Fiona Gardner
Attachments
Sat, May 21, 4:32 PM
to me, fionagardneraway@icloud.com
Dear Sejin, thank you for your enquiry about Meeting for Learning. I’ve attached the pamphlet that gives you the basic information. It can also be helpful to talk to someone who has been – which Meeting are you in and I can suggest people, unless you have already done that of course!
We also ask people to send us responses to the following queries to help us make sure Meeting for Learning fits with what you are hoping for:
- How would you describe your spiritual journey so far?
- What has been your involvement with Friends or with other spiritual development programs?
- What is it about the Meeting for Learning that attracts you now?
- What do you hope to gain from participating in this program?
Feel free to ask me anything else you would like to.
Peaceful wishes,
Fiona Gardner
----
Answering your intial queries for Meeting foe Learning:
1] How would you describe your spiritual journey so far?
First, I would like to tell a little bit about my background. I am born in 1948, retired from a university teaching job in the social sciences and Asian studies. My ethnic background is Korean. I left South Korea in 1964 when my parents decided to migrate to Brasil. We remigrated to Canada. So, spent a lot of time adjusting to new cultures and languages. My first major in the university in Canada was Physics which was different from what my occupation ended up beig later.
In my twenties, although I was studying very hard to become a physicist as I that was the sole goal in my life, I was not very happy for reasons that I did not understand. My parents were both university educated and seemed "reasonable" in child rearing, so I thought they had done their best in rearing me. But, am I not happy, I asked my self. I thought about suicide, or becoming a monk, at least not pursue a normal life that most people pursue. I concluded at the time that I could do no better than my parents in child rearing, so I would not want to have a child, which meant also not getting married.
It was around this time that I got interested in exploring the reasons for my unhappyness, which turned out to be the beginning of what would later conceived as "a sort of spiritual quest". Although my major was physics and I studied it for seven years to PhD level, I was at the same time pursuing a sepate study of philosophy and religion on my own.
Toward the latter part of my study in physics, something happened in my family related to the diaspora politics of the overseas Koreans, that I will not explain. This lead me to abandone my dream of becoming a physicist. I now wanted become a sociologist. I wanted to explore the question of the historical, social and political forces in Korea and in the overseas Korean communities, that impacted my family and myself.
Changing the career plan from physics to sociology was of course not easy. I was not a native speaker of English, my training was in science, not in writing. Whether this change will be successful was very unclear, and it was a gamble. So I had to work very hard in a new field to get into a PhD program, and eventually to get into an academic career in the new field. What this meant to my "spiritual quest" that started in my twenties, was it was stalled there, not to continue and grow.
When finally retired form my job, I wanted to go back to the "spiritual quest" of my twenties, and continue the process. I was around this time that I encountered Quakerism through a friend, whom I did not know was a Friend. I had a connection to this friend though a spiritual group callled the Emissaries of Divine Light to which my siblings were connected. I should also mention that my wife is a Christian, who goes to an ethnic Korean Presbitarian church. I do not go to this church because it has a conservative leaning even though my life is not religious conservative. I am not very socal, and I continued to feel lack of sense of community. I was already feeling lack of a sense of beloniging because of many international moving (from Soutj Korea, to Brazil, Canada, USA, Japan, back to Canada, then to Australia).
I was hoping to find a spiritial community through a Quakerism and a Quaker community.
I should add that in terms of religion and my background, I used to say I was not religious even though I have been exposed to Buddhism as a sort of family religion and Christianity as the major religion among the migrant Koreans.
2] What has been your involvement with Friends or with other spiritual development programs?
I began attending a Quaker meeting in Adelaidesix years ago. I attended very diligently for about four years, but stopped doing that for a combination of a medical condition of Bowel cancer and the Covid situation. For the first four years, I attended all Yearly meetings. And it tured out that the connection I established with a group of iter state friends became stronger than that with the people in my local meeting.
The main reason for that was that I lead a group of friends to visit North Korea as a study group to establish a peaceful relationship with the people of that country. Preparing for the trip and our effort to develop a program to interact with North Korea lead to a lot of interaction among a group of 8 to 10 friends. I am not sure whether this group can be called a spiritual one in a typical sense, but may be in a loose sense. The idea of to trip to North Korea bascally started from my CONCERN about the issue of PEACE with North Korea. Actually, this was related to family history and the reason I gave up my career in physics.
On the matter of my encounter with "spiritual development programs" other than the Quaker one, I already mentioned the Emissaries group to which most of my siblings were related to. I got involved to this group actively only in late 2000. I went through a series of spirituality workshop in three levels. I also attended a sort of Buddhist group workshop in the late 1990s. All of these workshops were about a week long.
3] What is it about the Meeting for Learning that attracts you now?
Four (or five ?) years ago, when I first applied to the Meeting for Learnng, it was a way for me to learn more about Quakerism. At the time, I was told that the program was not about teaching Quakerism, but for exploring participant' own spirituality. I took it as a discuragement for a new comer for a right reason, but also for a wrong one. I will not explain that, but my status did change because I had ample tie to study Quakerism as well as other spiritual traditions since my retirement.
4] What do you hope to gain from participating in this program?
I had read some of previous participants' reflections on attending this program. I also studied Fiona's Backhouse lecture. So I have a reasonably good idea of the intention or goal of the program, as well as the diverse outcome for participants.
My expectation is first to acquire the Quaker frame and language of spiritual journey which is somewhat similar, and somewhat different to those of other traditions. I want pf curse to take this opportunity to enernise my spiritual journey. I also have an expectation to meet people with similar interest, in this case, in the Quaker tradition.
However, I am already concered about finding four people to regularly talk to with my spiritual concern.
