to do next? How do you accept something that is not just inconvenient but which really feels wrong to you? It's a story that raises all the toughest questions. And of course it's a story that made it clear to me that I needed to write about this gay issue or the issue of homophobia really in this book as well. And I was really grateful for that because I didn't want to have all the discernment stories be sort of. I discerned God's will and made a million dollars, which is how some kind of pseudo-spiritual books make it sound like if you find your calling, it's all going to be 50 and easy. And it's not in real life. This story just raised all those challenging questions. And the answer that he comes to is that community was really essential. And that having a supportive congregation and having really supportive people on this committee that was discerning with him with what got him through. And that was where he felt God's grace and growth through what was a very difficult experience. You have a significant portion at the end of the book talking about community and communities role in wisdom. And if you're going to change the world, community can make that possible or make it difficult as in the specific case that you just talked about. It's quite astounding when we can step back from our cultural situation. Of course your time in Botswana helped you do that. I also had my time in Togo where I was a Peace Corps volunteer step back and see the assumptions that our entire culture is making. And sometimes we're very tilted like you have to do it. If it's all possible to do something, you have to do it. And in other cultures, that imperative isn't necessarily there. But I do feel it as part of American culture. You know, if you can keep someone alive one more day, you have to do it. So anyway, back to the question of community. Talk a little bit more about how that affects our discernment of wisdom and how we end up needing to come down in terms of the serenity prayer. Because some people really figure, you know, you've just got to keep trying to your last breath. And some people think, no, I just have to turn to accepting vessel, whatever comes. And this whole book is about the fact that it's not an either/or, but that there's discernment and community has a role in that. Well, that's right. I would say that community really supports the three main ideas of the serenity prayer, serenity, courage and wisdom. So first on the serenity front, it's much easier to accept something difficult if you have a supportive network of people. And like the case of Timothy having to accept the decision of the bishop, the fact that he had people who loved him, who supported him, who were going to advocate for him, who would pray with him, was really what got him through it. And there are other stories in the book where people said that as well. And we'll talk about her mother dying and being an only child caring for her mother and knowing that there were neighbors who would step in, knowing that there were people in her faith community who were supportive. And Martin Seligman makes the point, he's a psychologist from University of Penn who's written a lot about positive psychology and optimism. The phrase he has, I think he says our spiritual furniture is running threadbare that four year, 50 years ago, in general, Americans had more support network than they do today because people move all over the country, don't necessarily live in communities or are part of faith communities that can give them that support in difficult times. Sometimes people have to cultivate it. I also talk about in terms of change, as you mentioned, that there's things people can do together that they could not change alone. Hollister Noulton talks about that in terms of doing environmental work, that when she started trying to do that work as an individual, she really got depressed because it seemed so impossible. And that finding like-minded people who were doing similar work gave her hope and courage and energy and a sense of possibility that she didn't have as an individual. Then in terms of wisdom, I use the Quaker example of the Clearness Committee, the idea of having a small group of people sit and listen to help you discern as just one example of how community can help in discernment. A lot of the things I talk about discernment I draw on different writings from different traditions, but the idea that community helps us to listen to and follow God's guidance is, I think, a particularly Quaker view of discernment. And just having people who know us well is part of that. People who can point out our foibles, you know, if we have a tendency to rush off and do things too quickly, or if we have a tendency to hold back and hide our gifts, community can help balance us out on either front when people who love us and know us and have our best interest at heart can, you know, give us the nudges that we need, one direction or the other. I want to ask you a little bit more about Clearness Committees in a moment, but I'm still wondering if our listeners have really latched on to how important it is to get the self-knowledge, and one of the elements of the self-knowledge that we need to know is what kind of a soup we're swimming in. There is, for instance, in America a strong ethic that's very widespread, as you point out, of individualism, you know, where you shouldn't share your troubles, where you should drive to the store to get your own cup of sugar rather than asking your neighbor, or whatever the case is. The ability to see beyond the soup that we live in, I mean, you can never totally divorce yourself from it, of course, but if you can step back and notice that it's affecting you, that really can empower you, or let you see clearly what's going on. And people certainly follow paths in life because their family culture, or maybe their city culture, or whatever says, you know, what you should want to be as a lawyer or a doctor, when what they really are called to be is a very good janitor. And again, I think that it's our national culture, but it also is impacted by region, by class, by generation. The woman who you mentioned from New Orleans talked about how different the culture was when she moved up north