Freshly Laundered & Hanging Out to Dry: Chapter6, Part1

Freshly Laundered & Hanging Out to Dry. Part II
The Exoteric Phase:
That Which Is Seen

Mid-October to Christmas Break 1972

Chapter 6
The Course Begins

This work has service at its apex not as its foundation.
At its foundation it has understanding what our situation really is. _JG Bennett

It is Sunday, October 15, 1972, and the whole student body is gathered together in the ballroom for Mr. Bennett’s welcoming address. He sits on a chair while most of us are sitting on cushions scattered on the floor before him. The air is dense with expectation and quiet chatting. My one hundred and two classmates drift in, each finding a place to sit. Everyone has arrived, even the latecomers. While we wonder why Mr. B is not beginning, impatience is added to expectation. Finally, we realize he’s waiting for us to silence ourselves. At last, when we become fully attentive, he speaks with great deliberation, that British accent having an additional sound of authority to the American ear. Each of his long pauses underscores his weighing every thought before he says it aloud. The intermittent silences make some of us squirm.
He reminds us of all the reasons we’ve come here—rampant consumerism, dwindling resources, human greed and hunger for power, and the inability to put into practice spiritual knowledge. I need this reminding because for the past month the daily schedule and grim company of Work veterans have consumed me. He speaks to us for well over an hour. During the discourse,
his meaning seems clear but, as soon as he finishes, little sense of it remains. Only two concepts stay with me.
First, he warns us that we cannot be free until we are free of our petty likes and dislikes—toward people, things, activities.
“You will have many opportunities here to learn more about yourselves by opening to new experiences. You can learn much by choosing to do what is unappealing, attending to the people who don’t attract you, performing tasks you think you cannot do; in other words, by putting aside your usual inclinations. Ultimately, we must be capable of living the way we believe is just and loving.”
I recognize that by having agreed to be at Sherborne House, I am going to experience life in ways I might not allow myself under ordinary circumstances. The protected environment allows us freedom to conduct ourselves in a way that is different from our usual responses. There are no grades or prizes, no certificates of completion, no competition created by outer motivation. Theoretically, this should free me to try activities I do not know how to do and to experiment with my behavior toward people, as well.
Will I be able to make this year more meaningful than my past schooling where I didn’t like the way we studied history by memorizing dates and simplistic reasons given for the cause of that war instead of studying real documents and human behavior? And what about jobs where I spent hours filing papers or pasting in word corrections on supply catalogs? Then I thought about colleagues who gossiped and took pleasure in causing dissension. I wonder if I’ll have the courage to make choices based on my values instead of my preferences.
The second concept that Mr. B introduces might address some of my questions. He asks that in every situation and with every exercise we verify as far as possible whether our new activities serve the purposes and understanding we have determined for ourselves. What is our personal aim? This simple notion is to become our touchstone for evaluating everything, including the Work as we are being shown it. He also implies that by acting from our own conscience we will connect to a force beyond our comprehension.

You cannot get what you’ve never had unless you’re
willing to do what you’ve never done. _Mac Anderson

The same morning, the official beginning of the course, I have had a dream:

I discover I have a baby that Mr. and Mrs. Bennett have been caring for. After spending just a little time with it, I love it so much that I know I won’t ever be able to leave it again.

So once again, a sense of promise countered my discomfort with Sherborne’s atmosphere and we began the official program of physical labor and inner exercises that defined our lives there. This is how the daily activities were organized. The student body of one hundred and three people was divided into three groups of about 35 people each. Every day, one group was on house duty—cooking, cleaning, and childcare—while the other two groups attended classes—cosmology, psychology, movements, and lectures on other topics that weren’t necessarily ongoing. In the mornings, however, everyone worked in the garden or on property maintenance for two-and-a-half hours. Only those whose housekeeping tasks had to be performed during that time were excused. Lest we became too comfortable with our accomplices, we were forewarned that the groups would be reconstituted several times during the ten-month course. Since every student would play every role, by the end of the course we should have experienced all sides of every practical activity.

Warren, of the gray sweat suit and coke bottle glasses, is my group’s house supervisor the first Sunday of the course. It is his duty to allocate jobs the night before. Even though the full list of assignments doesn’t go up on the board that night, at least the morning servers and breakfast cooks are notified. The cooks have to put the huge pot of porridge on the coal burning Aga, a cast iron stove, to cook through the night.
Morning servers also have work to do the night before. Learning of this duty late in the evening takes them by surprise. They have to return to the dark dining hall long after dinner has been cleared. At this hour the dim lights feel eerie and the sound of utensils echo as they’re being set upon the tables in the deserted room.
We are told we may go to church on Sunday as long as we let the house supervisor know so he can assign us afternoon and evening chores. Although I’m Jewish, I decide to go, thinking I am already in need of another break since the one I took by going to Beshara was a couple of weeks ago. Going to church will provide a formal outlet for my spiritual yearnings, I decide.
When I inform Warren that night that I intend to go, he says okay. However, in the morning the list shows me assigned as lunch cook for which I need to work through most of the morning. Does he not realize that I need time to cook or is he purposely sabotaging my plans? I confront him by whining about it. He is unwilling, however, to make any changes and I feel stuck.
I remind myself of The Practice of the Presence of God and decide to follow Brother Lawrence’s simplicity of intention. Cooking the soup will be my Sunday prayers. I hold this thought in my mind as I cut and sauté the onions and carrots. In addition, I make it a point to pray hourly. So immersed in this assignment am I that I’m barely aware of the other cooks in the kitchen or what they are doing. The efforts do change my angry state and the soup turns out okay. Later in the day I apologize to Warren for what felt to me like lashing out at him.

Not more than a couple of months later into the course, I noticed that I was still carrying negativity toward Warren. By this time I’d seen at close quarters the variety of ways other people had solved similar problems. Instead of agreeing not to go to church when he’d scheduled me to work, I could have told him without any anger that he had made a mistake, that I had informed him the night before and he’d agreed to my going to church which I still intended to do. Then I could have gone off on my journey and let him deal with finding someone to take my place. Stating my position and doing what I thought fair without his agreement would never have occurred to me at that time.
As I imagined myself behaving differently, however, additional aspects to this incident became conspicuous. There was my need to get approval, for one, and if after presenting my case logically, I still didn’t get it, I would do as I was told while inwardly nurturing defeat and resentment.
In the case of my wanting to go to church, the purpose was to give myself a break when I felt like having one. Had guilt over this unstated purpose contributed to my lack of resolve about going? I wanted to think that giving myself a break was ‘taking care of myself,’ not just selfishly doing what I felt like.
Maybe I was afraid of having Warren, whom I didn’t even know, be angry with me. Or was I even more afraid he would report my shirking to Mr. Bennett? What if he disapproved? He could kick me out of the program. Or what if Warren didn’t assign another cook to take my place and I became the reason there was no soup for lunch? Then everyone might become furious with me.
All of these thoughts and more are what Mr. Bennett would have called ‘inner considering.’

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. _H.L. Mencken

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