NEYM Part 5 - In which we work together in the Light.

The first significant issue that came forward on Wednesday morning was the preliminary approval to the chapter of Faith and Practice on Corporate Discernment.  The sticking point was the recommendation that if a Friend stands aside from a decision of the meeting, that person's name should not be recorded in the minutes. Some friends were concerned that this would make the work of future historians more difficult. Christopher McCandless, a former clerk of NEYM, shared with us that he felt that the biggest mistake that he made while he was clerk, was in recording the names of people who were standing aside from the decisions made about our relationship with FUM. Once he did that, he had some 20 people wanting to be recorded, and he doubted that any future historian would be able to figure out all of their different motivations. Another friend spoke about another elephant in the room, and in fact it might be the mother of all the other elephants, and that is pride. It appears that some people want to be recorded as standing aside so that they can be shown later to have been on the right side of history. Such an attitude is not conducive to the kind of unity that we seek. The chapter was approved with one friend standing aside because he could not be in unity with the section on standing aside.

I wish that I had participated in such a discussion and discernment about our business practice before I had attended the FUM General Board Meeting in Kenya 5 years ago. It is too easy for us to see the mechanisms of Quaker process as a quaint variation of Robert's Rules of Order and think of them as techniques for political advantage. We do not sufficiently appreciate that the Quaker practice of business is radically different than the world's. From time to time we may get business done, but the deeper purpose is to build up our discernment, faithfulness and unity as a body.

The other major issue on Wednesday morning was our relationship with FUM. Two years ago the Yearly Meeting had agreed to a mechanism that if a meeting minuted that it wanted to withhold funds from FUM that they could contact the treasurer, reduce their contribution to the Yearly Meeting by that amount and that amount would be deducted from the contribution that NEYM sends to FUM. But because there are Friends in New England that want to hold FUM harmless, there was also a fund set up to receive contributions from Friends specifically to replace these withheld funds. As a result, Friends who were concerned that they not be supporting an organization that they felt was discriminatory could contribute to their monthly meetings and through them the Yearly Meeting without violating their conscience. But Friends who felt that it was important that NEYM continue to support FUM fully could contribute additional amounts with love and respect for the consciences of these other Friends. It was clearly not a long term solution but it was being recommended that this be extended for another two years.

The clerk of Wellesley Meeting spoke about how the discussion in their meeting had been very painful and that several years ago they had brought that pain to the Yearly Meeting. She wished that some of those same people could have been here this year. The current mechanism had been important in allowing discussion and discernment to continue while removing the pressure that had surrounded the issue of contributions. Other speakers noted that it takes time for Monthly Meetings to find out about the decisions of the Yearly Meeting and then to proceed based on that. As a result, a number of meetings are only beginning to consider the issues raised.

I spoke that, while it was significant that the FUM General Board had acknowledged that it was unable to find unity on the sexual ethics portion of the FUM Personnel Policy, and that while we had already seen evidence of God to perform miracles in a body, it was highly unlikely that FUM was going to change its Personnel Policy in the next two years. Part of the work that we need to do is to deal with the whole issue of how do we balance the call of individual conscience with what we as a body are willing to do. This is work that we need to do primarily in our own monthly meetings. Delay will not make the problem go away. Another friend noted that we also have to deal with the homophobia and heterosexism in our own meetings.

The proposal was approved. The sense of unity was not as strong as the day before, but I think that is because we still have a lot of work to do. What we had was the unity of committing to continue difficult work together, rather than the joyful unity that comes when the labor is completed. But it was still a gathered and favored meeting. Our sessions this year were truly blessed.