immediately after the storm, that her neighborhood in New Orleans, everybody knew each other. If she needed a ride to the doctor, there were at least five people who could offer her a ride, partly because she was a newcomer, but also because the regional culture was different, she didn't have that same sense of being able to rely on her neighbors. So it partly depends on where you're living, I think, and it is really hard to see, as you said, the soup that we're swimming in. One of the other things I talk about is how our education affects our assumptions about things. How people who went to the kinds of schools that were preparing them for high-powered colleges and careers might have, in very subtle ways, been given their whole lives, the message that you can make a difference, what you think matters, what you say matters. People who went to another kind of school might have very subtly been giving the message, what you think doesn't matter, what you say doesn't count. It's very hard for people to see that that's affected them, but it's easier to see in other people. That's part of the trouble of developing self-knowledge. It's easier sometimes to see the patterns in others, but then if we think about it and reflect on our own experience, we can start to see how those things operate within us. Certainly the point of view you come from is religious and/or spiritual. There is this god word that keeps coming up, or maybe it's higher power, and you've got people in the book who are not necessarily specifically religious, I guess, that they have an outlook that still reaches towards a wider wisdom. How much do you think it's important or necessary or helpful, maybe, to have this concept of the divine, this concept of the higher power? I think in AA they slip it in there fairly inapptrusively, but it's a necessary element of going through the 12 steps. I think that AA and the recovery movement in general was just brilliant to come up with this term "higher power," because we have so much baggage around the word "god." I talk about that in chapter one as part of cultural conditioning that some people grew up with such negative images of a god who was punishing or fearful that they don't want any part of it. For some of the people who I interviewed, letting go of that judgmental, angry kind of god and connecting to a sense of spirituality that was not rooted in fear was really empowering. Some of the people I talked to weren't interested in religion at all, but, again, found this sense of connection or trust in something greater. And to me, I would say that ability to live with trust seems really important to me more so than what we call it. I'm not interested in converting everybody to my language or my way of understanding the divine, and I try to use different words in the book in order to make it more accessible to people. I left the Catholic Church myself actually on Ash Wednesday of my freshman year of college. It was very kind of dramatic. I was reading the profession of faith during math, and I just started to question, "Do I believe that? Do I believe that? I'm not sure." And so I had several years where I wasn't part of any religion. And so I always want to write with that phase of my life in mind. I want to write a book that's accessible to people who don't feel connected to organized religion. But I know that at that phase, still, I would go to nature and I would feel that there was something bigger than me in the universe. And I had a fundamental sense of kind of being able to trust life, but I don't mean that in a quibble way that things are always going to be easy or things are always going to work out. But a sense that things happen for a purpose, a sense that there are resources I can draw on, a sense that I can trust my own inner guidance about things. To me, those hallmarks really make a difference in how you live, more so than whether you use the word "God" or not. Because a lot of people use that word but mean different things by it or don't necessarily alter their behavior because of their use of that word. Is it important and by that I mean is it helpful, is it necessary that people have some sense of higher power? If they think they're totally in control of things, if they think that all of the power that the buck stops only here, it doesn't go anywhere else, does that prevent certain steps that are necessary in some situations for some people? I think in some situations, I mean I try to be very careful about judging how other people live, but I think that a lot of times when someone is going through life with the assumption that they're totally in charge, it's not until something happens that pushes them up against the reality that they're not totally in charge, that they start kind of groping for some sense of belief. Going back to my mother aging, my mother was a lifelong Catholic, she went to mass every week when she was healthy, but I'm not sure she spent a lot of time really developing her spiritual life or thinking about it a whole lot, but at the end of her life she did, as many people do, start really grappling with what do I believe in, what do I think is on the other side. People probably do that work when they feel they need to, I don't feel like it's my job to say you should believe in a higher power, but I do think it's part of my job to suggest to people that opening to that possibility might make certain things in their life easier. And that's what some of the stories I think show are that when someone reached a difficult point in their life being open to the idea that there is a higher power helping them was very helpful. And because there are so many people in our society with baggage about religion, I think sometimes people need that encouragement to realize you don't have to believe everything that you were told as a kid in order to have faith. I think your section, you explain how clearness committees work and I do think that the clearness committee process has such tremendous potential for the world. Would you care to explain what clearness committees are in some detail and how the process works so that some of our listeners can get an idea of whether maybe this is something that they might want to include as they go