*

Alexander Levering Kern is a Somerville-based poet, educator, organizer, and Quaker chaplain who directs the Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service at Northeastern University in Boston. He is completing a book manuscript of poems based on twenty years living in Somerville, celebrating the city’s extraordinary diversity, strength, history, and character. Alex’s poems and nonfiction have been published widely and he is editor of the anthology Becoming Fire. He co-edits the new interfaith/intercultural publication Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, which is currently seeking submissions.

Doug Holder: You are a Quaker chaplain. How would a Quaker chaplain approach things differently from a Catholic or Protestant one?

Alexander Levering Kern: Excellent question, Doug. Thank you. First off, Quaker chaplaincy has nothing to do with oats! Secondly, I suspect there are as many different approaches to chaplaincy as there are chaplains. I happen to be a Quaker who serves an interfaith community of people from all major religious, spiritual, and humanist worldviews – people of all faiths and none. Quakers tend to approach ministry from a place of “answering that of God in everyone,” that is, recognizing and reverencing the divine Light and Life in each person. Quaker chaplaincy emphasizes the value of deep listening and expectant silence as the rich soil from which words spring and wisdom grows.

Quaker chaplaincy also foregrounds the communal and socially-engaged role of faith, drawing upon the historic Quaker testimonies of peace, equality, simplicity, integrity, and community. By developing programs of dialogue and civic engagement, Quaker chaplains strive to promote wellness and wholeness in wider society, what our Jewish friends call tikkun olam, or repairing the world in the direction of shalom, a more just, sustainable, peaceable “kin–dom” of God on earth, or what Dr. King called the Beloved Community, extended to all living things. The field of chaplaincy varies across traditions, but most of us who’ve been to seminary or completed Clinical Pastoral Education internships in hospitals see the heart of chaplaincy as “spiritual accompaniment” and providing “a non–anxious relational presence,” at least in one-on-one pastoral care.

In the University setting, chaplaincy involves not only support for individuals in times of need, struggle, or celebration, but also serving as the “public face” of religion and spirituality on campus – facilitating vigils and memorial services, offering inclusive interfaith prayer at commencements, responding to crises such as the Boston Marathon bombing or the current coronavirus/COVID–19 pandemic. A Quaker University chaplain educates students about world faiths and the ways they shape culture and current affairs. As educators, Quaker chaplains invite learners to look within to discover the “Inward Teacher,” and look beyond the classroom to experiential learning settings as disparate as Boston’s homeless shelters, the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, or the streets of Selma and Ferguson, Missouri. At our best, chaplains build structures of interfaith understanding and cooperation, challenge religious bigotry, encourage vocational discernment and deep ethical reflection, and tend to the soul of the University and the heart of a hurting planet.

DH: You have lived in Somerville for twenty years. How does Somerville differ from other places that you have lived? What makes it unique?

ALK: Place is extremely important to me as a poet and writer, a neighbor, a citizen of this bioregion/watershed and of the wider global village. I grew up in Washington, DC, with six generations of family roots there, and other roots in my grandparents’ orchard in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I’ve studied and lived in Poughkeepsie, Atlanta, Greensboro, and Philadelphia, and traveled, studied, and served on five continents. Somerville is distinct from each of these places, with echoes of many of them (we even have hills here, if not necessarily mountains!) What distinguishes Somerville is its extraordinary diversity, with 80,000 people packed into four square miles and many circles that for some reason are called squares! We are a microcosm – quite literally a “little world”– mirroring wider society, coexisting in generally symbiotic ways. While we have a long way to go to address challenges such as affordable housing and climate change, Somerville is a wonderful place to live, to learn, and to write.

DH: I would think that a sense of spirituality would be essential now during this pandemic.

ALK: Absolutely. Early on in the pandemic, I wrote a piece called Caring for Self and Others in Times of Trouble: Some Spiritual Tools and Tips, which is widely available online. At a time when our very life and breath is threatened, spirituality reminds us to pause and breathe. Indeed, the word “spirituality” comes from the Latin for breath, wind, or spirit. Anyone who breathes has access to the spirituality. Whether one chooses prayer, mindfulness, yoga, creative writing, congregational worship, walking in the woods, or any range of other spiritual practices, there is a grounding and centering available through spirituality that offers comfort, courage, hope, and healing connection.

DH: Tell us about the online journal you co-edit, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts.

ALK: It’s super exciting. I am working with an editorial board of students, sniffing out the finest spiritual writing and art we can find. Already we have submissions from some of the best known spiritual writers in the US, and from exciting voices from around the world. In a time when religion so often is a catalyst of conflict, it is gratifying to discover artistic expression that promotes the best in our shared humanity. The arts are good medicine, especially now.

DH: Tell us a bit about the process you used to develop your manuscript about Somerville?

ALK: It’s been an amazing journey, sixteen years in the making. Honestly, I did not begin to feel fully at home in Somerville until our son Elias was born and I began to see the city through his wide–open imaginative eyes: its playgrounds, playgroups, buses, trains, and firetrucks. Writing poems about Somerville has helped me experience the city more deeply – the beautiful, the wild, the surreal, the sacred. The book is a product of contemplation and action, sitting still and taking walks, sheltering in place and sometimes, when needed, marching on Boston. Sitting on my front porch, I’ve found myself listening to the world of Somerville – the language of its streets, the distant highway, the bagpiper who plays at dusk. Taking a walk on any given day, I encounter Irish and Italian–American old timers, Sikh gentlemen chatting in Union Square, new immigrant schoolkids from across the planet, homeless street vendors, artists and creatives of every stripe, and Steampunk young people riding tall bikes in top hats! The book is as much about people as place, and often it is about people standing up for their neighbors in our city and around the world. I can’t wait to share this love song to Somerville, my adopted home, a place of many hills and squares!

DH: You are an accomplished poet. What was the germ of the idea that led you to poetry?

ALK: I began writing poetry early on during the second Iraq war, to make sense of the world and my place in it. I was auditing a course at a seminary on the Hebrew prophets and modern poetry. Our professor encouraged us to keep a notebook and to notice our lives – the strange, the awful, the sublime. At the same time, my son Elias was just learning to speak, discovering the power of language. While being with him, I found myself falling in love with poetry, reading and writing it, telling fanciful bedtime stories, developing new ways to speak about war, parenting, the natural world, and this wondrous, fraught business of being alive.

• after Gerald Stern’s “96 Vandam”