Blessings to all,

Will T

NEYM Part 3 - In Which We Listen Deeply and Are Broken Open

Our Monday morning session was given over to listening deeply. This session arose from a concern raised by Hannah Zwirner, a young adult Friend who has grown up in New England Yearly Meeting. As she has said:

This program came out of my frustration with the way the Yearly meeting collectively has talked in the last few years about our relationship with FUM. Prior meetings about FUM on the YM floor have left me very un-centered, and I don't think that there has been enough deep listening to each other's experiences. Instead, I think our meetings have involved many quick reactions to others' statements without first holding those messages in our hearts. It is my feeling that many people feel that the wider community has not fully or properly received their stories and the truths that they live. I think that there are a lot of people who simply feel unready to act until they have been heard.

The form the session took was to have a panel of four people share their experiences while asking the larger community to sit deeply with them. The people were chosen to have a diversity of experience but not to be representative of the entire yearly meeting. After the last speaker finished we were asked to go into worship with the discipline that we were to listen and let the messages to sink in and we were to have no vocal ministry.

The first person to speak was Eden Grace. She introduced herself simply as being from Beacon Hill Friends Meeting but she is also FUM Field Staff at the FUM Africa office in Kisumu, Kenya and has also served as a representative to the World Council of Churches where she taught them how to use the Quaker decision making process. She spoke how she identifies as an Evangelical Christian. She also spoke of the healing value of confession. Then for the rest of her time, she confessed to the sins of Christianity.

In the name of me and my people, I confess that we have been proud and arrogant....

In the name of me and my people, I confess that we have excluded people and their gifts because they are not like us.....

In the name of me and my people I confess that we have valued power above the love of neighbor...

In the name of me and my people I confess....

The list just kept going on and on and by the time she finished, she was crying, other panelists were crying, I was crying, and many people in the body were crying. It was an incredibly powerful moment. I think it broke open the entire body.

In the silence that followed her talk, someone in the body started to sing. The microphone spacers (Those people appointed by Ministry and Counsel to carry portable microphones to people wishing to address the body.) quickly rose and indicated with hand gestures to quiet down and stop. A number of the people on the stage who were holding the body in prayer also rose at this time, as did some people in the body. The singing quickly subsided. This was another indication of the increased discipline of the body and our increased ability to sit in a difficult place and stay there.

Brian Drayton spoke about Spirit and community. What are we about as the Society of Friends? At the most basic level, we are called to holiness. We are to live our lives at the disposal of the divine life whose being is both truth and love. Entering a spiritual community means joining your spiritual life to the other members of the community. Our religious society and the larger Quaker institutions we have created are only tools created to meet certain needs. Quoting Erasmus, “I must stay with this church until I find a better one, and the church must put up with me until I am a better person.” Is our worship bringing us to a place where our impurities are named and burned away, or certainties transformed, and everything reassembled by the action of love? If so we are renewed little by little. If not, we have not come to true worship. We have more work to do.

Anne- Marie Witzburg spoke about how she was raised a Quaker and taught that God has no hands but ours. She has tried to do the work she is called to do and to live her values. At age 4 she learned that all life is sacred so since then she has been a vegetarian because animals are sacred too. She grew up boycotting grapes in solidarity with the United Farm Workers and boycotting Coca-Cola because of their business in South Africa. She grew up thinking that all Quakers loved everyone because that was what Jesus would do. It was a shock to her and to her family to discover that there were Quaker organizations with homophobic personnel policies. It was a shock to realize that she and her sister were not equal in the eyes of all Friends because one was partnered with a man and the other a woman.

She feels the spiritual grounding of people working with FUM and the FUM missions and the spiritual grounding of people resisting membership in that organization. If we are all truly listening to our leadings and to what we must do, then we are all doing the right thing. She worries about where the line is between loving others who are at different points in their journeys and betraying her own values. She is concerned about belonging to a yearly meeting that rejects membership in racist organizations but within which, racism is still present. She is concerned that NEYM insists on membership in a homophobic organization but denies that homophobia exists among us still. She worries about questioning her own still small voice instead of listening fully and following faithfully what she know to be true and right. She worries about homophobia and internalized homophobia and questions of white privilege and guilt and how those struggles get in the way of listening to the Light and her leadings. And she wonders if other people have those struggles as well.

