Beloved Children of God

We all started out and live as "beloved children of God." As a Quaker, I am asked to speak to that of God in every person. And, recognizing our common humanity and divinity is not just for those times when it's easy. It is also when the good in another seems most difficult to find.  Jesus didn't qualify his urging to "love one another."

I feel very sad for the loss of all lives. I can't help feeling that we failed Adam Lanza and his mother, and therefore 26 people in Connecticut. Gun control and mental illness and our health care system are overripe for public discussion, and action.

"With state-run treatment centers and hospitals shuttered, prison is now the last resort for the mentally ill—Rikers Island, the LA County Jail and Cook County Jail in Illinois housed the nation's largest treatment centers in 2011."

This is morally wrong!

P.S. Photograph from Washington Post article about Mister Rogers' quote and photo gone viral

My Dad and His Cigars

Turns out there are many photos depicting my father and a cigar. This is a snapshot I took when I joined him, my mother, and my sister Jane for a trip to Yosemite a few years ago.

It may be a toss up between beer and cigars, but I believe he gave up cigars last, only a few days before he died. However, he never gave up people - even though he couldn't really talk and had taken out his hearing aids, he seemed to enjoy the visiting, chatting, coming and going, that carried on until the very end.

Warren P. Henegar, 1926-2012

My father, Warren P. Henegar, died August 21, 2012 outside Bloomington, Indiana.  Born in 1926 in West Texas, he lived a long and full life and died as he wished - at home in the room he'd shared with his wife for nearly the 50+ years they'd lived in the house on the farm he loved, his wife, daughters, and one of his beloved sons-in-law at his bedside.  Here are some of the photos displayed at the "calling" held in the rotunda at the Monroe County Courthouse a week later, August 27.

Here's a link to the Herald Times Obituaries for August 22, 2012 - my father's obituary was a joint effort but mostly the artful and loving endeavor of my sister Jane.

Toddler Warren with his father, Wallace Walker  Henegar. The manner in which  his father holds his cigar is reminiscent of his son's decades, a lifetime, later.

Summer 2011 before my father's cancer diagnosis.

An early 1970s campaign picture.

Out of my grassheart Rises the bobwhite

"I am earth, earth 

Out of my grassheart Rises the bobwhite. 

Out of my nameless weeds His foolish worship." 

from Thomas Merton's Book of Hours, among the meditations for Dawn on Thursdays.

Finding George Annie Hardin

This is Rhody Keith, my great great great grandmother on my mother's mother's side.  More about her later. Researching my family lines through the women is presenting challenges.

The first challenge is simply finding out who was who in my family - on both sides - and what they did and where they lived. My people were laborers and farmers, many farming someone else's land. Many were illiterate and poor.Often too poor to have portraits taken or living in remote parts of the frontier where amenities like that photography and gravestones were scarce. Nearly all of these people seemed to move from place to place, a common happenstance in the 19th century. Someone could start life in North or South Carolina and end it in Texas and showing up in the census for a variety of places, and having their numerous children listed as being born in different towns and states.  The second challenge is specific to women's history. Women didn't join the military. Women didn't vote or hold office - for example, I have a couple male ancestors who were appointed the postmaster for their little communities. The women often died in childbirth and left children but little else to remember them.

I began wanting to find out what I could through the internet about my mother's mother's line. I had the basic story that had been told to us.  My grandmother's mother, George Annie, had married a Huggins by whom she had four or five children.  My grandmother, Clara Irene, and her younger sister, Mary Lillian, were the only two I really knew or could recall from the stories.  George Annie was evidently a saint.  She divorced Ervin Huggins when my grandmother was 10 years old.  He was declared insane and, I was told, died in a mental institution. She left my grandmother with family while she tried to make a living.  She came for my grandmother when she married Mr. Jordan, with whom she had one more child, Winnie.  We have a portrait of the three of them.  I learned that George Annie was a cook in a boarding house. She was such a great cook that working single men would come to the boarding house just to take the meals she prepared.  When my grandmother Clara started school, the teacher tried to break her from using her left hand - a common practice at that time.  The next day, George Annie came to school and gave the teacher heck, and my grandmother's lefthandedness was never a problem again. (My mother, I, and another sister are all left handed.)

These are great stories, and may be more than most people have of their key ancestors.  But, in a few hours research online I learned more.  If I had been told, I had not heard or retained...my great grandmother George Annie Hardin Huggins Jordan* was an orphan. Her mother died giving birth to her.  That alone blows me away and somehow enhances the aura surrounding George Annie.  There is more however, her mother, Annie Foster, was the second wife of George Washington Hardin.  George Washington Hardin's first wife, Margaret Brown, died as well in childbirth, leaving him with five children.  Not too long after that, he marries a 16 year old Annie.