through their own discernment and their wisdom to know the different steps. Sure, I actually just went to speak to a book group a few nights ago. It's a spiritual book group of women in New Jersey who every quarter read a book. Most of them are Roman Catholic and by the end of the night they had decided that a few of them wanted clearness committees. And I think that's great. There is a section in the book that kind of lays out how to go about it and there's some resources online as well. The basic idea is that a few people, maybe three or four, are going to gather with a person who wants help with discernment. Not advice, but support and prayerful listening and questioning. First, it's important to pick three or four people who are not going to be tempted to tell you what to do, but who really are able to prayerfully listen and ask you questions that will help you find the truth that's in you already. So from a Quaker point of view, I would say that there's that of God in every person. There's the possibility of us receiving direct guidance from the divine or from the spirit by listening in the deepest part of ourselves, but that in the busyness of everyday life, we don't always listen to that inner voice. So a clearness committee is a chance to sit and settle mutually in silent prayer at the beginning or worship. And then the person who is making a decision or facing a dilemma will sort of share what their situation is. Hopefully they'll have written it out ahead of time to give the people on the committee a little bit of a heads up about it. But they'll share, you know, I'm thinking about leaving my job or I'm thinking about joining a new community. I'm feeling drawn to a new kind of volunteer work, whatever the thing is. And people will listen and then trusting their own intuition, they'll ask questions that are designed not to be nosy, but to help the person work through what they're really called to do. Sometimes toward the end, people might make observations. I noticed that your face really lit up when you talked about the new job or I noticed that you got really teary when you talked about needing to ask for more money. Could you reflect on what that's about, that sort of thing. It's usually at least a couple hours, some clearness committees might meet multiple times, some might only meet once. There are lots of different ways to do it. But the basic idea is to support an individual in finding the wisdom within them. I'm a little bit chagrined. When you're talking about clearness committees, you mentioned how the question should be fairly specific. Should I take this job or not? As opposed to a very open-ended question, like what kind of work should I look for, what should I do? I have to admit that it was a clearness committee process that brought me to doing the programs under the name Northern Spirit Radio. In fact, I had had the big question out there. I requested the clearness committee. We met multiple times, and out of that came the clearness to do Northern Spirit Radio. I want to let our listeners know, if you just tuned in, this is Northern Spirit Radio. I'm Mark Helpsmeet. This specific program is called Spirit in Action. Today, we're visiting with Eileen Flanagan, who is the author of a book, The Wisdom to Know the Difference, When to Make a Change, and When to Let Go. You can always hear this program again via my website, which is northernspiritradio.org. On that site, you can also leave comments about this program, or about the program in general, and lots of resources there, too. Please do drop us a note when you visit. Again, we're speaking with Eileen Flanagan. She's out in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This book, The Wisdom to Know the Difference, is of course the last line of the Serenity Prayer. She's got a lot of insights about wisdom, about power, about change, about individualism community. You were just speaking, Eileen, about individual discernment by use of the Quaker process called the Clearness Committee, but it's also interesting to note that you can do that kind of discernment on a communal level. When you talk about the Situation Act, I think Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, deciding to help with Ramallah friends over in Palestine, in Israel, and where the pros and cons didn't make sense to go ahead, but the group discernment was clear to go ahead and help rebuild the Meeting House there. Were you there present for that discussion? I was present for that discussion, and I found it to be one of the most moving decisions and decision-making processes in that setting. We have an ideal that we're always going to make our group decisions through that kind of group listening and discernment. I'm not sure we live up to our ideal all the time, but that was a moment where it felt to me that the spirit was really at work among our group. Part of this book is to give people tools for their individual discernment, whatever they're doing in their life, how to live out their life fully. What tools do you think that you go away with? Besides the fact that they've got this book and they can read it over and over, and they can keep getting inspirations, what would you say are the necessary tools to be able to access the wisdom to know the difference? Well, in each chapter, I have some kind of exercise to try and offer people tools. I think different things work for different people, but in general, I would say practices that help you cultivate self-knowledge will be helpful whenever you're making a decision to know kind of where you really are in it, what your tendencies are. You know, do you tend to rush in? Do you tend to hold back? And so there's a whole lot of spiritual practices or other practices that can help to develop that kind of awareness, whether it's meditating or journal writing, being part of a spiritual support group where you share. One of the people I interviewed talked about going to therapy as being really helpful to her in understanding herself, and I think all those things also then feed into listening within for guidance. For some people, it might be taking walks in the woods or doing very quiet yoga or gardening, or again, journal writing or meditating, going to worship with