Lisa Graustein presented a spectrum of acceptance for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer people. There is homophobia, there is heterosexism, which might accept gay men and lesbians but which considers heterosexual orientation as normative, there is tolerance, there is being welcoming and affirming, and there is being an ally. She shared about the stories she heard from gay men, lesbian women and their families when she was traveling in Kenya for the FUM Triennial in 2002. She also recounted her experiences with homophobia and heterosexism within New England Yearly Meeting.

The meeting ended with about 25 minutes of deep and silent worship.

I spoke with a number of people afterwards and many of them talked about how powerful the experience was. The relationship if NEYM with FUM was on our agenda for later in the week and for the first time I found myself looking forward to that session with anticipation and not apprehension. It seemed to me that something had changed and I was looking forward to seeing how it would play out. 

Clearly, God was at work.

Blessings,

Will T

New England Yearly Meeting and the Power of the Lord

New England Yearly Meeting finished last Thursday. Because we were trying to fit 10 pounds of business in a 5 pound poke, we were still at it Thursday morning when the children joined us. Perhaps because we were mostly centered while doing our business, the children settled in quietly and remained quiet through most of the time. (My experience has been that children have a very good sense of the centeredness of a meeting. They are mostly quiet in a settled meeting and tend to be more restless in a meeting that has lost, or never found, it's center.) But I missed the singing and the sense of celebration. Which is too bad, because we were doing work worth celebrating.

The first item to celebrate was a minute affirming our support for the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgendered, intersex and queer Friends among us. It called for us to be sensitive to the difficulties that the families with GLTBQ parents or children encounter and to provide support to them. It also said that the same-sex marriages that have been or may be taken under our care are well-ordered. Given that same-sex marriage is now legal in five of the six New England states, this was not the prophetic witness that it might have been, but it is still an important step for the Yearly Meeting. It is official recognition of what has been true in much of the Yearly Meeting for some time.

Here is another take on this decision.

The second item was a consideration of our contribution to FUM. Last year sessions had asked Finance Committee to prepare a mechanism whereby monthly meetings could accommodate individuals who did not want their contributions to go to FUM because of the personnel policy which requires all employees to be celibate except if they are in a monogamous heterosexual marriage. This question was very contentious last year. The Finance committee had reluctantly prepared a mechanism to accomplish this and had presented it to Permanent Board. (Permanent Board is the body in NEYM which is authorized to conduct the business of the Yearly Meeting between annual sessions.) Permanent Board had not adopted this policy because of concerns about what this meant in terms of individual discernment overriding the discernment of the body.)

Many people were disappointed with the decision of Permanent Board. In our initial consideration this year, we were not able to come to any unity and a working group was asked to continue to wrestle with the issue and report back. The recommendations of the working group were the minute of support I described above. The second recommendation was that the proposal from Finance Committee to allow for contributions to be specified as not going to FUM. This will allow people with this concern to be easy in their conscience that they are not giving financial support to an organization that discriminates. They also recommended that there be a fund set up so that Friends who are concerned that FUM be made whole as far as the yearly meetings budgeted contribution can make additional contributions to the Yearly Meeting to make up for what has been withheld. This provision will last for just the upcoming year and we will re-examine it next year.

At first glance this mechanism seems to be a crazy contrivance that ends up making no difference. That view does not explain the sweetness that came over the working group as this “contrivance” was taking shape. That sense of sweetness is one of the hallmarks of the work of the Holy Spirit. As I have thought more about this, I have come to see more clearly the spiritual principals at work here. Robert Barclay talks about how even a mistaken conscience is still binding upon a person. I had forgotten this. This resolution acknowledges that the people who want to withhold money from FUM are being faithful to their conscience and provides a way for them to be faithful. Before I felt anger towards some of these people because I was aware of how damaging their conscientious position was to FUM. With this resolution, my anger has been changed to a sense of love. I can help carry the burden that they cannot, by making an extra contribution. We have time to labor together to see where each of us may be being faithful to a mistaken conscience. This is a pastoral response that is bad policy for an organization. My hope is that it will serve as a way to move the conversation along so that we can come to a better solution later on. In the words of George Fox, “In this I see the power of the Lord over all.”

