On September 27, 2008, St. Alban�s Episcopal Church in Westwood, California hosted the first Los Angeles Beijing Circle. Back in February, Dr. Luisa Del Giudice and the Rev. Joanne Leslie participated in the New York Beijing Circle training workshop. They returned from New York eager to start a Beijing Circle at one of their home parishes. Luisa�s home parish, St. Alban�s, is located across the street from UCLA where Joanne taught for many years, and where Luisa and Joanne continue to have academic ties, so it seemed a logical choice. In April, Joanne and Luisa organized an informational discussion about Beijing Circles (�Listening Globally, Acting Locally�) at which time several participants committed to being part of a group. Over the summer, another �graduate� of the New York workshop, Caitlin Frazier, came to Los Angeles as part of the Episcopal Urban Intern Program, so Caitlin joined Luisa and Joanne as a convener. To make this an interfaith group, the September workshop was advertised widely, both within and beyond Episcopal Church circles.
We gathered on Saturday September 27th, Christian and Jewish and Buddhist, religious and secular, around a small altar decorated with a circle of candles�some brighter, some dimmer, some with burning in their hearts, some requiring more oxygen�representing all of us gathered around the spiritual center (a blossoming flower)! On the altar were two actual commemorative stamps from the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. The workshop was opened with a prayer of lament. Then Luisa provided some background on the circle approach and Joanne followed with an explanation of the origins of the name, �Beijing Circle,� as well as some history of the connections with the UNCSW and the Anglican Communion. However, the heart of the morning was practicing circles themselves. Because we were an interfaith gathering, our spiritual reflection piece was a wonderful Indian folktale entitled �A Story and a Song.� (see below). After hearing the story together, we divided into three groups of 5 or 6 people each. We shared stories and tears, reflected on challenges faced by women locally and globally, and broke reluctantly after an hour. It was clear that there was a hunger for this kind of authentic sharing. As Luisa put it, �Our Saturday morning Beijing Circle workshop was just what we had hoped it would be: a thoughtful group of committed women (and two men), spiritually-centered, interfaith, and raring to go!�
�A Story and a Song�
A housewife knew a story. She also knew a song. But she kept them to herself, never told anyone the story or sang the song. Imprisoned within her, the story and the song were feeling choked. They wanted release, wanted to run away. One day, when the woman was sleeping with her mouth open, the story escaped, fell out of her, took the shape of a pair of shoes, and sat outside the house. The song also escaped, took the shape of something like a man�s coat, and hung on a peg.
The woman�s husband came home, looked at the coat and shoes, and asked her, who�s visiting?
No one, she said.
But whose coat and shoes are these?
I don�t know, she replied.
He wasn�t satisfied with her answer. He was suspicious. Their conversation was unpleasant. The unpleasantness led to a quarrel. The husband flew into a rage, picked up his blanket, and went to the Monkey God�s temple to sleep.
The woman didn�t understand what was happening. She lay down alone that night. She asked the same question over and over: Whose coat and shoes are these? Baffled and unhappy, she put out the lamp and went to sleep.
All the lamp flames of the town, once they were put out, used to come to the Monkey God�s temple and spend the night there, gossiping. On this night, all the lamps of all the houses were represented there�all except one, which came late.
The others asked the latecomer: Why are you so late tonight?
At our house, the couple quarreled late into the night, said the flame.
Why did they quarrel?
When the husband wasn�t home, a pair of shoes came onto the verandah, and a man�s coat somehow got onto a peg. The husband asked her whose they were. The wife said she didn�t know. So they quarreled.
Where did the coat and shoes come from?
The lady of our house, said the flame, knows a story and a song. She never tells the story, and has never sung the song to anyone. The story and the song got suffocated inside; so they got out and have turned into a coat and a pair of shoes. They took revenge. The woman doesn�t even know.
The husband, lying under his blanket in the temple, heard the lamp�s explanation. His suspicions were cleared. When he went home, it was dawn. He asked his wife about her story and her song. But she had forgotten them. What story, what song? She said.
[from: A. K. Ramanujan, A Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India. Berkeley London: University of California Press, 1997; see: http://www.learningtogive.org/resources/folktales/Story&Song.asp;]