a community. Any of those practices that make space to listen inwardly can be very helpful. Again, I mentioned community as a tool that can be both supportive and challenging sometimes, but can help us in sifting through things. And then there are lots of other little practices that are mentioned in the course of the book, Counting Your Blessings or Gratitude, as we're coming up on Thanksgiving, is one that comes to mind that can help us shift our perspective, help us to focus on the things that we have instead of the things that we don't have, which helps us to cultivate serenity among other things. There are a lot of little tips through the book, but I think that those practices that help us to be centered to listen inwardly to know ourselves are probably the core of it. You know, one of them that you don't mention, and maybe that's because it shouldn't be included, is debating, you know, drawing up the pros and cons and have an argument in favor and against. Why isn't that included? Isn't that a way to get to wisdom? That's a way to get to logic. And I don't discount logic. I think that our minds are part of what we have been given to work with, and so counting the pros and cons isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I think as you talked about our culture, we live in a culture that tends to be very focused on the logical answer, analyzing one of the pros and cons. And so I think the book is sort of trying to point people in a different direction of maybe more intuitive or a spiritual sense of being guided. Because I certainly, when I think of some of the ways that I feel I've been led or guided in my life, they weren't necessarily to the things that were logical. You know, I mean, joining the Peace Corps was one of the best experiences of my life. But if I was evaluating it by how much money I made or was it going to advance my career, I might not have done it. You know, and I've had lots of experiences like that. So I think using our mind is important, but balancing it with those other ways of knowing, I think, gets closer to wisdom, because wisdom and intellectual intelligence aren't necessarily exactly the same thing. Absolutely. And I know that because I was in debate in high school and college, and I learned that for all the good that it did me, which was a significant amount of good, it wasn't the end point. There was still a threshold beyond that where I had to access something that put the whole picture together, and debate alone can't do that, because debate can't be your underlying values. It can only measure one thing against another, and it isn't the wellspring itself, at least as I see it. I agree. I wanted to make sure we mention again your website is Eileenflanigan.com. And of course, you know you're a good Irish stock. Does everybody know how to spell Eileen Flanagan? Oh, thank you. In fact, someone just mentioned to me that they would have spelled it a different way. It's E-I-L-E-E-N-F-L-A-N-A-G-A-N dot com. And on my website, I also have a blog, where I post about once a week. I have a list of events around the country. If anyone's interested in coming to hear me speak or asking me to come speak to their group, there are links to the many different places you can buy the book through different independent bookstores or through the mainstream Amazon borders, that kind of thing. There's also some resources if you're interested in learning more about spiritual discernment or positive psychology. There's lists of those kinds of books, as well as information about the book, other interviews I've done, or reviews and that kind of thing. Again, you can go to Eileenflanigan.com. I will also have a link on my site, northernspiritradio.org. And almost no one misspells northernspiritradio.org. So you can always find a link to Eileen and her work there. You do, I think, Eileen have something coming up soon in Milwaukee. So you're going to get into at least the same state with us. I'm located in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, which is still 250 miles away, but it's almost within driving reach. When exactly is the Milwaukee visit? Well, I'm going to be speaking in Yellow Springs, Ohio, on the way for a Thanksgiving visit. And then I'm speaking in Milwaukee on Monday, November 23rd at Boswell Book Company on the East Side of Milwaukee at 7 p.m. And again, people can find that schedule and that location on Eileenflanigan.com or via my link to Eileen from northernspiritradio.org. And I also want to ask you, Eileen, do you have other books out there that we should be reading? I've only read this first one by you. You've got one in the past and more in the future? Well, hopefully more in the future. The one in the past is available for very little money on Amazon because it went out of print, but you can get it used. It's called Listen With Your Heart, Seeking the Sacred and Romantic Love. And it's about how people make the decision of whether or not to be in a committed partnership. I also have a pamphlet published by Pendle Hill on Parenting as a Spiritual Path. That's called God Raising Us. There's information about both of those and another book that I had an essay in available on my website. If anyone wants to get on my mailing list, I don't email people all the time with stuff, but next time I do have a book come out, you could also do that through the link on my website. Well, it's been very enjoyable to visit with you. I have to say it was very enjoyable to read your book. The examples of the people that you have, you know, this person who's gay, a piss-pull, this person who's Jewish, and this one's Buddhist, and this one is a therapist. And, you know, you've got this whole range of people and experiences, all classes, all places in our country, plus the insights from outside of our country. It was a very enjoyable read. The stories are great. And I want to thank you for helping move the world a little bit closer to wisdom by your book. Thank you very much, Marcus. It's been great talking to you. That was today's Spirit and Action Guest, Eileen Flanagan, author of The Wisdom to Know the Difference. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit and Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)