Staying home this year

The summer before my son was born, I stood in front of the historical Quaker meetinghouse at Iowa Yearly Meeting Conservative, watching a crop duster dive over the fields of soybeans across the street. I watched it, musing about how ironic it was that yearly meeting had been working so hard to keep people from wearing perfumes so that it would be safe for people with chemical sensitivities. I did not flee indoors or rage at the injustice of it. I just stood there, thinking, and then headed back to the activities of the yearly meeting.

Worship had ended for the morning, and few dozen Quakers had scattered about the campus of Scattergood Friends School, waiting for lunch. We had just spent the mornings in the bright, plain Quaker meetinghouse, considering business slowly and worshipfully. Even after the time of waiting worship has passed, silence stretches on in the midst of the daily business deliberations. The old meetinghouse has absorbed hundreds of years of silence which nuilt into a palpable presence. The group of people is elderly and sweet and some of them are grounded in generations of Friends' traditions. I feel that when I talk there, I can be heard, and that when I listen I can listen with all my heart. I feel the presence of God intensely in that safe and faithful setting, and I have often been called to vocal ministry.

However, I have developed a problem that makes it harder for me to attend the gatherings. A couple years after my son was born, I started to feel sick almost all the time. It was like trying to live with a low-level stomach flu that sometimes became a debilitating sickness for a day or two. Very gradually, I began to recognize that I was sickened by things like applying sunblock or using contact paper to create supplies for our religious education program. Regular life suddenly seemed full of booby-traps. One of those booby-traps is cropdusting.

When we attended Iowa Yearly Meeting Conservative a couple of years ago, and little planes started buzzing overhead, I got flulike symptoms and had to sleep for a whole day. After all that sleep, I felt somewhat better, but I lost another day to sleep and sickness as soon as I returned home. Maybe I had a virus, but I had experienced very same symptoms over and over again during the previous months. I blamed the cropdusting for that little bout of illness.

The regular doctor said I was getting ill because I'm a survivor of violence and my body overreacts to things that it perceives as dangerous. He said get counseling and do not avoid the things that make me sick. His advice did not sound compelling. An osteopath suggested an outrageously strict diet, but I tried it, and within a week, I started to feel better. I stayed on that diet, and last year, when they started cropdusting at Iowa Yearly Meeting Conservative, I hopped in the car and fled to Iowa City for the day, but I did not lose a day to illness.

This year, the cropdusting will keep me away from that beloved yearly gathering. I am pregnant, and I'm afraid that because I can’t seem to protect myself from these chemicals, then I also can't protect the baby growing inside me. Going to yearly meeting feels like going home in some way. It helps give me strength for the rest of the year. I feel like I offer something special to the yearly meeting, too, and I feel wrong staying away from it. Still, the trip sounds too risky this year.

I feel angry about this, but I think I might've felt even more angry in past years. My faith has grown enough so that at least at this moment, I am more willing to wait eagerly for the window that God always opens when a door is closed. More than going to any gathering, I want to walk in true faith.