The tragedy doesn't stop there. George Washington Hardin himself dies two years later.  So I ask myself, who raised George Annie?  It didn't appear that her half-siblings did - the oldest was herself barely 17 years old and the younger ones were still children.  I found a note, which I need to corroborate, that George Annie was raised by "a cousin Cora Ann Hardin Harris Roach," suggesting another great story and person to uncover.

If you do even the most casual geneological reserach online, you will find that you can go down paths that you didn't have on your list.  I went down one that was fascinating.  In trying to find out about Annie Foster, I found out about her husband's ancestry, which I guess is mine.  George Washington Hardin was one of many middle children of Asher Garner Hardin (great name!) and Rhoda (or Rhody) Keith.  Rhody Keith herself was one of many - born in 1819 in Alabama to John Birden (or Borden) Keith and Polly Ann Crane. I found myself fascinated by Rhody Keith. In part because I found this photo of her and her long elegant neck.  She holds herself so proudly. I've had mixed feelings about my own long neck.  This time it links me to someone in a grainy old photograph. By the way, Rhody Keith's grandfather, Nichodemus Keith immigrated from Ireland in the 1700s.


*(Jordan is pronounced Jer-den)   

My Life as a Poor Little Rich Girl

Huguette Clark as a teenager.

I have devoted way too much time over the past couple days reading about the mysterious Madame Huguette M. Clark.  Huguette Clark May 24 2011 Obituary in the New York Times

I am not sure, yet, why I am so fascinated. MSNBC has an extensive archive of stories about her - from her father's climb to become one of the richest men in the nation, her life as an eccentric heiress and recluse, her paintings, her convicted sex offender accountant, and the jewelry collection now up for auction.

According to a 2012 New York Times article on her three(!) apartments on Fifth Avenue, “It was like going back in time 100 years,” one potential buyer said. “There was oak paneling and original wood floors, and in the kitchen there were appliances from 1915. It was a throwback.” There are no published photos of her past the 1930s.  She is frozen in time.

I can daydream about "my" life as a poor little rich girl in the early 1900s, but this is a daydream for my ancestors had a very different life in Oklahoma as pictured here in 1908.

My father's father, Wallace, is standing behind his father

January 1, 2013 -  an update on the Huguette Clark story

Meditation on the Light in Spring

I walked the nearly two miles to Quaker meeting this morning, and returned that way. The sun had come out after raining steadily for a few days. It sure picks up the spirits to revel in the blue sky, the sunshine, the loud glad bird songs, and the bursts of blooms in every direction. I saw metaphors for the Light in nature where I’d not seen it before.

Besides the lengthening of the days, two articles in Western Friend have been inspiring my meditation on the Light. In January/February 2012 issue, the Pacific Yearly Meeting’s delegates to the World Conference of Friends describe why they are going and their hopes for their trips.

How often have we’ve heard the admonishment not to hide our light under a bushel? The article quotes the Gospel according to Matthew, “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house….” Matthew 5:14-16. I don’t think it makes a difference how perfect you are at being a Quaker – your measure of the Light is a continuously evolving thing and it grows with shining.

In the March 2012 issue, Strawberry Creek Friends Meeting (Berkeley, California) shares their conversation on the meaning and significance of that Quaker expression and custom, “to hold in the Light.” The article quotes the explanation in Pacific Yearly Meeting Faith & Practice (2001): “to desire that divine guidance and healing will be present to an individual who is in distress or faces a difficult situation; also, to give prayerful consideration to an idea.”

A member of Strawberry Creek Friends Meeting starts her answer to the question ”What does the expression “holding in the Light” mean to you?” with “to establish a sense of connection between God within and God without.”

After being raised as a Quaker by parents fully involved in their Meetings and then the erratic observance during my 20s, I became a convinced Friend around my 30^th year. It was a revelation to me to understand that not sharing a leading in Meeting for Worship could be a selfish act. The homey image of a lamp placed in a room so that everyone there benefits from its light, the reminder that we look for the expression of the Divine in ourselves as we do in others, suggests to me that as Jesus taught us about God’s call to man, we teach as well. We teach in many ways, big and grand as well as small and mundane. Nor, can we know what who will be touched or will be our teacher.

One of the members of the delegation to the World Conference describes the Quaker tradition she was raised in and how her experiences as an adult have exposed her to other Quaker traditions. So, one of her desires for her time in Kenya with Friends from all over the world is learn more, “It is fascinating to me that we all have the same roots and yet have ended up in different place.”

By holding ourselves in the Light we are led to greater openness. We find that acceptance of others easier. The Light can only illuminate, shine a bright lamp on, our oneness with each other. If there is that of God in everyone, then it follows that God or the Light shines in me. I speak to that of God in me. If being opened to the truth is good, can’t it be even better when we find ways, conscious or unconscious, prepared or spontaneous, to share this measure of our Light.