Blessings to All
Will T

Back from Africa with a broken heart

I arrived back from Kenya on Tuesday evening. That night we had our first significant snowfall of the year here in the Boston area. Except it wasn't just snow, it was ice and rain and sleet and a couple of things like grapple (little ice balls) that I had never heard of before. It was very heavy stuff to shovel. I was glad for our neighborhood snowblower. Wednesday night the weather turned cold. It was 11 degrees in the morning and what had been plowed into the end of our driveway during the night had turned into something resembling rock. So another hour of wrestling with the snowblower to clean it up so we could get to work, and to clean up the driveway of our elderly neighbor. So much for a gentle re-entry.

It was wonderful to go back to Africa after 36 years. I couldn't believe how much Nairobi had changed. In 1970 there were maybe 3 high rise buildings. The New Stanley Hotel, the Intercontinental and maybe one more. Now the entire downtown was high rises. We got in on Saturday night, attended the service at the Friends International Center on Ngong Road and then went right to the airport for our flight to Kisumu where the FUM Africa office is. Monday and Tuesday we visited the hospitals at Lugulu and Kaimosi, spending the night at the Bishop Stam Conference Center in Kakamega, which was where the Board Meetings were to be held on the weekend. We also got a chance to visit the Kakamega orphanage started by Dorothy Selebwa and sponsored by USFW (United Society of Friends Women). On Wednesday and Thursday we traveled into Uganda and visited 4 schools. There are stories to be told about all of these visits. I also have a lot of pictures but they are still in the camera.

Friday was devoted to working on a strategic plan for FUM and Saturday was the General Board meeting itself. I look at what I wrote before I left about Friends learning about reconciliation among themselves. That is not what happened. On Sunday at Ngong Road and again during the opening devotions of the General Board meeting itself, we were treated to sermons denouncing homosexuality as evil. On Friday I was in the group looking at how FUM can deal with its identity issues. In October we had felt God working among us and there had been a sense of tenderness toward each other, even when we disagreed significantly. This spirit was not present in February. Led by the Superintendents of Iowa, Indiana and Western Yearly Meetings and supported by the representatives of the African yearly meetings, there was a clear sentiment expressed that even looking at these issues was keeping them from doing the work of FUM. In the morning we did some work on discussing our plans for an identity retreat before the June General Board Meeting. In the afternoon we discussed how to address the issues of our theology, Christology, and the source of our authority. We made no progress in finding common ground and at the end, the only recommendation was that the General Board reaffirm the Richmond Declaration as a statement of faith of FUM. Christopher Sammonds, General Secretary of New York Yearly Meeting, was the co-clerk of this session and he felt it was the sense of that meeting, even though he could not unite with it.

On Saturday, the proposal to affirm the Richmond Declaration came to the General Board. Every representative present from the dual-affiliated yearly meetings spoke against the proposal. Everyone else who spoke was in favor of it and the presiding clerk, Brent McKinney of North Carolina said that the recommendation was approved. All of the representatives of the dual-affiliated yearly meetings were recorded as standing aside. This did not feel like a sense of the meeting, it felt like a vote. It felt as though the yearly meetings with dual affiliations were being told that their understandings and opinions did not matter to FUM. For me it was the most painful experience I have ever had among Friends. I do not know how New England Yearly Meeting or any of the other dual-affiliated yearly meetings will react to this. I do not know what this means for the future of FUM. I do know that it is not a step towards finding unity among Friends. This action makes it clear that there are Friends who care more for theological purity than they do for unity. Meanwhile my heart grieves for the Society of Friends.